that industry was largely made possible in the first place by governments subsidizing the cost of chasing down runaway slaves

Whoa! Source?

OK, perhaps you are saying what I would phrase as "are you saying it's not greatly to Sam's discredit if he forced employees to sign ...?".

I have some feeling that this back-and-forth is bad or a waste of something, but I just don't see how

[Austin is saying that] it would be to Sam's credit to learn that he forced employees to sign NDAs by straightforwardly lying to them about their legal obligations, using extremely adversarial time pressure tactics and making very intense but vague threats?

is at all a plausible interpretation, or anything like a necessary implication, of what Austin wrote.

What does "the evidence is about" mean? I don't think there's one piece of evidence, and I think evidence is normally relevant to multiple latent variables.

I agree that the fact there was filtering and how it was conducted is bad evidence. On the other hand, "now that the NDAs have been dropped, curious to see what comes to light (if nothing does, that would be more positive credit towards Sam [...])" seems to be talking about how the lack of something to insult Sam about is positive evidence about Sam. I don't think it's very strong evidence, fwiw, but noting that it is positive evidence seems pretty clearly distinct from saying "it would be to Sam's credit to learn that he forced employees to sign NDAs by [bad stuff]"

Austin is saying absence of evidence is evidence of absence (in the absence of a preempting filter)

FWIW, I had noticed the same but had thought it was overly split (“Golden Gate Bridge, particularly its fog, colour and endpoints”) rather than dirty.

Curated! This is a nice short post! I think the altered state of memorylessness is pretty interesting evidence for how minds might work. I would not have guessed that the multiplication tasks wouldn't be impaired (though I'm a little confused how to think about exactly what it means to have no trouble doing a multiplication while needing to be reminded of the numbers).

This post also reminds me of (HPMOR spoilers)

Some people find the messages annoying. I personally don't love the large amount of vertical space they take up. Looks like someone went through and downvoted a bunch of recent comments by the bot

Sorry for slightly off-topic, but curious if NAO has been thinking about/prepping for for HPA1/H5N1?

Fair enough! But perhaps disparaging enough things could affect the value of equity, though probably by less than refusing to sign a non-disparagement agreement and not getting your vested PPUs.

Does that make you reconsider whether having the equity might give you action-altering (and, particularly, speech-altering) incentives?