Edit to add: I edited my original comment to hopefully address these misunderstandings
Yep—indeed—I assumed it’s obvious to everyone that it’s a bad idea to make [things that are perceived as] unwanted romantic or sexual advances towards people, and that serious action should be taken if someone receives repeated complaints about that.
The intentions of my comment were to give information that might be helpful + informative for people deciding how to best achieve a goal of something like “make the community safe and welcoming for people in general, and especially for underrepresented, vulnerable, or easy-to-make-feel-unwelcome groups”. As a potential member of such a group, I was assuming my experiences are at least somewhat relevant.
Similar to comments by Emma and Jonas, I want to prevent people taking away what I would consider a misleading picture of Owen’s behavior, because I think people having a misleading picture will make it harder to achieve the goal.
I think people might read from this post that it matches a pattern of predatory or nefarious behavior—which definitely does exist, and which I think should be handled very aggressively by removing people from the community, which I have advocated in other cases. Whereas, I think the pattern in this case is social clumsiness, some misunderstandings, and some psychological hangups around scrupulosity and needing to confess attraction and receive moral validation. I think the latter pattern of behavior should be handled differently than the former, and I think it’s very important information for people to know when deciding e.g. how likely Owen is to cause similar problems in the future, whether or in what way they personally want to interact with Owen, whether to ban him from particular spaces, what interventions could be undertaken to prevent problems like this from occurring, or what information they should take away from this situation as to what their response should be to someone who is displaying predatory behavior.
I continue to think that decisions whether to ban people from shared spaces should at least consider what their net effect was. I think that excluding Owen from the community in the past would have made it less welcoming for me and even specifically would have made me more vulnerable to harm from some situations that were more sinister. There was a particular episode (related to people who are no longer part of the community) where I was in a situation which was pressuring and manipulative and had weird power dynamics, and Owen’s support and advice was helpful for me keeping my sanity and perspective and avoiding getting sucked in.
Obviously my experiences don’t erase the negative experiences other people had, and the algorithm of “ignore complaints of bad behavior if someone else says the person seems nice” is not a good one. But “get information from multiple sources to understand what overall pattern of behavior things were part of, and what the net effect on the community was” seems like a better algorithm than “consider only evidence about the worst things people did”.
I assumed it’s obvious to everyone that it’s a bad idea to make [things that are perceived as] unwanted romantic or sexual advances towards people, and that serious action should be taken if someone receives repeated complaints about that.
It reads like you’re saying that if you ask somebody out and they say no (aka unwanted romantic advances), that this is obviously bad and that serious action should be taken against you? This seems clearly wrong, because it would mean that virtually all people who’ve ever asked somebody out should have serious actions taken against them.
Or is it saying only to take serious actions if somebody makes repeated romantic advances despite the person saying they’re not interested?
If the latter, only one anonymous woman claims this happened to her (“In at least one case, Owen did not stop making repeated unwanted attempts at contact after being asked to do so”) and Owen says that he has written evidence that this didn’t happen (see the “On feedback” section).
Given that he’s been very forthcoming about everything else, so doesn’t seem to be hiding anything, that he says he has written evidence to the contrary, and it seems to go against most people who know him’s priors, I’m inclined to believe him until further evidence is provided.
Sorry, was being somewhat sloppy—I meant to broadly wave at “I think sexual harassment is bad”. More specifically could say: - It’s probably suboptimal ex post to make an unwanted romantic or sexual advance on someone, but it can definitely be reasonable ex ante— If it’s predictably unwanted then it’s probably bad ex ante - if it’s uncertain and the asker is in position of power / you are in professional setting / other person is esp likely to feel uncomfortable etc etc, then it’s probably a bad idea ex ante - If someone has a pattern of doing this and has received complaints about it then either they should update that they are bad at judging when this is ok and be really careful to steer pretty clear of this kind of thing - The community should in general take repeated complaints of this kind of thing pretty seriously and not let it be brushed off with “but this person is good in X way”, because some fraction of the time this is the tip of an iceberg of manipulative/abusive/harassing behavior, and is the best chance you’ll get to catch it - Even if you conclude it’s not part of a pattern of nefarious behavior, it’s still pretty costly to the community, and actions should be taken that provide high confidence it won’t continue happening
Edit to add: I edited my original comment to hopefully address these misunderstandings
Yep—indeed—I assumed it’s obvious to everyone that it’s a bad idea to make [things that are perceived as] unwanted romantic or sexual advances towards people, and that serious action should be taken if someone receives repeated complaints about that.
The intentions of my comment were to give information that might be helpful + informative for people deciding how to best achieve a goal of something like “make the community safe and welcoming for people in general, and especially for underrepresented, vulnerable, or easy-to-make-feel-unwelcome groups”. As a potential member of such a group, I was assuming my experiences are at least somewhat relevant.
Similar to comments by Emma and Jonas, I want to prevent people taking away what I would consider a misleading picture of Owen’s behavior, because I think people having a misleading picture will make it harder to achieve the goal.
I think people might read from this post that it matches a pattern of predatory or nefarious behavior—which definitely does exist, and which I think should be handled very aggressively by removing people from the community, which I have advocated in other cases. Whereas, I think the pattern in this case is social clumsiness, some misunderstandings, and some psychological hangups around scrupulosity and needing to confess attraction and receive moral validation. I think the latter pattern of behavior should be handled differently than the former, and I think it’s very important information for people to know when deciding e.g. how likely Owen is to cause similar problems in the future, whether or in what way they personally want to interact with Owen, whether to ban him from particular spaces, what interventions could be undertaken to prevent problems like this from occurring, or what information they should take away from this situation as to what their response should be to someone who is displaying predatory behavior.
I continue to think that decisions whether to ban people from shared spaces should at least consider what their net effect was. I think that excluding Owen from the community in the past would have made it less welcoming for me and even specifically would have made me more vulnerable to harm from some situations that were more sinister. There was a particular episode (related to people who are no longer part of the community) where I was in a situation which was pressuring and manipulative and had weird power dynamics, and Owen’s support and advice was helpful for me keeping my sanity and perspective and avoiding getting sucked in.
Obviously my experiences don’t erase the negative experiences other people had, and the algorithm of “ignore complaints of bad behavior if someone else says the person seems nice” is not a good one. But “get information from multiple sources to understand what overall pattern of behavior things were part of, and what the net effect on the community was” seems like a better algorithm than “consider only evidence about the worst things people did”.
@lyra Can you clarify what you mean by this?
It reads like you’re saying that if you ask somebody out and they say no (aka unwanted romantic advances), that this is obviously bad and that serious action should be taken against you? This seems clearly wrong, because it would mean that virtually all people who’ve ever asked somebody out should have serious actions taken against them.
Or is it saying only to take serious actions if somebody makes repeated romantic advances despite the person saying they’re not interested?
If the latter, only one anonymous woman claims this happened to her (“In at least one case, Owen did not stop making repeated unwanted attempts at contact after being asked to do so”) and Owen says that he has written evidence that this didn’t happen (see the “On feedback” section).
Given that he’s been very forthcoming about everything else, so doesn’t seem to be hiding anything, that he says he has written evidence to the contrary, and it seems to go against most people who know him’s priors, I’m inclined to believe him until further evidence is provided.
Sorry, was being somewhat sloppy—I meant to broadly wave at “I think sexual harassment is bad”. More specifically could say:
- It’s probably suboptimal ex post to make an unwanted romantic or sexual advance on someone, but it can definitely be reasonable ex ante—
If it’s predictably unwanted then it’s probably bad ex ante
- if it’s uncertain and the asker is in position of power / you are in professional setting / other person is esp likely to feel uncomfortable etc etc, then it’s probably a bad idea ex ante
- If someone has a pattern of doing this and has received complaints about it then either they should update that they are bad at judging when this is ok and be really careful to steer pretty clear of this kind of thing
- The community should in general take repeated complaints of this kind of thing pretty seriously and not let it be brushed off with “but this person is good in X way”, because some fraction of the time this is the tip of an iceberg of manipulative/abusive/harassing behavior, and is the best chance you’ll get to catch it
- Even if you conclude it’s not part of a pattern of nefarious behavior, it’s still pretty costly to the community, and actions should be taken that provide high confidence it won’t continue happening