Over the years, I’ve done a fair amount of community building, and had to deal with a pretty broad range of bad actors, toxic leadership, sexual misconduct, manipulation tactics and the like. Many of these cases were associated with a pattern of narcissism and dark triad spectrum traits, self-aggrandizing behavior, manipulative defense tactics, and unwillingness to learn from feedback. I think people with this pattern rarely learn and improve, and in most cases should be fired and banned from the community even if they are making useful contributions (and I have been involved with handling several such cases over the last decade). I think it’s important that more people learn to recognize this; I encourage you to read the two above-linked articles.
I feel worried that some readers of this Forum might think Owen matches that pattern. Knowing him professionally and to some degree personally, I think he clearly does not. I’ve collaborated and talked with him for hours in all kinds of settings, and based on my overall impression of his character, I understand his problematic behavior to have arisen from an inability to model others’ emotions, an inability to recognize that he was in a position of power and influence, and moral scrupulosity (obsession about whether he’s a bad person or not for inappropriately feeling attracted to someone).
This obviously doesn’t make his past behavior any less bad and doesn’t excuse any of it. But it makes it more likely that he makes a real effort to learn and improve, and based on some conversations I’ve had with Owen, I believe this learning has indeed happened. I think Owen is unlikely to repeat his mistakes, and his document seems honest and he’s not just trying to tell us what we want to hear (in fact, I think his moral scrupulosity makes him unusually honest in this situation).[1]
Personally, I hope Owen can be involved in the community soon again. I think a temporary ban is important, both as an incentive against bad behavior and as a precaution so the harms don’t continue. That said, two years are a long time, and I hope other EA orgs won’t take his loss too lightly and will consider inviting him to participate again. I think we would benefit a lot from his participation, both in terms of ensuring the community is safe and welcoming for everyone (where I’ve seen him go out of his way in the past), and in terms of getting more of his contributions to the causes we all care about.
(This comment is intended as sharing my impression from knowing Owen personally, which I figured might be helpful context for some readers. I welcome others sharing different perspectives, especially if you disagree. By default I won’t engage in much discussion due to lack of time.)
I think a significant share of sexual misconduct or unwelcome sexual attention in EA is caused by the broad cluster of poor theory of mind and autism-spectrum / OCD-spectrum personality traits, as opposed to the more broadly publicized manipulative/sociopathic/narcissistic spectrum. The latter seems characterized by not caring sufficiently about the victim’s experience, whereas the former seems characterized by a lack of understanding of the effects of one’s actions, which makes it more tractable. I think Owen’s example could be instructive and hope it helps others avoid similar mistakes.
I think what Jonas has written is reasonable, and I appreciate all the work he did to put in proper caveats. I also don’t want to pick on Owen in particular here; I don’t know anything besides what has been publicly said, and some positive interactions I had with him years ago. That said: I think the fact that this comment is so highly upvoted indicates a systemic error, and I want to talk about that.
The evidence Jonas provides is equally consistent with “Owen has a flaw he has healed” and “Owen is a skilled manipulator who charms men, and harasses women”. And if women (such as myself) report he never harassed them, that’s still consistent with him being a serial predator who’s good at picking targets. I’m not arguing the latter is true- I’m arguing that Jonas’s comment is not evidence either way, and its 100+ karma count has me worried people think it is. There was a similar problem with the supportive comments around Nonlinear from people who had not been in subservient positions while living with the founders, although those were not very highly upvoted.
“If every compliment is equally strong evidence for innocence and skill at manipulation, doesn’t that leave people with no way to prove innocence, or in this case improvement?” Yes, it is very hard to prove a negative, or that you’ve genuinely improved instead of merely hiding things better. I don’t know what the right way to handle that is, although I can point to a few things I think would have made Jonas’s comment more valuable.
As written, this comment contains only Jonas’s interpretations (and appropriate caveats- still really appreciate those). Those are valuable to the extent people have informed trust in Jonas in particular. But if he had shared specifics, people have a chance to evaluate themselves. This could include things Owen had said or done, or what Jonas hopes to gain from Owen’s return. I also think providing unrelated positives is good for contextualizing people; it has to be done carefully to avoid presenting it as a counterargument, but I think Jonas could pull it off.
The evidence Jonas provides is equally consistent with “Owen has a flaw he has healed” and “Owen is a skilled manipulator who charms men, and harasses women”.
Surely there are a lot of other hypotheses as well, and Jonas’s evidence is relevant to updating on those?
More broadly, I don’t think there’s any obvious systemic error going on here. Someone who knows the person reasonably well, giving a model for what the causes of the behavior were, that makes predictions about future instances, clearly seems like evidence one should take into account.
(I do agree the comment would be more compelling with more object-level details, but I don’t think that makes it a systemic error to be happy with the comment that exists.)
Surely there are a lot of other hypotheses as well, and Jonas’s evidence is relevant to updating on those?
There are of course infinite hypotheses. But I don’t think Jonas’s statement adds much to my estimates of how much harm Owen is likely to do in the future, and expect the same should be true for most people reading this.
To be clear I’m not saying I estimate more harm is likely- taking himself off the market seems likely to work, and this has been public enough I expect it to be easy for future victims to complain if something does happen. I’m only saying that I think large updates based on Jonas’s statement are a mistake for people who already know Owen was an EA leader in good standing for many years and had many highly placed friends.
If I was completely unfamiliar with EA and Jonas’s comment was the first piece of information I got, that would probably shift my probability weights for what happened. Although it’s still consistent with a lot of harm being done by accident, and with harm done being difficult to estimate.
But for anyone who knows Owen’s place in EA, Jonas’s comment is a high level assessment that is only useful insofar as you trust his judgment. I contend that that kind of trust should only come from observing someone in detail over a prolonged period, and few people are likely to have that about Jonas. Not because of anything specific to him, it just takes a lot of time and intimacy to develop that kind of justified trust. There are a handful of people I’d defer to in this situation and I’ve had high-information engagement with them for years.
In contrast, lyra’s comment contains a lot of details I can use to inform my own reasoning. She was also in a better position to notice Owen’s harms, and to hear about them second hand. Hher comment has half the karma of Jonas’s (and had 1⁄3 when I wrote my original comment), which I think indicates systemic bad judgment and probably excess deference to professional reputation, even accounting for the fact that lyra’s comment is anonymous.
(Fyi, I probably won’t engage more here, due to not wanting to spend too much time on this)
Jonas’s comment is a high level assessment that is only useful insofar as you trust his judgment.
This is true, but I trust basically any random commenter a non-zero amount (unless their comment itself gives me reasons not to trust them). I agree you can get more trust if you know the person better. But even the amount of trust for “literally a random person I’ve never heard of” would be enough for the evidence to matter to me.
I’m only saying that I think large updates based on Jonas’s statement are a mistake for people who already know Owen was an EA leader in good standing for many years and had many highly placed friends.
SBF was an EA leader in good standing for many years and had many highly placed friends. It’s pretty notable to me that there weren’t many comments like Jonas’s for SBF, while there are for Owen.
In contrast, lyra’s comment contains a lot of details I can use to inform my own reasoning.
It seems so noisy to compare karma counts on two different counts. There are all sorts of things we could be failing to miss about why people voted the way they did. Maybe people are voting Jonas’s comment up more because they liked that it went more out of its way to acknowledge that the past behavior was bad and that a temporary ban is good.
It seems like a mistake to treat karma as “the community’s estimate of the evidence that the comment would provide to a new reader who knows that Owen was a leader in good standing but otherwise doesn’t know anything about what’s going on”. I agree you’ll find all sorts of ways that karma counts don’t reflect that.
SBF was an EA leader in good standing for many years and had many highly placed friends. It’s pretty notable to me that there weren’t many comments like Jonas’s for SBF, while there are for Owen.
I think these cases are too different for that comparison to hold.
One big difference is that SBF committed fraud, not sexual harassment. There’s a long history of people minimizing sexual harassment, especially when it’s as ambiguous. There’s also a long history of ignoring fraud when you’re benefiting from it, but by the time anyone had a chance to comment on SBF he had already incontrovertibly failed, in public, at an epic scale.
Additionally, even in the most generous interpretation of the overall situation, Owen seems extremely bad at assessing how his advances are received. Jonas’s comment doesn’t mention any source of information other than Owen himself, who even if he’s not actively lying, is not a reliable source of information. Maybe I’m wrong and Jonas has more sources, in which case I would love for him to give more details on that.
If someone else had written my comment, I would ask myself how good that person’s manipulation detection skills are. If I judge them to be strong, I would deem the comment to be significant evidence, and think it more likely that Owen has a flaw that he healed, and less likely that he’s a manipulator. If I judge them to be weak (or I simply don’t have enough information about the person writing the comment), I would not update.
If there are a lot of upvotes on my comment, that may indicate that readers are naïvely trusting me and making an error, or have good reason to trust my judgment, or have independently reached similar conclusions. I think it’s most likely a combination of all of these three factors.
Not sure if everyone does it this way, but I find agree/disagree votes more important for what you’re saying than merely upvotes. In cases like this, I would use agree/disagree votes if I know a lot about either Owen directly, or about Jonas’s judgment in situations like this.* Even though it’s technically anonymous, I think of agree/disagree votes in situations like this as “staking a small part of my own reputation on the claims in the comment.” I’d use upvotes more liberally and upvote things that sound potentially important or insightful even if I’m still unsure about them.
*I guess a third case is if I think a comment uses weird reasoning that makes me think the person who wrote it has bad people judgment, I could also see myself disagree-voting it from a distance/without any more direct knowledge.
As a person with an autism (at the time “asperger’s”) diagnosis from childhood, I think this is very tricky territory. I agree that autistics are almost certainly more likely to make innocent-but-harmful mistakes in this context. But I’m a bit worried about overcorrection for that for a few reasons:
Firstly, men in general (and presumably women to some degree also), autistic or otherwise are already incredibly good at self-deception about the actions they take to get sex (source: basic commonsense). So giving a particular subset of us more of an excuse to think “I didn’t realize I would upset her”, when the actual facts are more “I did know there was a significant risk, but I couldn’t resist because I really wanted to have sex with her”, seems a bit fraught. I think this is different from the sort of predatory, unrepentant narcissism that Jonas Vollmer says we shouldn’t ascribe to Owen: it’s a kind of self-deception perfectly compatible with genuine guilt at your own bad behavior and certainly with being a kind and nice person overall. I actually think the feminism-associated* meme about sexual bad behavior being always really about misogyny or dominance can sometimes obscure this for people a bit.
Secondly, I worry that people who are both autistic or at least autistic-coded and predatory can take advantage of a perception that their bad behavior is always a mistake and not deliberate. I strongly suspect SBF, though he is not a diagnosed autistic, deliberately exploited a perception that “nerds” are not socially savvy enough to engage in deliberate deception.
Thirdly, I’m worried about being patronized.
Fourthly, I’m worried that if the association between “autistic” and (even accidental) “sexual misconduct risk” becomes too strong in people’s heads, this will actually lead to overcorrection in the other way, with people becoming too reluctant to hire autistics. (Probably not an issue in EA to the degree it would be in less autistic communities though.) We don’t actually know how much more likely autistics are to behave badly in which particular ways.
Alas 4 and 1 kind of point in opposite directions.
*My guess is that feminists who’ve actually written carefully and at length about sexual bad behaviour have more nuanced views than this, and often when they cite “misogyny” as an explanation, they mean something structural, not something in the psychology of people who behave badly.)
Over the years, I’ve done a fair amount of community building, and had to deal with a pretty broad range of bad actors, toxic leadership, sexual misconduct, manipulation tactics and the like. Many of these cases were associated with a pattern of narcissism and dark triad spectrum traits, self-aggrandizing behavior, manipulative defense tactics, and unwillingness to learn from feedback. I think people with this pattern rarely learn and improve, and in most cases should be fired and banned from the community even if they are making useful contributions (and I have been involved with handling several such cases over the last decade). I think it’s important that more people learn to recognize this; I encourage you to read the two above-linked articles.
I feel worried that some readers of this Forum might think Owen matches that pattern. Knowing him professionally and to some degree personally, I think he clearly does not. I’ve collaborated and talked with him for hours in all kinds of settings, and based on my overall impression of his character, I understand his problematic behavior to have arisen from an inability to model others’ emotions, an inability to recognize that he was in a position of power and influence, and moral scrupulosity (obsession about whether he’s a bad person or not for inappropriately feeling attracted to someone).
This obviously doesn’t make his past behavior any less bad and doesn’t excuse any of it. But it makes it more likely that he makes a real effort to learn and improve, and based on some conversations I’ve had with Owen, I believe this learning has indeed happened. I think Owen is unlikely to repeat his mistakes, and his document seems honest and he’s not just trying to tell us what we want to hear (in fact, I think his moral scrupulosity makes him unusually honest in this situation).[1]
Personally, I hope Owen can be involved in the community soon again. I think a temporary ban is important, both as an incentive against bad behavior and as a precaution so the harms don’t continue. That said, two years are a long time, and I hope other EA orgs won’t take his loss too lightly and will consider inviting him to participate again. I think we would benefit a lot from his participation, both in terms of ensuring the community is safe and welcoming for everyone (where I’ve seen him go out of his way in the past), and in terms of getting more of his contributions to the causes we all care about.
(This comment is intended as sharing my impression from knowing Owen personally, which I figured might be helpful context for some readers. I welcome others sharing different perspectives, especially if you disagree. By default I won’t engage in much discussion due to lack of time.)
I think a significant share of sexual misconduct or unwelcome sexual attention in EA is caused by the broad cluster of poor theory of mind and autism-spectrum / OCD-spectrum personality traits, as opposed to the more broadly publicized manipulative/sociopathic/narcissistic spectrum. The latter seems characterized by not caring sufficiently about the victim’s experience, whereas the former seems characterized by a lack of understanding of the effects of one’s actions, which makes it more tractable. I think Owen’s example could be instructive and hope it helps others avoid similar mistakes.
I think what Jonas has written is reasonable, and I appreciate all the work he did to put in proper caveats. I also don’t want to pick on Owen in particular here; I don’t know anything besides what has been publicly said, and some positive interactions I had with him years ago. That said: I think the fact that this comment is so highly upvoted indicates a systemic error, and I want to talk about that.
The evidence Jonas provides is equally consistent with “Owen has a flaw he has healed” and “Owen is a skilled manipulator who charms men, and harasses women”. And if women (such as myself) report he never harassed them, that’s still consistent with him being a serial predator who’s good at picking targets. I’m not arguing the latter is true- I’m arguing that Jonas’s comment is not evidence either way, and its 100+ karma count has me worried people think it is. There was a similar problem with the supportive comments around Nonlinear from people who had not been in subservient positions while living with the founders, although those were not very highly upvoted.
“If every compliment is equally strong evidence for innocence and skill at manipulation, doesn’t that leave people with no way to prove innocence, or in this case improvement?” Yes, it is very hard to prove a negative, or that you’ve genuinely improved instead of merely hiding things better. I don’t know what the right way to handle that is, although I can point to a few things I think would have made Jonas’s comment more valuable.
As written, this comment contains only Jonas’s interpretations (and appropriate caveats- still really appreciate those). Those are valuable to the extent people have informed trust in Jonas in particular. But if he had shared specifics, people have a chance to evaluate themselves. This could include things Owen had said or done, or what Jonas hopes to gain from Owen’s return. I also think providing unrelated positives is good for contextualizing people; it has to be done carefully to avoid presenting it as a counterargument, but I think Jonas could pull it off.
Surely there are a lot of other hypotheses as well, and Jonas’s evidence is relevant to updating on those?
More broadly, I don’t think there’s any obvious systemic error going on here. Someone who knows the person reasonably well, giving a model for what the causes of the behavior were, that makes predictions about future instances, clearly seems like evidence one should take into account.
(I do agree the comment would be more compelling with more object-level details, but I don’t think that makes it a systemic error to be happy with the comment that exists.)
There are of course infinite hypotheses. But I don’t think Jonas’s statement adds much to my estimates of how much harm Owen is likely to do in the future, and expect the same should be true for most people reading this.
To be clear I’m not saying I estimate more harm is likely- taking himself off the market seems likely to work, and this has been public enough I expect it to be easy for future victims to complain if something does happen. I’m only saying that I think large updates based on Jonas’s statement are a mistake for people who already know Owen was an EA leader in good standing for many years and had many highly placed friends.
If I was completely unfamiliar with EA and Jonas’s comment was the first piece of information I got, that would probably shift my probability weights for what happened. Although it’s still consistent with a lot of harm being done by accident, and with harm done being difficult to estimate.
But for anyone who knows Owen’s place in EA, Jonas’s comment is a high level assessment that is only useful insofar as you trust his judgment. I contend that that kind of trust should only come from observing someone in detail over a prolonged period, and few people are likely to have that about Jonas. Not because of anything specific to him, it just takes a lot of time and intimacy to develop that kind of justified trust. There are a handful of people I’d defer to in this situation and I’ve had high-information engagement with them for years.
In contrast, lyra’s comment contains a lot of details I can use to inform my own reasoning. She was also in a better position to notice Owen’s harms, and to hear about them second hand. Hher comment has half the karma of Jonas’s (and had 1⁄3 when I wrote my original comment), which I think indicates systemic bad judgment and probably excess deference to professional reputation, even accounting for the fact that lyra’s comment is anonymous.
(Fyi, I probably won’t engage more here, due to not wanting to spend too much time on this)
This is true, but I trust basically any random commenter a non-zero amount (unless their comment itself gives me reasons not to trust them). I agree you can get more trust if you know the person better. But even the amount of trust for “literally a random person I’ve never heard of” would be enough for the evidence to matter to me.
SBF was an EA leader in good standing for many years and had many highly placed friends. It’s pretty notable to me that there weren’t many comments like Jonas’s for SBF, while there are for Owen.
It seems so noisy to compare karma counts on two different counts. There are all sorts of things we could be failing to miss about why people voted the way they did. Maybe people are voting Jonas’s comment up more because they liked that it went more out of its way to acknowledge that the past behavior was bad and that a temporary ban is good.
It seems like a mistake to treat karma as “the community’s estimate of the evidence that the comment would provide to a new reader who knows that Owen was a leader in good standing but otherwise doesn’t know anything about what’s going on”. I agree you’ll find all sorts of ways that karma counts don’t reflect that.
I think these cases are too different for that comparison to hold.
One big difference is that SBF committed fraud, not sexual harassment. There’s a long history of people minimizing sexual harassment, especially when it’s as ambiguous. There’s also a long history of ignoring fraud when you’re benefiting from it, but by the time anyone had a chance to comment on SBF he had already incontrovertibly failed, in public, at an epic scale.
Additionally, even in the most generous interpretation of the overall situation, Owen seems extremely bad at assessing how his advances are received. Jonas’s comment doesn’t mention any source of information other than Owen himself, who even if he’s not actively lying, is not a reliable source of information. Maybe I’m wrong and Jonas has more sources, in which case I would love for him to give more details on that.
If someone else had written my comment, I would ask myself how good that person’s manipulation detection skills are. If I judge them to be strong, I would deem the comment to be significant evidence, and think it more likely that Owen has a flaw that he healed, and less likely that he’s a manipulator. If I judge them to be weak (or I simply don’t have enough information about the person writing the comment), I would not update.
If there are a lot of upvotes on my comment, that may indicate that readers are naïvely trusting me and making an error, or have good reason to trust my judgment, or have independently reached similar conclusions. I think it’s most likely a combination of all of these three factors.
Not sure if everyone does it this way, but I find agree/disagree votes more important for what you’re saying than merely upvotes. In cases like this, I would use agree/disagree votes if I know a lot about either Owen directly, or about Jonas’s judgment in situations like this.* Even though it’s technically anonymous, I think of agree/disagree votes in situations like this as “staking a small part of my own reputation on the claims in the comment.” I’d use upvotes more liberally and upvote things that sound potentially important or insightful even if I’m still unsure about them.
*I guess a third case is if I think a comment uses weird reasoning that makes me think the person who wrote it has bad people judgment, I could also see myself disagree-voting it from a distance/without any more direct knowledge.
How can the EA community better support neurodivergent community members who feel like they might make mistakes without realizing it?
As a person with an autism (at the time “asperger’s”) diagnosis from childhood, I think this is very tricky territory. I agree that autistics are almost certainly more likely to make innocent-but-harmful mistakes in this context. But I’m a bit worried about overcorrection for that for a few reasons:
Firstly, men in general (and presumably women to some degree also), autistic or otherwise are already incredibly good at self-deception about the actions they take to get sex (source: basic commonsense). So giving a particular subset of us more of an excuse to think “I didn’t realize I would upset her”, when the actual facts are more “I did know there was a significant risk, but I couldn’t resist because I really wanted to have sex with her”, seems a bit fraught. I think this is different from the sort of predatory, unrepentant narcissism that Jonas Vollmer says we shouldn’t ascribe to Owen: it’s a kind of self-deception perfectly compatible with genuine guilt at your own bad behavior and certainly with being a kind and nice person overall. I actually think the feminism-associated* meme about sexual bad behavior being always really about misogyny or dominance can sometimes obscure this for people a bit.
Secondly, I worry that people who are both autistic or at least autistic-coded and predatory can take advantage of a perception that their bad behavior is always a mistake and not deliberate. I strongly suspect SBF, though he is not a diagnosed autistic, deliberately exploited a perception that “nerds” are not socially savvy enough to engage in deliberate deception.
Thirdly, I’m worried about being patronized.
Fourthly, I’m worried that if the association between “autistic” and (even accidental) “sexual misconduct risk” becomes too strong in people’s heads, this will actually lead to overcorrection in the other way, with people becoming too reluctant to hire autistics. (Probably not an issue in EA to the degree it would be in less autistic communities though.) We don’t actually know how much more likely autistics are to behave badly in which particular ways.
Alas 4 and 1 kind of point in opposite directions.
*My guess is that feminists who’ve actually written carefully and at length about sexual bad behaviour have more nuanced views than this, and often when they cite “misogyny” as an explanation, they mean something structural, not something in the psychology of people who behave badly.)
Yeah, I think there’s a lot more to be said about this topic, and I’m glad that your said some of it—thanks!