Owen very much doesn’t seem to me like that either
Part of me wants to ask what you’re basing that on. And on one hand, I do think specifics are better than general assessments (which I explain in more detail here). On the other, I think trying to relitigate this on the forum is likely to go poorly, and isn’t worth it given that EV has laid down a reasonable plan.
I’m not sure why your comment was downvoted. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable request since, as you say correctly in other comments, people who don’t know enough to form their own opinion can’t just trust that other forum commenters with direct opinions are well-calibrated/have decent people judgment about this.
I started writing down some points, but it’s not easy and I don’t want to do it in a half-baked fashion and then have readers go “oh, those data points and interpretations all sound pretty spurious, if that’s all you have, it seems weird that you’d even voice an opinion.” It’s often hard to put in words convincingly why you believe something about someone.
I might still get around to finishing the comment at some point in the next few days, but don’t count on it.
Owen clearly doesn’t fit the pattern of grandiose narcissism or sociopathy. I could say more about this but I doubt it’s anyone’s crux, and I prefer to not spend too much time on this.
Next to grandiose narcissism or sociopathy, there are other patterns how people can systematically cause harm to others. I’m mostly thinking of “harm through negligence” rather than with intent (but this isn’t to say that grandiose narcissists cause all their harm fully-consciously). Anyway, many of these other patterns IMO involve having a bad theory of mind at least in certain domains. And we’ve seen that Owen has had this. However, I think it only becomes really vexed/hard to correct if someone (1) lacks a strong desire to improve their understanding of others so as to (i.e., with the prosocial goal being the primary motivation) avoid harming them/to make them more comfortable, or (2) if they are hopelessly bad at improving their understanding of others for reasons other than lacking such a desire in the first place.
On (1), I’m confident that Owen has a strong desire to improve his understanding of others so as to avoid harming them and make people positively comfortable. I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember thinking that he’s considerate in a way that many people aren’t, which suggests that other people’s feelings and comfort is often on his mind (edit) at least in some contexts. (E.g., in conversations about research, he’d often ask if what he’s been saying so far is still helpful, or if we should move on to other questions. But more importantly, I think I also noticed signs of scrupulosity related to how he picks words carefully to make sure he doesn’t convey the wrong thing, which I think is linked with not wanting to be bad socially or not wanting to come to the wrong conclusions about research relevant to the other party’s path to impact.) Sure, people who are scared of social rejection can also be hypervigilant like that, and sometimes it’s more people-pleasing than sincere concern, but I also felt like I picked up on “he’s sincerely trying to be helpful” when talking to him. Though this is more of an intuition-based judgment than anything where I can say “this specific thing I’ve observed is the reason.” (Edit: Actually, one concrete thing that comes to mind is that he was among the very few people who said things about s-risks that made my research priorities seem less important, so he was honest about this in a way that exposes him to me thinking less of him if I were the sort of person who would take stuff like this personally.) Lastly, I think the apology really speaks to all this as well. (That said, I guess someone with cynical priors could point out that the apology might have been written in a very different way if it wasn’t for showing it to friends – I doubt that it would be fundamentally different, and in fact I don’t even know if he showed it to other people before posting [though I think that would be the wise thing to do]. In any case, I agree it’s important to look at whether what people say in their apology is consistent with what we know about them from other situations; anyway, my answer to that is “yes, feels very consistent.”)
Regarding (2), I have no doubts that Owen can greatly improve his understanding of others. He seems among the most “interested in introspection and analyzing social stuff” men that I’ve met, and he’s very intelligent, so it’s not like he lacks the cognitive abilities or interest to improve.
This leaves us with “are there other character obstacles that we should expect that would stop him from improving sufficiently?.” The other negative patterns that I can think of in this domain are: (a.) Extreme entitlement; (b.) being very bad at taking feedback to heart because one “flinches away” from bad parts of one’s psychology, to the point that all one’s introspection is premature and always an exercise in ego protection; (c.) issues with externalizing shame/bad feelings, such as (e.g.) an underlying drive to emotionally control others or “drag them down to one’s level” when one is feeling bad; (d.) domain-specific tendency to form strong delusional beliefs, like believing that people who aren’t attracted to you are attracted to you, and keeping these even in the light of clear counterevidence. Of the above, I think (c.) doesn’t fit the pattern of observed harm in this case here (this would be more relevant in people who make false accusations), so let’s focus on (a.), (c.) and (d.)
Regarding (a.) (“extreme entitlement”), I haven’t observed anything that would make me worry that Owen is very entitled. Admittedly, I only know him from a few professional (or semi-professional – e.g., talking in a small group of people after a retreat) context occasions, and I’m not a woman he’s attracted to, so I may not have seen all sides. Still, for further consistency of what I already thought about him before all of this based on my intuitions from meeting him, I note that having extreme entitlement would be in tension with not causing bigger issues after being rejected (and it seems like he faced a lot of rejection in these cases), nor is it consistent with writing an apology where the fault isn’t placed on other people.
Regarding (b.) (“a pattern of habitually flinching away from self-critical thoughts”), my best guess is that Owen’s interest in introspection is too deep for a person with this issue. (Edit: Also, he partly felt driven to mention his attraction because there was shame attached to it, and even though this made him maybe not think clearly about everything, it’s not like, if I understand correctly, that he flinched away from mentioning or at least noticing the shame altogether.) The people I know who exhibited this “flinching away” pattern to a severe degree seemed uncomfortable with serious introspection in the first place. They sometimes were very quick to apologize, but they seemed to distort what they were accused of to a point where they were only apologizing for things that are easy to apologize to. By contrast, I feel like Owen’s apology admits a bunch of things about himself that aren’t easy to say, so it feels like genuine self-work went into it.
Regarding (d.) (“motivated cognition dialed up into proper delusions”), I get that people are concerned about this when they read the accounts of what happened. I am too, a little bit. However, I think that it’s not super uncommon to not pick up on people feeling uncomfortable when they try to hint at this discreetly. I also think the instances where Owen kept talking to someone about topics they expressed they wanted him to stop talking about are at most only one or two instances? I feel like if he were severely deluded in the sense of flat-out not cognitively accepting when his advances are rejected, he’d have kept talking to people a lot more than what he actually did? So, I think the levels of motivated cognition here were most likely “bad, but not too far out of the ordinary” (i.e., nowhere near “stalker levels”), so I’m not too worried about this for the future. We should also keep in mind how this was a big event in Owen’s life he’s unlikely to forget, and how much updating he’s probably been doing (and he also said he’s been discussing this stuff with a therapist).
Lastly, something that goes into my assessment of (d.) that I could imagine other people missing is that I feel I have a good model of what went wrong. In that model, it’s not necessary for (d.) (or anything else that would spell trouble) to be pathological about Owen’s psychology. Instead, I think what went poorly is primarily explained by (i) bad theory of mind and (ii) character-related scrupulosity that led to persistently bringing up things that were no longer appropriate (or were never appropriate in the first place, such as with some of the comments or locations where things were brought up).
[Now describing my model.] When people read Owen’s account of why he did what he did, one reaction they might have is the following. “So, okay, he felt attracted to someone, he worried that this attraction would make him a bad person, he wanted to get feedback to reassure himself that he isn’t bad for this. So far, so good. But then, out of everyone he could’ve picked for that conversation, why on earth would he pick the person he’s attracted to to discuss this with? Why not discuss it with anyone else? Doesn’t that mean there must be some more sinister underlying motive at play? How could ‘wanting to be reassured that he isn’t bad’ be anything but an excuse to make repeated advances?” My reaction to that interpretation is “people who think this are probably missing something about what it’s like to have character-related scrupulosity.”
I’m only speculating here, but it feels like the sort of thing I’m likely right about at least directionally. Namely, my guess is that Owen, over the five or so years that this is about, confessed his attraction also to the women he was attracted to (instead of only seeking out other people to discuss his feelings with) and sought absolution from thempartly because he cared particularly about what these women think about him, which was related to him being attracted to them in the first place (meaning he admired them character-wise).
[Edit: paragraph added roughly 8h after posting the comment] Owen reached out to me (first time we communicated in several years) after I wrote this comment and said he felt seen by this paragraph (the one right above), but that I was missing a further factor. He felt – at the time – like the women in question had moral authority on this topic. Quoting: “If they didn’t mind my attraction, then by their judgement my attraction wasn’t bad. If they did mind it, it was bad (and I should take therefore take further internal steps to suppress the feeling).” Don’t take from this that Owen necessarily agrees with all the other descriptions in my long comment, but I wanted to highlight this bit in particular because it sheds more light on why he talked about his attraction to the women directly. I didn’t think of this possibility independently, but it seems credible/consistent to me. (I got permission from Owen to share.)
In some men, it’s common to feel like the ultimate judge of your character is a woman with desirable character qualities herself. If you have a strong desire to be trusted and accepted for who you are, not for who others think you are but for who you actually are, it makes sense that you overshare weird details about yourself that you feel the least comfortable about. And someone with obsessive tendencies in that area may make the mistake of doing this too often or in contexts where it isn’t appropriate. This is a common motivation (I know because I have the same feelings around some of this), and it IMO explains a lot of what happened, so it’s not like we need to postulate other outlier-y things (extreme entitlement, extreme propensity to form delusional beliefs, etc.) to explain why Owen did what he did. (Other than poor theory of mind and common levels of motivated cognition, I mean.)
Lastly, and ironically, I think part of what caused things to go wrong here is actually protective for avoiding bad outcomes in the future. It makes it so much easier to evaluate someone’s character if the person proactively gives you lots of information about it and if one of their primary drives seems to be to help you with that. It serves to rule out a lot of ways someone’s character could be, but isn’t. (Like, I’m pretty sure if Owen had had any sinister motives besides just having a crush on the women, he’d have confessed those other motives as well to the women in question, and we’d have a bigger scandal.) I think this is a positive thing and one reason I’m drawn to defending Owen here as someone who doesn’t know him super well (without saying that he didn’t do anything wrong) is because I can easily imagine how other people would react in similar situations, and I want to flag that I like it when people make it easier for others to evaluate them.
A caveat here is that, as we’ve seen, a desire to be trusted and act so as to earn trust by proactively doing lots of introspection and sharing negative information by no means implies that someone is free from massive blind spots or self-deception. There’s even a hypothesis that people who practice radical honesty and transparency thereby dial up their self-deception – see Holly Elmore’s post on privacy, which seems relevant here, though (a) “making oneself transparent on matters relevant to trust” isn’t exactly the same as “declining to have any sort of privacy in any context,” and so, (b), I’m not sure I’d say that self-deception is necessarily dialed up in all instances of trying to do the former. Still, it seems plausible that it could come with that sort of risk.) Anyway, despite the concern that self-deception and blind spots remain very much possible/to be expected, I think that people who try to make themselves transparent to have their character more easily evaluated are in fact easier to evaluate for good character than people who don’t do that.
Part of me wants to ask what you’re basing that on. And on one hand, I do think specifics are better than general assessments (which I explain in more detail here). On the other, I think trying to relitigate this on the forum is likely to go poorly, and isn’t worth it given that EV has laid down a reasonable plan.
I’m not sure why your comment was downvoted. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable request since, as you say correctly in other comments, people who don’t know enough to form their own opinion can’t just trust that other forum commenters with direct opinions are well-calibrated/have decent people judgment about this.
I started writing down some points, but it’s not easy and I don’t want to do it in a half-baked fashion and then have readers go “oh, those data points and interpretations all sound pretty spurious, if that’s all you have, it seems weird that you’d even voice an opinion.” It’s often hard to put in words convincingly why you believe something about someone.
I might still get around to finishing the comment at some point in the next few days, but don’t count on it.
Here are (finally) some thoughts:
Owen clearly doesn’t fit the pattern of grandiose narcissism or sociopathy. I could say more about this but I doubt it’s anyone’s crux, and I prefer to not spend too much time on this.
Next to grandiose narcissism or sociopathy, there are other patterns how people can systematically cause harm to others. I’m mostly thinking of “harm through negligence” rather than with intent (but this isn’t to say that grandiose narcissists cause all their harm fully-consciously). Anyway, many of these other patterns IMO involve having a bad theory of mind at least in certain domains. And we’ve seen that Owen has had this. However, I think it only becomes really vexed/hard to correct if someone (1) lacks a strong desire to improve their understanding of others so as to (i.e., with the prosocial goal being the primary motivation) avoid harming them/to make them more comfortable, or (2) if they are hopelessly bad at improving their understanding of others for reasons other than lacking such a desire in the first place.
On (1), I’m confident that Owen has a strong desire to improve his understanding of others so as to avoid harming them and make people positively comfortable. I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember thinking that he’s considerate in a way that many people aren’t, which suggests that other people’s feelings and comfort is often on his mind (edit) at least in some contexts. (E.g., in conversations about research, he’d often ask if what he’s been saying so far is still helpful, or if we should move on to other questions. But more importantly, I think I also noticed signs of scrupulosity related to how he picks words carefully to make sure he doesn’t convey the wrong thing, which I think is linked with not wanting to be bad socially or not wanting to come to the wrong conclusions about research relevant to the other party’s path to impact.) Sure, people who are scared of social rejection can also be hypervigilant like that, and sometimes it’s more people-pleasing than sincere concern, but I also felt like I picked up on “he’s sincerely trying to be helpful” when talking to him. Though this is more of an intuition-based judgment than anything where I can say “this specific thing I’ve observed is the reason.” (Edit: Actually, one concrete thing that comes to mind is that he was among the very few people who said things about s-risks that made my research priorities seem less important, so he was honest about this in a way that exposes him to me thinking less of him if I were the sort of person who would take stuff like this personally.) Lastly, I think the apology really speaks to all this as well. (That said, I guess someone with cynical priors could point out that the apology might have been written in a very different way if it wasn’t for showing it to friends – I doubt that it would be fundamentally different, and in fact I don’t even know if he showed it to other people before posting [though I think that would be the wise thing to do]. In any case, I agree it’s important to look at whether what people say in their apology is consistent with what we know about them from other situations; anyway, my answer to that is “yes, feels very consistent.”)
Regarding (2), I have no doubts that Owen can greatly improve his understanding of others. He seems among the most “interested in introspection and analyzing social stuff” men that I’ve met, and he’s very intelligent, so it’s not like he lacks the cognitive abilities or interest to improve.
This leaves us with “are there other character obstacles that we should expect that would stop him from improving sufficiently?.” The other negative patterns that I can think of in this domain are:
(a.) Extreme entitlement;
(b.) being very bad at taking feedback to heart because one “flinches away” from bad parts of one’s psychology, to the point that all one’s introspection is premature and always an exercise in ego protection;
(c.) issues with externalizing shame/bad feelings, such as (e.g.) an underlying drive to emotionally control others or “drag them down to one’s level” when one is feeling bad;
(d.) domain-specific tendency to form strong delusional beliefs, like believing that people who aren’t attracted to you are attracted to you, and keeping these even in the light of clear counterevidence.
Of the above, I think (c.) doesn’t fit the pattern of observed harm in this case here (this would be more relevant in people who make false accusations), so let’s focus on (a.), (c.) and (d.)
Regarding (a.) (“extreme entitlement”), I haven’t observed anything that would make me worry that Owen is very entitled. Admittedly, I only know him from a few professional (or semi-professional – e.g., talking in a small group of people after a retreat) context occasions, and I’m not a woman he’s attracted to, so I may not have seen all sides. Still, for further consistency of what I already thought about him before all of this based on my intuitions from meeting him, I note that having extreme entitlement would be in tension with not causing bigger issues after being rejected (and it seems like he faced a lot of rejection in these cases), nor is it consistent with writing an apology where the fault isn’t placed on other people.
Regarding (b.) (“a pattern of habitually flinching away from self-critical thoughts”), my best guess is that Owen’s interest in introspection is too deep for a person with this issue. (Edit: Also, he partly felt driven to mention his attraction because there was shame attached to it, and even though this made him maybe not think clearly about everything, it’s not like, if I understand correctly, that he flinched away from mentioning or at least noticing the shame altogether.) The people I know who exhibited this “flinching away” pattern to a severe degree seemed uncomfortable with serious introspection in the first place. They sometimes were very quick to apologize, but they seemed to distort what they were accused of to a point where they were only apologizing for things that are easy to apologize to. By contrast, I feel like Owen’s apology admits a bunch of things about himself that aren’t easy to say, so it feels like genuine self-work went into it.
Regarding (d.) (“motivated cognition dialed up into proper delusions”), I get that people are concerned about this when they read the accounts of what happened. I am too, a little bit. However, I think that it’s not super uncommon to not pick up on people feeling uncomfortable when they try to hint at this discreetly. I also think the instances where Owen kept talking to someone about topics they expressed they wanted him to stop talking about are at most only one or two instances? I feel like if he were severely deluded in the sense of flat-out not cognitively accepting when his advances are rejected, he’d have kept talking to people a lot more than what he actually did? So, I think the levels of motivated cognition here were most likely “bad, but not too far out of the ordinary” (i.e., nowhere near “stalker levels”), so I’m not too worried about this for the future. We should also keep in mind how this was a big event in Owen’s life he’s unlikely to forget, and how much updating he’s probably been doing (and he also said he’s been discussing this stuff with a therapist).
Lastly, something that goes into my assessment of (d.) that I could imagine other people missing is that I feel I have a good model of what went wrong. In that model, it’s not necessary for (d.) (or anything else that would spell trouble) to be pathological about Owen’s psychology. Instead, I think what went poorly is primarily explained by (i) bad theory of mind and (ii) character-related scrupulosity that led to persistently bringing up things that were no longer appropriate (or were never appropriate in the first place, such as with some of the comments or locations where things were brought up).
[Now describing my model.] When people read Owen’s account of why he did what he did, one reaction they might have is the following. “So, okay, he felt attracted to someone, he worried that this attraction would make him a bad person, he wanted to get feedback to reassure himself that he isn’t bad for this. So far, so good. But then, out of everyone he could’ve picked for that conversation, why on earth would he pick the person he’s attracted to to discuss this with? Why not discuss it with anyone else? Doesn’t that mean there must be some more sinister underlying motive at play? How could ‘wanting to be reassured that he isn’t bad’ be anything but an excuse to make repeated advances?” My reaction to that interpretation is “people who think this are probably missing something about what it’s like to have character-related scrupulosity.”
I’m only speculating here, but it feels like the sort of thing I’m likely right about at least directionally. Namely, my guess is that Owen, over the five or so years that this is about, confessed his attraction also to the women he was attracted to (instead of only seeking out other people to discuss his feelings with) and sought absolution from them partly because he cared particularly about what these women think about him, which was related to him being attracted to them in the first place (meaning he admired them character-wise).
[Edit: paragraph added roughly 8h after posting the comment] Owen reached out to me (first time we communicated in several years) after I wrote this comment and said he felt seen by this paragraph (the one right above), but that I was missing a further factor. He felt – at the time – like the women in question had moral authority on this topic. Quoting: “If they didn’t mind my attraction, then by their judgement my attraction wasn’t bad. If they did mind it, it was bad (and I should take therefore take further internal steps to suppress the feeling).” Don’t take from this that Owen necessarily agrees with all the other descriptions in my long comment, but I wanted to highlight this bit in particular because it sheds more light on why he talked about his attraction to the women directly. I didn’t think of this possibility independently, but it seems credible/consistent to me. (I got permission from Owen to share.)
In some men, it’s common to feel like the ultimate judge of your character is a woman with desirable character qualities herself. If you have a strong desire to be trusted and accepted for who you are, not for who others think you are but for who you actually are, it makes sense that you overshare weird details about yourself that you feel the least comfortable about. And someone with obsessive tendencies in that area may make the mistake of doing this too often or in contexts where it isn’t appropriate. This is a common motivation (I know because I have the same feelings around some of this), and it IMO explains a lot of what happened, so it’s not like we need to postulate other outlier-y things (extreme entitlement, extreme propensity to form delusional beliefs, etc.) to explain why Owen did what he did. (Other than poor theory of mind and common levels of motivated cognition, I mean.)
Lastly, and ironically, I think part of what caused things to go wrong here is actually protective for avoiding bad outcomes in the future. It makes it so much easier to evaluate someone’s character if the person proactively gives you lots of information about it and if one of their primary drives seems to be to help you with that. It serves to rule out a lot of ways someone’s character could be, but isn’t. (Like, I’m pretty sure if Owen had had any sinister motives besides just having a crush on the women, he’d have confessed those other motives as well to the women in question, and we’d have a bigger scandal.) I think this is a positive thing and one reason I’m drawn to defending Owen here as someone who doesn’t know him super well (without saying that he didn’t do anything wrong) is because I can easily imagine how other people would react in similar situations, and I want to flag that I like it when people make it easier for others to evaluate them.
A caveat here is that, as we’ve seen, a desire to be trusted and act so as to earn trust by proactively doing lots of introspection and sharing negative information by no means implies that someone is free from massive blind spots or self-deception. There’s even a hypothesis that people who practice radical honesty and transparency thereby dial up their self-deception – see Holly Elmore’s post on privacy, which seems relevant here, though (a) “making oneself transparent on matters relevant to trust” isn’t exactly the same as “declining to have any sort of privacy in any context,” and so, (b), I’m not sure I’d say that self-deception is necessarily dialed up in all instances of trying to do the former. Still, it seems plausible that it could come with that sort of risk.) Anyway, despite the concern that self-deception and blind spots remain very much possible/to be expected, I think that people who try to make themselves transparent to have their character more easily evaluated are in fact easier to evaluate for good character than people who don’t do that.