In at least one case, Owen did not stop making repeated unwanted attempts at contact after being asked to do so[2].
Iām surprised and confused as to why the EV Board did not include that Owen says that he has written evidence showing that this isnāt true. (See the āOn feedbackā section here)
Did the investigators look at the evidence and disagree that the evidence was exculpatory? Or did they not look at the evidence at all and just post anyways, despite Owen telling them he had evidence (great article here about why this is suboptimal)?
Given that Owen has been more than forthcoming about everything so far, so itās unlikely heās hiding anything, and he says he has written evidence to the contrary, I am inclined to believe that this accusation is false or misleading until I get more evidence to the contrary.
I would appreciate if @EV UK Board@EV US Board shared more information about what they did in this case, since it seems like a very cruxy accusation.
If the only thing he did was express romantic interest in people who werenāt as influential as him, I think that is a much less bad thing (even not bad at all), and the 2 year banishment seems unwarranted.
I donāt think āonly thing he did was express romantic interest in people who werenāt as influential as himā would be a full characterization of the factual findings here. For example, the Boards found that the āfrequency and the content of the advances contributed to the womenās feelings.ā Thatās still vague, but itās more than merely expressing interest across a power/āinfluence gradient. Thereās a finding concerning inconsistent recognition (and thus, management) of conflicts of interest. Thereās an implied finding that the circumstances of some expressions of interest were inappropriate: āit was difficult for the women to avoid interacting with Owen while the inappropriate actions were taking place, e.g. with a woman staying at Owenās house.ā
More generally: The Boardsā post lists their findings of fact at a fairly high level. The post clearly states that it is not a āshared perspectiveā document and that involved persons may disagree with some of the conclusions. Thereās a footnote indicating that Owen doesnāt seem to agree with the factual finding you identified.
I think thatās enough here. Itās almost inevitable that factual findings in a matter like this will rely in significant part on information obtained in confidence and on reasoning that is not publicly disclosed. The Boardsā primary responsibility here was to take action necessary to protect the EVFsā interests and those of involved members of the public. In my view, it would be inappropriate for the Boards to give less weight to information or reasoning merely because it could not be publicly disclosed. Given that, a disconnect between the presented rationale and the strength of the action is not terribly surprising.
Of course, the Boards are not trial courts for the EA community, and it would be reasonable to consider the relatively low reasoning transparency when deciding whether /ā how much to update, what to do in your own non-EVF organization, etc.
Furthermore, presenting evidence and reasoning favorable to Owen could make the post imbalanced if the information to which the Boards assigned greater weight could not be disclosed because of confidentiality commitments, concerns about losing legal privilege over the investigative report, etc. For example, some of the incidents involved people with formal power differentials; saying much more about those matters would likely pose a serious risk of identifying the individuals. I think giving Owen advance notice of the postās contents and noting that he may wish to make a response was a reasonable approach here.
As well as the reasons Jason lists, I think there are difficulties relating to preserving anonymity here. The identities of the people involved are known to me, to Community Health, and to the external investigationābut not as far as Iām aware to the EV boards. The external investigation is complete, and I canāt share evidence with the EV boards without damaging that anonymity (although note also that I donāt completely agree with Katās characterisation of my view of the evidence). Moreover, although itās transparent to me who this finding must be relating to, itās presumably not transparent to the EV boards that itās transparent to me, so I imagine they want to avoid leaking any bits of information about people who may or may not have spoken to the investigation. (Iām still not in fact certain that this person spoke to the investigation! It seems unlikely-but-conceivable that the finding is a garbled version of a thing I said to the investigation about the personās bad experience.)
I understand now that the boards wanted to base their actions just on the findings of the investigation, so there could be no question about the process being impartial.
frequency and the content of the advances contributed to the womenās feelings.
If somebody doesnāt express disinterest in the romantic interest, why is frequency a problem? There is only one claimed case where a person says he didnāt stop when she said no, and he says he has written evidence against that.
For ācontentā, this could be reframed as saying ādonāt ask people out in the wrong wayā which seems like a vague and impossible standard. There is no right or wrong way to ask somebody out (of course, Iām sure there are edge cases).
If you combine someone frequently expressing sexual/āromantic interest in you when thereās a power differential, that is a problem. It might mean, especially when the person whoās doing that is your boss/āmentor/āsomeone more senior than you, that you donāt feel like you can (clearly) refuse. When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone ānoā often make this worse.
Even if both people are interested in each other, the way they relate to each other in an organization should ideally be changed to reduce the power differential. This is a standard procedure in some countries, e.g. Israel.
When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone ānoā often make this worse.
I do think many women experience fear around this, and many have troubles expressing their wants in general. Many donāt though. Whatās the solution then?
Should we encourage women to be strong, to do things that scare them, to stand up for themselves? Should we encourage women to tell people what they want instead of holding it in and not getting their needs met?
Or should we make it so theyāre never in situations that they might feel scared? Should we protect women from any danger, including the danger of being asked out and it feeling awkward to say no?
It might mean, especially when the person whoās doing that is your boss/āmentor/āsomeone more senior than you, that you donāt feel like you can (clearly) refuse
It looks like this is saying that women canāt say no to powerful men? Why is that?
I assume that women are strong and independent and if a powerful person tells them to do something, they can say no just fine, just like anybody else.
I think itās also highly salient that concerns about frequency were apparently raised by multiple women. This implies that they believed they had made it sufficiently clear enough that the attention was unwelcome before at least some of the expressions of interest. If there were just one report of that nature, one might conclude that the identified individual was not given enough information to reasonably understand that further attention was unwelcome. This becomes an increasingly unlikely theory as the number of reports increases.
My best guess is that itās not correct that concerns about frequency were raised by multiple women, and the sentence is referring to different things contributing to the feelings of different people (most likely two).
In the case Iām aware of the key thing that went wrong was that I didnāt realise some of what I was communicating would be taken as continued expression of interest (I thought it was a settled ānoā). Of course there may be a case where Iām still unaware of this facet of their experience.
If concerns about frequency were only raised by one person, the Boards should amend the second factual finding. If changing the text much would be problematic due to confidentiality concerns and/āor ambiguities in the investigative report, changing āandā to āand/āorā would at least help.
In my reading, the fifth finding involves a specific complaint about frequency.[1] Given that, there shouldnāt be references to frequency in the second paragraph in a context that implies that there were multiple such complaints (e.g., stating that frequency ācontributed to the womenās feelingsā (emphasis mine)). Rather, referring to the same complaint in both the second and fifth finding would constitute double-counting and thus overstate the findings.
In common language, I would describe a frequency concern as ~āit happened too many times.ā I think that āit happened too many timesā is necessarily implied by the fifth finding, that ~āit happened again to the same person after Owen was asked to stop.ā
Thanks, I thought a bit more about this (Iād previously just been assuming that it meant the case I knew about), and I find it plausible it was more than one. In particular, as I explained in my notes there was a pattern in the cases of harm in which I read the other person as having more reciprocated attraction than they did. I find it plausible that things I said working from such a mistaken impression would have been read as advances, and have little idea what the frequency of such things could have been.
So thereās no confirmed person aside from the one listed, but there could feasibly be more?
Is there anybody aside from the one person publicly listed who asked you to stop expressing interest or asked you to stop talking to them or anything like that?
it was difficult for the women to avoid interacting with Owen while the inappropriate actions were taking place, e.g. with a woman staying at Owenās house.
Is this cruxy for anybody? If people found out that heād expressed romantic interest in somebody at his house, would people think thatās an bannishable offense?
Yes, in this specific context itās a crux for me. If someone hosted a new person of the community at their house in a foreign country, and then made sexual advances at them, Iād not want that person to host newcomers/āforeigners again. Edit: Iām writing in personal capacity here, this is not a statement by EA Germany.
OK. Does it make a difference that the only instance where we have public details, Owen wasnāt making sexual advances in his house? He just mentioned, to a friend where they were both doing radical honesty with each other, inspired by circling, that he was going to masturbate that day. When she wasnāt in the house. Not masturbating about her or anything. Just that heād do what the vast majority of guys do every day.
She was a friend, not a colleague. He wasnāt doing professional connecting people with jobs or anything like that. He only started that role later.
Itās a weird thing to say in most contexts, but if youāre friends and have mutually agreed radical honesty, it seems fine. It would be like attending a circling event (where radical honesty is expected). As long as people are choosing to do it, then theyāre adults and can do what they want.
Now, itās unclear whether he also expressed romantic interest in others while at his house, and itās also unclear whether such people were working for/āwith him or were visting his house as a friend, etc.
Thereās a big difference between expressing interest on a social visit to oneās home and doing so under the circumstances described in the Time article to which this is apparently alluding. Itās not particularly for the person on a social visit to leave and thus get away from the situation.
concerning inconsistent recognition (and thus, management) of conflicts of interest
In the same article they say that Julia Wise also did this and had troubles managing conflicts of interest. Should she be banished for 2 years?
There are plenty of EA leaders whoāve had this problem (managing COIs is hard and not straightforward!) and they are not being banished.
It seems that the more likely explanation is that there was a big blow up for EAās reputation with that Time magazine article, and EV is trying to protect themselves by making a public example of somebody.
The Boards found that Owen committed acts of sexual misconduct. That he failed to appropriately manage COIs related to expressing sexual/āromantic interest is an aggravating factor to the finding that he had committed misconduct with respect to expressions of interest.[1] The Boards are not suggesting that a 2 year ban from EVF activities is some sort of default penalty for COI mismanagement.
I think many organizations in both the US and UK would have disassociated themselves from a former trustee for the conduct described in the Time magazine article alone. Thus, I do not think the sanction here is excessive. The Boards have no power to make decisions for the EA community or any other organization; that is up to all of us.
Julia made some (admittedly significant) errors of judgment in a very difficult situation not of her own making, where the existing policies, precedents, and resources were not remotely up to the task set before her. It is relatively uncommon for an organization to suspend or fire a longstanding employee for an honest mistake in judgment in one case on the job. I do not see any evidence that the Boardsā decision here was outside of their discretion.
I have no idea whether the Boards considered public reputation in deciding on this action. However, it would not have been inappropriate for the Boards to give some weight to Owenās prominence and the need to set an example (āgeneral deterrenceā). By analogy, the US Department of Justice is pretty open that it goes after celebrities for criminal tax violations to achieve maximum public awareness and deterrence. Moreover, itās appropriate to hold people in senior positions to a stricter standard.
It also wouldnāt have been inappropriate for the EVF UK Board to consider that it is under statutory inquiry in part for Board-related issues when addressing sexual misconduct by someone who was recently a trustee of that organization. No one has a right to be associated with EVF, and the Boardās responsibilities are to EVF and its mission, not to Owen personally. And of course, the Boards did notānor did they have the power to! -- ābanish[]ā anyone from EA.
Iām surprised and confused as to why the EV Board did not include that Owen says that he has written evidence showing that this isnāt true. (See the āOn feedbackā section here)
Did the investigators look at the evidence and disagree that the evidence was exculpatory? Or did they not look at the evidence at all and just post anyways, despite Owen telling them he had evidence (great article here about why this is suboptimal)?
Given that Owen has been more than forthcoming about everything so far, so itās unlikely heās hiding anything, and he says he has written evidence to the contrary, I am inclined to believe that this accusation is false or misleading until I get more evidence to the contrary.
I would appreciate if @EV UK Board @EV US Board shared more information about what they did in this case, since it seems like a very cruxy accusation.
If the only thing he did was express romantic interest in people who werenāt as influential as him, I think that is a much less bad thing (even not bad at all), and the 2 year banishment seems unwarranted.
I donāt think āonly thing he did was express romantic interest in people who werenāt as influential as himā would be a full characterization of the factual findings here. For example, the Boards found that the āfrequency and the content of the advances contributed to the womenās feelings.ā Thatās still vague, but itās more than merely expressing interest across a power/āinfluence gradient. Thereās a finding concerning inconsistent recognition (and thus, management) of conflicts of interest. Thereās an implied finding that the circumstances of some expressions of interest were inappropriate: āit was difficult for the women to avoid interacting with Owen while the inappropriate actions were taking place, e.g. with a woman staying at Owenās house.ā
More generally: The Boardsā post lists their findings of fact at a fairly high level. The post clearly states that it is not a āshared perspectiveā document and that involved persons may disagree with some of the conclusions. Thereās a footnote indicating that Owen doesnāt seem to agree with the factual finding you identified.
I think thatās enough here. Itās almost inevitable that factual findings in a matter like this will rely in significant part on information obtained in confidence and on reasoning that is not publicly disclosed. The Boardsā primary responsibility here was to take action necessary to protect the EVFsā interests and those of involved members of the public. In my view, it would be inappropriate for the Boards to give less weight to information or reasoning merely because it could not be publicly disclosed. Given that, a disconnect between the presented rationale and the strength of the action is not terribly surprising.
Of course, the Boards are not trial courts for the EA community, and it would be reasonable to consider the relatively low reasoning transparency when deciding whether /ā how much to update, what to do in your own non-EVF organization, etc.
Furthermore, presenting evidence and reasoning favorable to Owen could make the post imbalanced if the information to which the Boards assigned greater weight could not be disclosed because of confidentiality commitments, concerns about losing legal privilege over the investigative report, etc. For example, some of the incidents involved people with formal power differentials; saying much more about those matters would likely pose a serious risk of identifying the individuals. I think giving Owen advance notice of the postās contents and noting that he may wish to make a response was a reasonable approach here.
As well as the reasons Jason lists, I think there are difficulties relating to preserving anonymity here. The identities of the people involved are known to me, to Community Health, and to the external investigationābut not as far as Iām aware to the EV boards. The external investigation is complete, and I canāt share evidence with the EV boards without damaging that anonymity (although note also that I donāt completely agree with Katās characterisation of my view of the evidence). Moreover, although itās transparent to me who this finding must be relating to, itās presumably not transparent to the EV boards that itās transparent to me, so I imagine they want to avoid leaking any bits of information about people who may or may not have spoken to the investigation. (Iām still not in fact certain that this person spoke to the investigation! It seems unlikely-but-conceivable that the finding is a garbled version of a thing I said to the investigation about the personās bad experience.)
I understand now that the boards wanted to base their actions just on the findings of the investigation, so there could be no question about the process being impartial.
If somebody doesnāt express disinterest in the romantic interest, why is frequency a problem? There is only one claimed case where a person says he didnāt stop when she said no, and he says he has written evidence against that.
For ācontentā, this could be reframed as saying ādonāt ask people out in the wrong wayā which seems like a vague and impossible standard. There is no right or wrong way to ask somebody out (of course, Iām sure there are edge cases).
If you combine someone frequently expressing sexual/āromantic interest in you when thereās a power differential, that is a problem. It might mean, especially when the person whoās doing that is your boss/āmentor/āsomeone more senior than you, that you donāt feel like you can (clearly) refuse. When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone ānoā often make this worse.
Even if both people are interested in each other, the way they relate to each other in an organization should ideally be changed to reduce the power differential. This is a standard procedure in some countries, e.g. Israel.
I do think many women experience fear around this, and many have troubles expressing their wants in general. Many donāt though. Whatās the solution then?
Should we encourage women to be strong, to do things that scare them, to stand up for themselves? Should we encourage women to tell people what they want instead of holding it in and not getting their needs met?
Or should we make it so theyāre never in situations that they might feel scared? Should we protect women from any danger, including the danger of being asked out and it feeling awkward to say no?
I think the former is a better solution.
It looks like this is saying that women canāt say no to powerful men? Why is that?
I assume that women are strong and independent and if a powerful person tells them to do something, they can say no just fine, just like anybody else.
Am I missing something?
I think itās also highly salient that concerns about frequency were apparently raised by multiple women. This implies that they believed they had made it sufficiently clear enough that the attention was unwelcome before at least some of the expressions of interest. If there were just one report of that nature, one might conclude that the identified individual was not given enough information to reasonably understand that further attention was unwelcome. This becomes an increasingly unlikely theory as the number of reports increases.
My best guess is that itās not correct that concerns about frequency were raised by multiple women, and the sentence is referring to different things contributing to the feelings of different people (most likely two).
In the case Iām aware of the key thing that went wrong was that I didnāt realise some of what I was communicating would be taken as continued expression of interest (I thought it was a settled ānoā). Of course there may be a case where Iām still unaware of this facet of their experience.
If concerns about frequency were only raised by one person, the Boards should amend the second factual finding. If changing the text much would be problematic due to confidentiality concerns and/āor ambiguities in the investigative report, changing āandā to āand/āorā would at least help.
In my reading, the fifth finding involves a specific complaint about frequency.[1] Given that, there shouldnāt be references to frequency in the second paragraph in a context that implies that there were multiple such complaints (e.g., stating that frequency ācontributed to the womenās feelingsā (emphasis mine)). Rather, referring to the same complaint in both the second and fifth finding would constitute double-counting and thus overstate the findings.
In common language, I would describe a frequency concern as ~āit happened too many times.ā I think that āit happened too many timesā is necessarily implied by the fifth finding, that ~āit happened again to the same person after Owen was asked to stop.ā
Thanks, I thought a bit more about this (Iād previously just been assuming that it meant the case I knew about), and I find it plausible it was more than one. In particular, as I explained in my notes there was a pattern in the cases of harm in which I read the other person as having more reciprocated attraction than they did. I find it plausible that things I said working from such a mistaken impression would have been read as advances, and have little idea what the frequency of such things could have been.
So thereās no confirmed person aside from the one listed, but there could feasibly be more?
Is there anybody aside from the one person publicly listed who asked you to stop expressing interest or asked you to stop talking to them or anything like that?
Nobody else like that.
Is this cruxy for anybody? If people found out that heād expressed romantic interest in somebody at his house, would people think thatās an bannishable offense?
Yes, in this specific context itās a crux for me. If someone hosted a new person of the community at their house in a foreign country, and then made sexual advances at them, Iād not want that person to host newcomers/āforeigners again.
Edit: Iām writing in personal capacity here, this is not a statement by EA Germany.
OK. Does it make a difference that the only instance where we have public details, Owen wasnāt making sexual advances in his house? He just mentioned, to a friend where they were both doing radical honesty with each other, inspired by circling, that he was going to masturbate that day. When she wasnāt in the house. Not masturbating about her or anything. Just that heād do what the vast majority of guys do every day.
She was a friend, not a colleague. He wasnāt doing professional connecting people with jobs or anything like that. He only started that role later.
Itās a weird thing to say in most contexts, but if youāre friends and have mutually agreed radical honesty, it seems fine. It would be like attending a circling event (where radical honesty is expected). As long as people are choosing to do it, then theyāre adults and can do what they want.
Now, itās unclear whether he also expressed romantic interest in others while at his house, and itās also unclear whether such people were working for/āwith him or were visting his house as a friend, etc.
Did you read the actual description of the incident in question?
What is the inaccuracy youāre pointing to?
Thereās a big difference between expressing interest on a social visit to oneās home and doing so under the circumstances described in the Time article to which this is apparently alluding. Itās not particularly for the person on a social visit to leave and thus get away from the situation.
In the same article they say that Julia Wise also did this and had troubles managing conflicts of interest. Should she be banished for 2 years?
There are plenty of EA leaders whoāve had this problem (managing COIs is hard and not straightforward!) and they are not being banished.
It seems that the more likely explanation is that there was a big blow up for EAās reputation with that Time magazine article, and EV is trying to protect themselves by making a public example of somebody.
The Boards found that Owen committed acts of sexual misconduct. That he failed to appropriately manage COIs related to expressing sexual/āromantic interest is an aggravating factor to the finding that he had committed misconduct with respect to expressions of interest.[1] The Boards are not suggesting that a 2 year ban from EVF activities is some sort of default penalty for COI mismanagement.
I think many organizations in both the US and UK would have disassociated themselves from a former trustee for the conduct described in the Time magazine article alone. Thus, I do not think the sanction here is excessive. The Boards have no power to make decisions for the EA community or any other organization; that is up to all of us.
Julia made some (admittedly significant) errors of judgment in a very difficult situation not of her own making, where the existing policies, precedents, and resources were not remotely up to the task set before her. It is relatively uncommon for an organization to suspend or fire a longstanding employee for an honest mistake in judgment in one case on the job. I do not see any evidence that the Boardsā decision here was outside of their discretion.
I have no idea whether the Boards considered public reputation in deciding on this action. However, it would not have been inappropriate for the Boards to give some weight to Owenās prominence and the need to set an example (āgeneral deterrenceā). By analogy, the US Department of Justice is pretty open that it goes after celebrities for criminal tax violations to achieve maximum public awareness and deterrence. Moreover, itās appropriate to hold people in senior positions to a stricter standard.
It also wouldnāt have been inappropriate for the EVF UK Board to consider that it is under statutory inquiry in part for Board-related issues when addressing sexual misconduct by someone who was recently a trustee of that organization. No one has a right to be associated with EVF, and the Boardās responsibilities are to EVF and its mission, not to Owen personally. And of course, the Boards did notānor did they have the power to! -- ābanish[]ā anyone from EA.
The findings do not state whether the COI problems were associated with the individuals who were known to be upset by the advances.