I do not know Owen. I am however a bit worried to see two people in these comments advocating for Owen while this affair does not look good and the facts speak for themselves; there is a certain irony to see these two people coming to defend Owen while the community health head, Julia, admits to a certain level of bias when handling this affair since he was her friend. It seems that EA people do not learn from the mistakes that are courageously being owned up here. This posts talks about Owen misbehaving: it does not talk about Owen’s good deeds. So this kind of comment defeats the point of this post.
Can you put yourself two seconds in the shoes of these women who received unwanted and pressing attention from Owen, with all the power dynamics that are involved, reading comments on how Owen is responsible and a great addition to the community, even after women repeatedly complained about him? What I read is ‘He treated me well, so don’t be so quick to dismiss him’ and ‘I’ve dealt with worse cases, so I can assure you this one is not that bad’.
Do you really think that such attitudes encourage women to speak up? Do you really think that this is the place to do this?
Edit: I want to thank those who have written this post and highlight the courage that it has taken. I know that I am flagging up the things that are not okay, e.g these comments, but I am very happy that this does not stay within community building circles and gets shared. Yeay for transparency, yay for honesty, yay for highlighting what is wrong if we want to do better. I know of instances where such bad press has been kept within closed doors, and I’m glad this one has not. So, thanks. I yell a lot (I wish I did not have to, of course) but I also want to be grateful.
[T]here is a certain irony to see these two people coming to defend Owen while the community health head, Julia, admits to a certain level of bias when handling this affair since he was her friend.
Jonas’s comment includes statements like “This obviously doesn’t make his past behavior any less bad and doesn’t excuse any of it” and “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, [...]”
So, I don’t think this would be repeating the mistakes that the community health team acknowledged. I also think Jonas made important points.
Generally, I think as long as someone acknowledges what’s at stake for both sides (underreaction vs overreaction), it should be okay to try to add important nuance to a conversation.
Regarding lyra’s comment, among other things, she says that she thinks Owen would be positively welcoming for lots of communities. In light of several people speaking up about their negative experiences, I can see why that’s weird to hear. Like, even if it’s true going forward (I think it might be!), I’d personally would have liked it better if lyra’s comment had contained more of a mention of how she agrees the patterns described in the update were indeed concerning and very much warranted action. (I don’t know who lyra is – it’s plausible that she’d agree with that and simply didn’t bother to write it because she thought readers can already see all the negative descriptions.)
Can you put yourself two seconds in the shoes of these women who received unwanted and pressing attention from Owen,
Again, I can see why you’re writing this in response to lyra’s comment. At the same time, I want to point out that “being concerned about overreactions” isn’t just one-sidedly bad for the goal of improving community safety and welcomingness. If the community doesn’t have a sense of how there’s still a big difference in “potential for future harm” between someone like Owen and someone like Jeffrey Epstein, then how is that conducive for welcomingness and safety? This isn’t yet a fleshed out argument, but I have the intuition that if we react with all-out outrage at even comparatively more fixable/improvable incidents of harm, we’ll do a worse job at having the energy and vigilance to maximally pursue the worst cases of it, which often also involve a lot of deception and “enemy action” that distorts the discourse around what’s happening and around “who’s the bad party?.” In those situations, you really want people who can pay attention to lots of subtleties of character and don’t fall into outrage traps around whose side is currently winning.
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
The post did a great job at describing exactly what is reproached to Owen. I do not see anyone in the comment claiming that he is more than what is described in the post, and in general, I do not see anything pointing at overaction from anybody.
Citing Epstein looks like a strawman and does not make my point less salient: that some members jumping to defend Owen is an insult to the testimony of these women as if Owen’s good behaviour removed his bad behaviours, and contradictory to what has been courageously empathized in this post, i.e. that EAs knowing each other and defending each other encourage secrecy and overlooking potential serious misconducts.
I would even add that assuming that the community will conflate Owen and Epstein’s case is patronizing and far-fetched; I think that people are able to make the distinction between a sex offender who got jail time and Owen.
For reasons I went into here, I think it often sets things up for vexed discussion dynamics when we’re criticizing how others are reacting or aren’t reacting, and whether they are emphasizing the right points with the appropriate degree of strength. (I do this myself occasionally, and there isn’t anything wrong with doing it, per se. I’m just pointing out why we’re doomed to have an unpleasant discussion experience.)
I would even add that assuming that the community will conflate Owen and Epstein’s case is patronizing and far-fetched;
I feel like you’re being uncharitable here; I was commenting on “not leaving much space for things to be worse” rather than making a specific claim about conflation.
Edited to add:
I do not see anyone in the comment claiming that he is more than what is described in the post, and in general, I do not see anything pointing at overaction from anybody.
Just want to flag that I agree with this. It still doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to proactively make the sort of comment that Jonas made (in fact, I liked the comment a lot). But I also see why you find it odd to do this “unpromptedly.”
2nd edit 24h later: Someone has now made a comment pointing out how maybe Jonas just got “charmed.” The comment stating this hypothesis got lots of upvotes, which is okay/good for balance, but it shows why Jonas’s comment was very valuable in the first place. When you ban someone from community spaces for two years, it really is in a lot of people’s mind that the person might be antisocial and manipulative. That’s the sort of associations this conjures up. It’s important to point out how this case is atypical and that there are many reasons to assume that risk of future harm is very low – as others have pointed out with concrete examples/arguments. (Which I also believe to be the case firsthand, so not just based on updating to Jonas, lyra, Emma, etc.)
It’s important to point out how this case is atypical
I want to distinguish between “he is not the kind of deliberate predator you typically think of when you hear about sexual harassment” and “he is different than most people who sexually harass others”.
I think that “well-meaning person does damage through neglect rather than malice or deliberate disregard” is a fairly typical case; maybe more common than deliberate predation. You can do a lot of damage through neglect alone, especially when you underestimate your power in a situation. So while I think it is very good to push back against the assumption that harm came from deliberate malice, and provide evidence for a given situation, this is almost orthogonal to expectations of future harm.
I agree with those points and they seem important.
I didn’t write this further above, but thinking about it now, I think there was also another dimension that fed into me thinking of this case as “atypical.” (But maybe this isn’t the best wording and these things are more typical than we think, but what I’m trying to gesture at is “the sort of thing that has high chances of getting fixed.”) In any case, when I think of cases of “harm through neglect,” where someone isn’t ill-intentioned but still has a pattern of making others uncomfortable, some cases that come to mind are with people who are kind of hopeless and their personality and psychology seems tragic and like they are unlikely to improve without excessive amount of supervision/handholding and fix all the stuff that is at risk of causing harm in different ways. Importantly, Owen very much doesn’t seem to me like that either.* So, according to my interpretation and guesses, there is indeed less potential for future harm than in many other conceivable cases where someone e.g., received a two-year ban for making people uncomfortable.
It’s good that you made this point because I agree we shouldn’t place too much importance on the “intentional harm vs unintentional harm” distinction. Instead, I think what matters if people overall have a prosocially-oriented and corrigible cognition.
*That said, I acknowledge that Owen needed more than just the initial pointer from the first time he was approached by Community Health, so I’m not saying this is the most obvious call in the world. It would be a longer topic to elaborate on why I feel confidently optimistic, but people can read for themselves the document he wrote on all of this and see how much (if at all) it makes them feel reassured about steps Owen has taken since then and how much it seems he now has insight into what went wrong and why he did what he did, etc.
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.
Presumably there is some level of [mildness / accidentalness of misconduct ] and [strength of response] at which the correct community response is to say “that response seems a bit too strong for the level of misconduct”—do you disagree? If that’s the case I don’t think it’s that helpful to claim that it’s generically bad to ever say that you think a response is too strong—it has to depend on the specifics of a case.
I do not know Owen. I am however a bit worried to see two people in these comments advocating for Owen while this affair does not look good and the facts speak for themselves; there is a certain irony to see these two people coming to defend Owen while the community health head, Julia, admits to a certain level of bias when handling this affair since he was her friend. It seems that EA people do not learn from the mistakes that are courageously being owned up here. This posts talks about Owen misbehaving: it does not talk about Owen’s good deeds. So this kind of comment defeats the point of this post.
Can you put yourself two seconds in the shoes of these women who received unwanted and pressing attention from Owen, with all the power dynamics that are involved, reading comments on how Owen is responsible and a great addition to the community, even after women repeatedly complained about him? What I read is ‘He treated me well, so don’t be so quick to dismiss him’ and ‘I’ve dealt with worse cases, so I can assure you this one is not that bad’.
Do you really think that such attitudes encourage women to speak up? Do you really think that this is the place to do this?
Edit: I want to thank those who have written this post and highlight the courage that it has taken. I know that I am flagging up the things that are not okay, e.g these comments, but I am very happy that this does not stay within community building circles and gets shared. Yeay for transparency, yay for honesty, yay for highlighting what is wrong if we want to do better. I know of instances where such bad press has been kept within closed doors, and I’m glad this one has not. So, thanks. I yell a lot (I wish I did not have to, of course) but I also want to be grateful.
Jonas’s comment includes statements like “This obviously doesn’t make his past behavior any less bad and doesn’t excuse any of it” and “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, [...]”
So, I don’t think this would be repeating the mistakes that the community health team acknowledged. I also think Jonas made important points.
Generally, I think as long as someone acknowledges what’s at stake for both sides (underreaction vs overreaction), it should be okay to try to add important nuance to a conversation.
Regarding lyra’s comment, among other things, she says that she thinks Owen would be positively welcoming for lots of communities. In light of several people speaking up about their negative experiences, I can see why that’s weird to hear. Like, even if it’s true going forward (I think it might be!), I’d personally would have liked it better if lyra’s comment had contained more of a mention of how she agrees the patterns described in the update were indeed concerning and very much warranted action. (I don’t know who lyra is – it’s plausible that she’d agree with that and simply didn’t bother to write it because she thought readers can already see all the negative descriptions.)
Again, I can see why you’re writing this in response to lyra’s comment. At the same time, I want to point out that “being concerned about overreactions” isn’t just one-sidedly bad for the goal of improving community safety and welcomingness. If the community doesn’t have a sense of how there’s still a big difference in “potential for future harm” between someone like Owen and someone like Jeffrey Epstein, then how is that conducive for welcomingness and safety? This isn’t yet a fleshed out argument, but I have the intuition that if we react with all-out outrage at even comparatively more fixable/improvable incidents of harm, we’ll do a worse job at having the energy and vigilance to maximally pursue the worst cases of it, which often also involve a lot of deception and “enemy action” that distorts the discourse around what’s happening and around “who’s the bad party?.” In those situations, you really want people who can pay attention to lots of subtleties of character and don’t fall into outrage traps around whose side is currently winning.
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
The post did a great job at describing exactly what is reproached to Owen. I do not see anyone in the comment claiming that he is more than what is described in the post, and in general, I do not see anything pointing at overaction from anybody.
Citing Epstein looks like a strawman and does not make my point less salient: that some members jumping to defend Owen is an insult to the testimony of these women as if Owen’s good behaviour removed his bad behaviours, and contradictory to what has been courageously empathized in this post, i.e. that EAs knowing each other and defending each other encourage secrecy and overlooking potential serious misconducts.
I would even add that assuming that the community will conflate Owen and Epstein’s case is patronizing and far-fetched; I think that people are able to make the distinction between a sex offender who got jail time and Owen.
For reasons I went into here, I think it often sets things up for vexed discussion dynamics when we’re criticizing how others are reacting or aren’t reacting, and whether they are emphasizing the right points with the appropriate degree of strength. (I do this myself occasionally, and there isn’t anything wrong with doing it, per se. I’m just pointing out why we’re doomed to have an unpleasant discussion experience.)
I feel like you’re being uncharitable here; I was commenting on “not leaving much space for things to be worse” rather than making a specific claim about conflation.
Edited to add:
Just want to flag that I agree with this. It still doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to proactively make the sort of comment that Jonas made (in fact, I liked the comment a lot). But I also see why you find it odd to do this “unpromptedly.”
2nd edit 24h later: Someone has now made a comment pointing out how maybe Jonas just got “charmed.” The comment stating this hypothesis got lots of upvotes, which is okay/good for balance, but it shows why Jonas’s comment was very valuable in the first place. When you ban someone from community spaces for two years, it really is in a lot of people’s mind that the person might be antisocial and manipulative. That’s the sort of associations this conjures up. It’s important to point out how this case is atypical and that there are many reasons to assume that risk of future harm is very low – as others have pointed out with concrete examples/arguments. (Which I also believe to be the case firsthand, so not just based on updating to Jonas, lyra, Emma, etc.)
I want to distinguish between “he is not the kind of deliberate predator you typically think of when you hear about sexual harassment” and “he is different than most people who sexually harass others”.
I think that “well-meaning person does damage through neglect rather than malice or deliberate disregard” is a fairly typical case; maybe more common than deliberate predation. You can do a lot of damage through neglect alone, especially when you underestimate your power in a situation. So while I think it is very good to push back against the assumption that harm came from deliberate malice, and provide evidence for a given situation, this is almost orthogonal to expectations of future harm.
I agree with those points and they seem important.
I didn’t write this further above, but thinking about it now, I think there was also another dimension that fed into me thinking of this case as “atypical.” (But maybe this isn’t the best wording and these things are more typical than we think, but what I’m trying to gesture at is “the sort of thing that has high chances of getting fixed.”) In any case, when I think of cases of “harm through neglect,” where someone isn’t ill-intentioned but still has a pattern of making others uncomfortable, some cases that come to mind are with people who are kind of hopeless and their personality and psychology seems tragic and like they are unlikely to improve without excessive amount of supervision/handholding and fix all the stuff that is at risk of causing harm in different ways. Importantly, Owen very much doesn’t seem to me like that either.* So, according to my interpretation and guesses, there is indeed less potential for future harm than in many other conceivable cases where someone e.g., received a two-year ban for making people uncomfortable.
It’s good that you made this point because I agree we shouldn’t place too much importance on the “intentional harm vs unintentional harm” distinction. Instead, I think what matters if people overall have a prosocially-oriented and corrigible cognition.
*That said, I acknowledge that Owen needed more than just the initial pointer from the first time he was approached by Community Health, so I’m not saying this is the most obvious call in the world. It would be a longer topic to elaborate on why I feel confidently optimistic, but people can read for themselves the document he wrote on all of this and see how much (if at all) it makes them feel reassured about steps Owen has taken since then and how much it seems he now has insight into what went wrong and why he did what he did, etc.
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.
Presumably there is some level of [mildness / accidentalness of misconduct ] and [strength of response] at which the correct community response is to say “that response seems a bit too strong for the level of misconduct”—do you disagree? If that’s the case I don’t think it’s that helpful to claim that it’s generically bad to ever say that you think a response is too strong—it has to depend on the specifics of a case.