I really appreciate what you said about the community health team. I reported what I viewed as serious misconduct that they had jurisdiction over, and very little was done about it.
I trusted them based on what I understood to be their reputation. So it really broke me when, despite them saying they took my allegation seriously, they did not treat it as if they took it seriously. Their non-response was a massive contributor to what were some of the worst months of my life. I am still recovering.
That’s not to say anyone should completely write them off based on my account. I’m posting this anonymously with no details, and so there is absolutely no reason to trust my account of things. There is no reason to believe that I am perceiving the situation accurately/reasonably.
One piece of detail I’ll provide is that the nature of the misconduct involved repeated threats.
But I do wish people trusted them less. I think it could have saved me a lot of pain if I knew going in that they had a mixed reputation. If I had gone in with some uncertainty about how much I should have relied on them. I could have set better expectations.
Hi KnitKnack—I’m really sorry to hear you had a bad experience with the CH team, and that it contributed to some especially bad moments in your life. I totally endorse that people should have accurate expectations, which means that they should not expect we’ll always be able to resolve each issue to everyone’s satisfaction. I think that even in worlds where we did everything quote-unquote “right” (in terms of fair treatment of each of the people involved, and the overall safety and functioning of the community), some people would be disappointed in how much we acted or what we did, and all the more so in worlds where we made mistakes. If you’d like to talk about the situation you were in, feel free to contact me as the manager of the team members handling situations like this; I’d be interested to hear your feedback (happy to do this anonymously, such as through the forum). Entirely understandable if you’d rather not, though, and I wish you all the best.
Pre-committing to not elaborating further, but I wanted to echo what is said in this comment and give a non-anonymous account as someone who (due to personal experience with reporting misconduct) also has similar feelings as KnitKnack.
Edit: I think Chana’s comment is helpful context i.e. it seems good if people’s expectations going in are calibrated to CEA CH’s position is that it is there to “address problems that could prevent the effective altruism community from fulfilling its potential for impact”.
In particular, they “don’t see pursuing justice as [their] mission” and “protecting people from bullies is sometimes a part of [their] work, and something [they’d] always like to be able to do, but it’s not [their] primary goal”.
On a personal note, my advice to people who are considering going to CEA CH is to keep this in mind. To the extent to which there is a trade-off between impact and justice, it may not resolve in a way that is “just” from your POV, and their work on interpersonal harm does take the talent bottleneck seriously e.g. you should probably think about what they perceive the potential impact of the perpetrator to be.
I really appreciate what you said about the community health team. I reported what I viewed as serious misconduct that they had jurisdiction over, and very little was done about it.
I trusted them based on what I understood to be their reputation. So it really broke me when, despite them saying they took my allegation seriously, they did not treat it as if they took it seriously. Their non-response was a massive contributor to what were some of the worst months of my life. I am still recovering.
That’s not to say anyone should completely write them off based on my account. I’m posting this anonymously with no details, and so there is absolutely no reason to trust my account of things. There is no reason to believe that I am perceiving the situation accurately/reasonably.
One piece of detail I’ll provide is that the nature of the misconduct involved repeated threats.
But I do wish people trusted them less. I think it could have saved me a lot of pain if I knew going in that they had a mixed reputation. If I had gone in with some uncertainty about how much I should have relied on them. I could have set better expectations.
Hi KnitKnack—I’m really sorry to hear you had a bad experience with the CH team, and that it contributed to some especially bad moments in your life. I totally endorse that people should have accurate expectations, which means that they should not expect we’ll always be able to resolve each issue to everyone’s satisfaction. I think that even in worlds where we did everything quote-unquote “right” (in terms of fair treatment of each of the people involved, and the overall safety and functioning of the community), some people would be disappointed in how much we acted or what we did, and all the more so in worlds where we made mistakes. If you’d like to talk about the situation you were in, feel free to contact me as the manager of the team members handling situations like this; I’d be interested to hear your feedback (happy to do this anonymously, such as through the forum). Entirely understandable if you’d rather not, though, and I wish you all the best.
Pre-committing to not elaborating further, but I wanted to echo what is said in this comment and give a non-anonymous account as someone who (due to personal experience with reporting misconduct) also has similar feelings as KnitKnack.
Edit: I think Chana’s comment is helpful context i.e. it seems good if people’s expectations going in are calibrated to CEA CH’s position is that it is there to “address problems that could prevent the effective altruism community from fulfilling its potential for impact”.
In particular, they “don’t see pursuing justice as [their] mission” and “protecting people from bullies is sometimes a part of [their] work, and something [they’d] always like to be able to do, but it’s not [their] primary goal”.
On a personal note, my advice to people who are considering going to CEA CH is to keep this in mind. To the extent to which there is a trade-off between impact and justice, it may not resolve in a way that is “just” from your POV, and their work on interpersonal harm does take the talent bottleneck seriously e.g. you should probably think about what they perceive the potential impact of the perpetrator to be.