Justice is incredibly hard; doing justice while also being part of a community, while trying to filter false accusations and thereby not let the community turn on itself, is one of the hardest tasks I can think of. So I don’t expect disbanding CH to improve justice, particularly since you yourself have shown the job to be exhausting and ambiguous at best. You have, though, rightly received gratitude and praise—which they don’t often, maybe just because we don’t often praise people for doing their jobs. I hope the net effect of your work is to inspire people to speak up.
The data on their performance is profoundly censored. You simply will not hear about all the times CH satisfied a complainant, judged risk correctly, detected a confabulator, or pre-empted a scandal through warnings or bans. What denominator are you using? What standard should we hold them to? You seem to have chosen “being above suspicion” and “catching all bullies”.
It makes sense for people who have been hurt to be distrustful of nearby authorities, and obviously a CH team which isn’t trusted can’t do its job. But just to generate some further common knowledge and meliorate a distrust cascade: I trust CH quite a lot. Every time I’ve reported something to them they’ve surprised me with the amount of skill they put in, hours per case. (EDIT: Clarified that I’ve seen them work actual cases.)
Yeah, I think it is actually incredibly easy to undervalue CH, particularly if people don’t regularly interact with it or make use of them rather than just having a single anecdata to go off of. So much of what I do in the community (everything from therapy to mediation to teaching at the camps) is made easier by Community Health, and no one knows about any of it because why would they? I guess I should make a post to highlight this.
I mostly don’t like the ‘justice’ process involved in other cases insofar as it is primarily secret and hidden. I don’t think it’s much of a justice system where you often don’t know the accusations against you or why you’re being punished.
The data on negative performance is also profoundly censored! I am not sure why you think this makes this more likely to make me update positively on the process involved.
I am pro having some surveys of people’s general attitudes toward CEA Community Health. Questions like “Have you ever reported an issue to them” and “To your knowledge have you been investigated by the CEA Community Health team” and “How much do you trust CEA Community Health team to protect the EA ecosystem from bad behavior” and “How much do you trust CEA Community Health team to respect you if you go to them” and “For how many years have you been involved in the EA ecosystem”. I think that would clear up this question substantially.
Fwiw, seems like the positive performance is more censored in expectation than the negative performance: while a case that CH handled poorly could either be widely discussed or never heard about again, I’m struggling to think of how we’d all hear about a case that they handled well, since part of handling it well likely involves the thing not escalating into a big deal and respecting people’s requests for anonymity and privacy.
It does seem like a big drawback that the accused don’t know the details of the accusations, but it also seems like there are obvious tradeoffs here, and it would make sense for this to be very different from the criminal justice system given the difference in punishments (loss of professional and financial opportunities and social status vs. actual prison time).
With regards to 2: There is some information CH has made public about how many cases they handle and what actions they take. In a 12 month period around 2021, they handled 19 cases of interpersonal harm. Anonymized summaries of the cases and actions taken are available in the appendix of this post. They ranged from serious:
A person applied to EA Global who had previously been reported for deliberately physically endangering another community member, sending them threatening messages, and more. Written correspondence between the people appears to confirm this. I discussed with both of them separately, and told the person they cannot come to CEA events including EA Global.
to out of scope:
A community member asked for help in publicly documenting various bad things people outside EA have done to them. I explained I don’t have capacity to help with this.
I did some more research and 20 complaints a year of varying severity is typical, according to what Julia Wise told TIME magazine for their article:
Wise, whose role at CEA involves overseeing community well-being, tells TIME she has fielded roughly 20 complaints per year in her seven years on the job, ranging from uncomfortable comments to more serious allegations of harassment and more. But with no official leadership structure, no roster of who is and isn’t in the movement, and no formal process for dealing with complaints, Wise argues, it’s hard to gauge how common such issues are within EA compared to broader society.
The closing remarks about CH seem off to me.
Justice is incredibly hard; doing justice while also being part of a community, while trying to filter false accusations and thereby not let the community turn on itself, is one of the hardest tasks I can think of.
So I don’t expect disbanding CH to improve justice, particularly since you yourself have shown the job to be exhausting and ambiguous at best.
You have, though, rightly received gratitude and praise—which they don’t often, maybe just because we don’t often praise people for doing their jobs. I hope the net effect of your work is to inspire people to speak up.
The data on their performance is profoundly censored. You simply will not hear about all the times CH satisfied a complainant, judged risk correctly, detected a confabulator, or pre-empted a scandal through warnings or bans. What denominator are you using? What standard should we hold them to? You seem to have chosen “being above suspicion” and “catching all bullies”.
It makes sense for people who have been hurt to be distrustful of nearby authorities, and obviously a CH team which isn’t trusted can’t do its job. But just to generate some further common knowledge and meliorate a distrust cascade: I trust CH quite a lot. Every time I’ve reported something to them they’ve surprised me with the amount of skill they put in, hours per case. (EDIT: Clarified that I’ve seen them work actual cases.)
Yeah, I think it is actually incredibly easy to undervalue CH, particularly if people don’t regularly interact with it or make use of them rather than just having a single anecdata to go off of. So much of what I do in the community (everything from therapy to mediation to teaching at the camps) is made easier by Community Health, and no one knows about any of it because why would they? I guess I should make a post to highlight this.
Some brief reactions:
I mostly don’t like the ‘justice’ process involved in other cases insofar as it is primarily secret and hidden. I don’t think it’s much of a justice system where you often don’t know the accusations against you or why you’re being punished.
The data on negative performance is also profoundly censored! I am not sure why you think this makes this more likely to make me update positively on the process involved.
I am pro having some surveys of people’s general attitudes toward CEA Community Health. Questions like “Have you ever reported an issue to them” and “To your knowledge have you been investigated by the CEA Community Health team” and “How much do you trust CEA Community Health team to protect the EA ecosystem from bad behavior” and “How much do you trust CEA Community Health team to respect you if you go to them” and “For how many years have you been involved in the EA ecosystem”. I think that would clear up this question substantially.
Fwiw, seems like the positive performance is more censored in expectation than the negative performance: while a case that CH handled poorly could either be widely discussed or never heard about again, I’m struggling to think of how we’d all hear about a case that they handled well, since part of handling it well likely involves the thing not escalating into a big deal and respecting people’s requests for anonymity and privacy.
It does seem like a big drawback that the accused don’t know the details of the accusations, but it also seems like there are obvious tradeoffs here, and it would make sense for this to be very different from the criminal justice system given the difference in punishments (loss of professional and financial opportunities and social status vs. actual prison time).
Agreed that a survey seems really good.
With regards to 2: There is some information CH has made public about how many cases they handle and what actions they take. In a 12 month period around 2021, they handled 19 cases of interpersonal harm. Anonymized summaries of the cases and actions taken are available in the appendix of this post. They ranged from serious:
to out of scope:
Oh great, thanks. I would guess that these discrete cases form a minority of their work, but hopefully someone with actual knowledge can confirm.
I did some more research and 20 complaints a year of varying severity is typical, according to what Julia Wise told TIME magazine for their article: