Makes sense, thanks again. One small nitpick on re-reading your last message:
I do think giving Michael a small speculation grant budget ($200k initially) seems reasonable, and the speculation grant program includes a lot of people and I think includes a lot of people who I wouldn’t think of as being involved in the EA community at all.
I think I’d appreciate some clarification around your thought process around what kind of monetary value is acceptable for Michael (similar question for Jacy here).
I guess I get the sense that letting Michael act as a grantor is bad e.g. because of the signaling effects that SFF is willing to overlook someone’s history of sexual harassment/assault etc, and not because the money will necessarily be poorly spent. Whereas you think 50k to Jacy is reasonable and 200k to Michael as a grantor is reasonable because it’s sufficiently small that this effect doesn’t matter? I basically don’t follow, and I’d be interested in hearing more about your reasoning, if you’re happy to clarify!
I guess I get the sense that letting Michael act as a grantor is bad e.g. because of the signaling effects that SFF is willing to overlook someone’s history of sexual harassment/assault etc, and not because the money will necessarily be poorly spent. Whereas you think 50k to Jacy is reasonable and 200k to Michael as a grantor is reasonable because it’s sufficiently small that this effect doesn’t matter? I basically don’t follow, and I’d be interested in hearing more about your reasoning, if you’re happy to clarify!
I mean, I don’t think it makes sense to force everyone even vaguely nearby in the EA social network to defer to some EA consensus about who it is OK to engage with vs. not. I think it’s important that people can somehow signal “I don’t want my actions to be taken as an endorsement of the EA community, please don’t try to interpret my actions as trying very hard to reflect the EA consensus ”. The SFF has tried to do this in a lot of its writing and communications, and I think it’s pretty important for people to be able to do that somehow.
I also think it’s really important for grantmakers to somehow communicate that a grant from them is not a broad endorsement of all aspects of a project. This is actually frequently a huge obstacle to good grantmaking and there are all kinds of grants that things like the LTFF and OpenPhil and other grantmakers are averse to making because the grant would somehow inextricably come an endorsement of the whole organization or all individuals involved, and this prevents many good grants from happening.
Historically I have tried to fix this on the LTFF by just publishing my hesitations and concerns with individuals and organizations when I recommended them a grant, but that is a lot of work. It also stresses a lot of people out and gets you a lot of pushback, so I don’t think this is currently a solution that people can just adopt tomorrow (though I would love for more people to do this).
I do also think that $50k is really not very much, and also the grant isn’t “to Jacy”, but to an organization that Jacy is involved in, which I think reduces potential harm by another factor of 2-3 or so. I personally quite disliked this grant, and think it’s a bad grant, but I don’t think it’s a grant that I feel actually causes much harm. It just seems like a bad use of money that maybe causes a few thousand expected dollars in negative externalities.
There are grants that I would have paid serious money to prevent (like some historical grants to Leverage Research), but this is not one of them, and I think I would update a bit downwards on the judgement of a process that produces grants like this, but not much more.
On the other hand, I think the $200k speculation grant budget to Michael is actually a good idea, though definitely a high-variance choice and I could totally be convinced it’s a bad idea. $200k as a regrantor is just really not very much (I think substantially less power than $50k of direct funding, for example), and as far as I can tell the grants he recommended were extremely unlikely to cause any problems in terms of weird power dynamics or pressure (I don’t feel comfortable going into details since speculation grant info is private, but I do think I can share my overall assessment as these grants having been very unlikely to give rise to any undue pressure).
I do think this is a reasonable thing to worry about. I also think Michael is exactly the kind of person who has in the past suggested projects and perspectives that have been extremely valuable to me, and I think giving him some money to highlight more of those is totally a worthwhile investment. If I was doing something like giving him a speculation grant budget, I do think I would probably take some kind of precaution and block some grants that look maybe like they would involve weird power-dynamics, but it doesn’t look like it ever came to this, so it’s hard for me to tell what process might have been in place.
I also separately just want to iterate my own personal epistemic state, which is that I haven’t heard of any credible allegations of sexual abuse for Michael. I personally find being around him quite stressful, I know many people who have had bad experiences with him, and he seems very manipulative in a ton of different ways, but I do want to distinguish this from the specific ground truth of sexual abuse and assault. As I said before, I don’t currently want him to be part of my community or the Effective Altruism community more broadly.
I might totally be missing something, and if Michael was more closely involved in the community and would pose more of a direct risk, I would probably spend the (very considerable) effort investigating this in more detail, and I would currently be happy for someone else to investigate this in more detail and share as much as they can, but I also don’t currently have the personal capacity with all my other responsibilities to investigate this much further (and my guess is the community health team also thinks there is no immediate urgent need given that he is really not very involved in community things these days).
I do want to avoid contributing to an information cascade that somehow updates on there being tons of confirmed evidence of sexual assault for someone, when at least I haven’t seen that evidence. The only evidence I know of are these two tweet threads by a person named Jax (who I don’t know), and in that tweet thread they also say a bunch of stuff that seems really extremely likely to be false to me, or extremely likely to lack a ton of relevant crucial context, so that I don’t consider those allegations to be sufficient for me to update me very much.
Again, there is totally a chance I am missing information here, and I have my own evidence (unrelated to any sexual abuse or assault stuff) that makes me not want Michael be involved in the EA and Rationality community more than he currently is, and if other people have additional evidence I would love to see it, since this does seem at least somewhat important.
IIRC, Jax is Bryk is the one who made up the “math pets” allegation against me, which hopefully everyone knows to be false. I don’t know anything about the state of the rest of the allegations against Michael, but if I’m recalling correctly that Jax is that particular known-false-accuser, we probably want to subtract anything from Jax and then evaluate the rest of the list.
I strong upvoted this because it’s a great comment, with a lot of good info and perspective on grantmaking, but I would push back on the idea that there aren’t “credible allegations of sexual abuse against Michael”. Or, I wonder where you draw the line at defining “sexual abuse”? You yourself appear to admit he is troubling, and when in a relationship that can so easily just become sexual abuse, sexual gaslighting, sexually demeaning statements, etc. It’s not like “sexual behavior” is a protected category. It’s just another type of behavior. Sure it’s a very special type of behavior that is attached very strongly to the buttons for dopamine, power, self esteem, and pleasure, but that doesn’t make it special for an abusive personality type of person such that they would necessarily put a gate up in their minds around it… it makes it more likely they press that button. Especially once in relationship, it’s important to remember sexual misconduct is not rare, for some portion of people (and it sounds like vassar is highly likely to be one of these), who suck at relating to others (like suck so hard it becomes abuse), sexual conduct is just another way to relate, and that poor (abusively poor) sexual relating can be very common for such people.
Whether or not their relationship was even 2-way toxic, it doesn’t excuse sexual abuse so I am not sure I can think of a lot of context that makes up for it.
But anyway I agree with you that he shouldn’t be in community anyway. It;s weird that for so many people sexual abuse would be the breaking point they want absolutely confirmed or denied, when actually there are a lot worse things someone can do before that. I do kinda wonder if people near him should run an intervention though, that unless he seek help for anger issues and other personality issues (did you know there are meds to reduce angry outburts? plus of course other treatments you prob know about, CBT, DBT, etc) and make detialed apologies and accountings of his wrngdoings and accusations til that point, they will cut ties. Like, that would be the agentic option if friends with someone like that. I don’t get it. He is probably financially privileged so why can’t he use his money to try to fix his issues? Red flag he isn’t, or if he has he needs to do a public update to that effect, and what issues he is still struggling with (broken brain is real and maybe permanent but like it’s better to admit than people think you don’t care to try). Given his prominence in these discussions it is just insane that he has not done something like that. I would steer clear even personally tbh, but of course, I’m a woman so I expect he would scoff at me and mistreat me at any slip of mine which is not right.
Separate from the harassment accusations, Jacy (and ACE while he was there, where I expect he had influence but far from unilateral control) had a bunch of criticisms of their work I would also want addressed before I gave money to an org founded and run by Jacy and his spouse.
Totally. As I said in another comment, I think the grant was bad, but lots of grants made from the EA community are (in my opinion) pretty bad. It doesn’t feel like the kind of decision that makes me go and try to actively stop someone from doing it.
I’m also curious about the thinking on this. By having Michael act as a grantor, SFF isn’t just overlooking his history of sexual misconduct. It is also potentially enabling further misconduct, since it is giving him power and he has a track record of abusing power.
Makes sense, thanks again. One small nitpick on re-reading your last message:
I think I’d appreciate some clarification around your thought process around what kind of monetary value is acceptable for Michael (similar question for Jacy here).
I guess I get the sense that letting Michael act as a grantor is bad e.g. because of the signaling effects that SFF is willing to overlook someone’s history of sexual harassment/assault etc, and not because the money will necessarily be poorly spent. Whereas you think 50k to Jacy is reasonable and 200k to Michael as a grantor is reasonable because it’s sufficiently small that this effect doesn’t matter? I basically don’t follow, and I’d be interested in hearing more about your reasoning, if you’re happy to clarify!
I mean, I don’t think it makes sense to force everyone even vaguely nearby in the EA social network to defer to some EA consensus about who it is OK to engage with vs. not. I think it’s important that people can somehow signal “I don’t want my actions to be taken as an endorsement of the EA community, please don’t try to interpret my actions as trying very hard to reflect the EA consensus ”. The SFF has tried to do this in a lot of its writing and communications, and I think it’s pretty important for people to be able to do that somehow.
I also think it’s really important for grantmakers to somehow communicate that a grant from them is not a broad endorsement of all aspects of a project. This is actually frequently a huge obstacle to good grantmaking and there are all kinds of grants that things like the LTFF and OpenPhil and other grantmakers are averse to making because the grant would somehow inextricably come an endorsement of the whole organization or all individuals involved, and this prevents many good grants from happening.
Historically I have tried to fix this on the LTFF by just publishing my hesitations and concerns with individuals and organizations when I recommended them a grant, but that is a lot of work. It also stresses a lot of people out and gets you a lot of pushback, so I don’t think this is currently a solution that people can just adopt tomorrow (though I would love for more people to do this).
I do also think that $50k is really not very much, and also the grant isn’t “to Jacy”, but to an organization that Jacy is involved in, which I think reduces potential harm by another factor of 2-3 or so. I personally quite disliked this grant, and think it’s a bad grant, but I don’t think it’s a grant that I feel actually causes much harm. It just seems like a bad use of money that maybe causes a few thousand expected dollars in negative externalities.
There are grants that I would have paid serious money to prevent (like some historical grants to Leverage Research), but this is not one of them, and I think I would update a bit downwards on the judgement of a process that produces grants like this, but not much more.
On the other hand, I think the $200k speculation grant budget to Michael is actually a good idea, though definitely a high-variance choice and I could totally be convinced it’s a bad idea. $200k as a regrantor is just really not very much (I think substantially less power than $50k of direct funding, for example), and as far as I can tell the grants he recommended were extremely unlikely to cause any problems in terms of weird power dynamics or pressure (I don’t feel comfortable going into details since speculation grant info is private, but I do think I can share my overall assessment as these grants having been very unlikely to give rise to any undue pressure).
I do think this is a reasonable thing to worry about. I also think Michael is exactly the kind of person who has in the past suggested projects and perspectives that have been extremely valuable to me, and I think giving him some money to highlight more of those is totally a worthwhile investment. If I was doing something like giving him a speculation grant budget, I do think I would probably take some kind of precaution and block some grants that look maybe like they would involve weird power-dynamics, but it doesn’t look like it ever came to this, so it’s hard for me to tell what process might have been in place.
I also separately just want to iterate my own personal epistemic state, which is that I haven’t heard of any credible allegations of sexual abuse for Michael. I personally find being around him quite stressful, I know many people who have had bad experiences with him, and he seems very manipulative in a ton of different ways, but I do want to distinguish this from the specific ground truth of sexual abuse and assault. As I said before, I don’t currently want him to be part of my community or the Effective Altruism community more broadly.
I might totally be missing something, and if Michael was more closely involved in the community and would pose more of a direct risk, I would probably spend the (very considerable) effort investigating this in more detail, and I would currently be happy for someone else to investigate this in more detail and share as much as they can, but I also don’t currently have the personal capacity with all my other responsibilities to investigate this much further (and my guess is the community health team also thinks there is no immediate urgent need given that he is really not very involved in community things these days).
I do want to avoid contributing to an information cascade that somehow updates on there being tons of confirmed evidence of sexual assault for someone, when at least I haven’t seen that evidence. The only evidence I know of are these two tweet threads by a person named Jax (who I don’t know), and in that tweet thread they also say a bunch of stuff that seems really extremely likely to be false to me, or extremely likely to lack a ton of relevant crucial context, so that I don’t consider those allegations to be sufficient for me to update me very much.
Again, there is totally a chance I am missing information here, and I have my own evidence (unrelated to any sexual abuse or assault stuff) that makes me not want Michael be involved in the EA and Rationality community more than he currently is, and if other people have additional evidence I would love to see it, since this does seem at least somewhat important.
IIRC, Jax is Bryk is the one who made up the “math pets” allegation against me, which hopefully everyone knows to be false. I don’t know anything about the state of the rest of the allegations against Michael, but if I’m recalling correctly that Jax is that particular known-false-accuser, we probably want to subtract anything from Jax and then evaluate the rest of the list.
I strong upvoted this because it’s a great comment, with a lot of good info and perspective on grantmaking, but I would push back on the idea that there aren’t “credible allegations of sexual abuse against Michael”. Or, I wonder where you draw the line at defining “sexual abuse”? You yourself appear to admit he is troubling, and when in a relationship that can so easily just become sexual abuse, sexual gaslighting, sexually demeaning statements, etc. It’s not like “sexual behavior” is a protected category. It’s just another type of behavior. Sure it’s a very special type of behavior that is attached very strongly to the buttons for dopamine, power, self esteem, and pleasure, but that doesn’t make it special for an abusive personality type of person such that they would necessarily put a gate up in their minds around it… it makes it more likely they press that button. Especially once in relationship, it’s important to remember sexual misconduct is not rare, for some portion of people (and it sounds like vassar is highly likely to be one of these), who suck at relating to others (like suck so hard it becomes abuse), sexual conduct is just another way to relate, and that poor (abusively poor) sexual relating can be very common for such people.
Whether or not their relationship was even 2-way toxic, it doesn’t excuse sexual abuse so I am not sure I can think of a lot of context that makes up for it.
But anyway I agree with you that he shouldn’t be in community anyway. It;s weird that for so many people sexual abuse would be the breaking point they want absolutely confirmed or denied, when actually there are a lot worse things someone can do before that. I do kinda wonder if people near him should run an intervention though, that unless he seek help for anger issues and other personality issues (did you know there are meds to reduce angry outburts? plus of course other treatments you prob know about, CBT, DBT, etc) and make detialed apologies and accountings of his wrngdoings and accusations til that point, they will cut ties. Like, that would be the agentic option if friends with someone like that. I don’t get it. He is probably financially privileged so why can’t he use his money to try to fix his issues? Red flag he isn’t, or if he has he needs to do a public update to that effect, and what issues he is still struggling with (broken brain is real and maybe permanent but like it’s better to admit than people think you don’t care to try). Given his prominence in these discussions it is just insane that he has not done something like that. I would steer clear even personally tbh, but of course, I’m a woman so I expect he would scoff at me and mistreat me at any slip of mine which is not right.
Separate from the harassment accusations, Jacy (and ACE while he was there, where I expect he had influence but far from unilateral control) had a bunch of criticisms of their work I would also want addressed before I gave money to an org founded and run by Jacy and his spouse.
Totally. As I said in another comment, I think the grant was bad, but lots of grants made from the EA community are (in my opinion) pretty bad. It doesn’t feel like the kind of decision that makes me go and try to actively stop someone from doing it.
I’m also curious about the thinking on this. By having Michael act as a grantor, SFF isn’t just overlooking his history of sexual misconduct. It is also potentially enabling further misconduct, since it is giving him power and he has a track record of abusing power.