Do you have details of his college expulsion and accusations? I honestly couldn’t find them. After going through the whole discussion of his apology I could only find his own letter about it from 10 years prior saying it was an incorrect expulsion and also someone linked some other cases of Brown doing a poor job on sexual misconduct cases: IIRC other courts deemed that the brown committee mishandled cases of students accused of sexual misconduct. It appears in one case (not necessarily Jacy’s but I’ve seen this happen myself elsewhere, so I’d actually bet more likely than not that if it was allowed to happen one time it happened in Jacy’s case too) that the students had banded together and written letters of unsubstantiated rumors to the Brown committee (eg, assuming what they’d heard in the gossip mill to be true and then trying to make sure the committee “knew” the unsubstantiated rumors, perhaps stating them as fact not even relaying how they had heard it), and then the Brown committee actually did use the letters as evidence in the University tribunal. The actual US court said that Brown, in doing this, went against due process. To reiterate, that was another Brown case not Jacy’s, but I’d like to hear what actually happened in Jacy’scase if we were to count an offense from 10 years ago (which I now think CEA also mostly did not).
I’m really not trying to defend Jacy here. Actually after reading more and someone even DMed to have a conversation, I do expect he did worse than mentioned in his apology but that any victim won’t go public so those of us on the outside will never know for sure. But I’d also like to exhibit why I didn’t much discuss the college expulsion, and I still won’t jump the gun that, whatever he did, it necessarily deserved expulsion because it looks like Brown at that time may have been both incredibly bad at handling such cases and incredibly rife with rumor mill.
Plus it was still 10 years ago, and as I said elsewhere he has been punished (possibly overpunished) for that. I know that punishment might not assuage concerns of safety (I’ve been repeatedly surprised that questions of rehabilitation and self improvement have been so missing from the discussion of him, like no one seems to care that he also sent apologies directly to the women and also no one has wondered if there is a way he could make it up to the community via self-improvement efforts, although I don’t think he has focused on this), but to me safety is the important thing. I guess I’m still unsure what safety level to put Jacy at in my mind today even if I’m becoming more sure he did some troubling things left out of his apology in his past.
In pushing back on bringing up the college thing, I see myself not as defending Jacy, but as pushing back on an instinct to trust decisions of others, which might lead us into unwarranted disgust reactions and type-casting, which, to me, gets in the way of figuring out what matters about his presence, which, to me, is how safe he is to have around today (10 years after the expulsion).
I know that some people don’t find his work the most worth doing/granting to, but some people do, and if it is worth doing, his actual safety would be worth figuring out and making transparent.
(That said, as I conclude here, I’m now more interested in what is going on upstream, as to why this is so hard to figure out)
[Additional Reflection: I wish potential granters or collaborators of Jacy would speak to the women (maybe CEA would put them in contact?), and see what they think. While I don’t think their perspectives should be “the be all end all”, I find myself really wishing I could defer to their thoughts today about concrete actions like grantmaking given the passage of time. There are cases in my own life regarding men who I’ve had complaints about, where I would continue to have concerns about safety and I’d want others to act as though he is still a risk (forever or for some very long amount of time). But there are also other cases, from my own experience as a victim, where depending on the person’s evident growth, I might say, “I think it’s been long enough and it’s probably okay now”.
If I were a potential collaborator with Jacy I’d personally be very reluctant to assume that victims and people in the know feel the former or the latter, which in my case would mean I’d dig deeperwith the EA Community Health Team. I’d also feel frustrated and concerned if I couldn’t find out more, and probably not grant but feel there was some informational injustice occurring. I hope that CEAs processes allow for thorough understanding by well-meaning parties who need the info, and even potential requests to be put in contact with the victims respectfully. If SFF did not go looking for opportunities to thoroughly check things, I do find that troubling/risky/bad of SFF.
But if systems are not in place for that, I’m not sure we can expect potential collaborative actors such as SFF to just trust nontransparent decisions for the rest of time. It will depend on the case as to exactly how long, but after some amount of time without more complaints we should expect the scales for actors who would otherwise collaborate with past-accused to sort of tip against trusting the old nontransparent decision. They will at some point put much higher probability that it is not relevant to decisions they are faced with today. There will also, simultaneously, begin a period of time where people who view the old decision with different credences get upset at those whose scales tipped toward disregarding the old decision sooner than their own scales lead them too. This means there will be division and some predictable social unrest, until enough time has passed that basically everyone is ready to make peace with/disregard the nontransparent case (which may take 50 years idk). This is a bug of the world which will occur within communities of good people, because communities of good people still put different credences on things. It is not fully- mitigated by people trying to be “better” so it has to be fixed on a system level.
Since I started this topic of checking in about Jacy, I’m becoming more sure that Jacy did some serious things, but I’m also becoming less sure we can judge actors like SFF for attempting to collaborate anyway in cases of non-transparency. Jeff K just wrote a good and short piece about this a couple days ago. I see 4 possible cases here:
“The Community Health Team does not have adequate systems for potential collaborators to doublecheck if actors like Jacy are okay to collaborate with today.”
If this is true it implies that systems should be put in place around crosschecking, because with time we should expect people’s will to keep ostracizing to degrade, and this might otherwise mean too-soon reintroduction of the accused.
IMO this should include asking victims, at time of reporting, if people who might need the info can contact them and noting this.
I think it would also include ethically informing victims that without coming forward publically OR offering corroboration in private, that after some time has passed their claims may be discounted, not fully-discounted, despite the CH team’s best efforts. I would want to be informed of this “bug of social reality” when reporting so I can be informed going in of what might happen and make the decision I think is best.
“The CH Team does have systems for ensuring those who need to crosscheck info and plans can do so, but this isn’t well-enough-known, such that SFF didn’t use it because they didn’t realize they could.”
This would imply more publication of this option is needed
This should include mandating that “crosschecking is an option for potential collaborators in need” be attached to any public apology made after a CH Team investigation, like Jacy’s apology.
“The CH Team does have adequate systems for ensuring those who need to crosscheck info and plans can do so, and SFF knew they could use CH Team systems for doublechecking Jacy’s safety, but SFF didn’t use it because [they didn’t think it was worth it or want to or something like that.]”
This would reflect very badly on SFF management and they should be reprimanded and coached to do better, at a minimum (even if SFF is not technically EA if they are making decisions that put EAs at risk, PR-wise and safety-wise, we should try to prompt them to do better).
“The CH Team does have adequate systems for ensuring those who need the info and plans can do so, and SFF did so and determined that Jacy was safe to work with”
If this is the case, I would want to see it noted in SFF’s grant report and a few details.
I’m pretty sure multiple of these possibilities can be ruled out by the people in the know, or even random people who do a little digging, but I’m burned out on it for now.
First, I want to broadly agree that distant information is less valuable, and no one should be judged by their college behavior forever. I learned about the Brown accusation (with some additional information, that I lack permission to pass on, and also don’t know the source well enough to pass it on) in 2016 and did nothing beyond talking to the person and passing it on to Julia*, specifically because I didn’t want a few bad choices while young to haunt someone forever.
[*It’s been a while, I can’t remember whether I told Julia or encouraged the other person to do so, but she got told one way or another]
The reason I think the college accusations are relevant is that, while I tentatively agree he shouldn’t face more consequences for the college accusations, they definitely speak to Ariel’s claim there’s been no recidivism, and in general they shift my probability distribution over what he was apologizing for.
I don’t necessarily think these concerns should have prevented the grant, or that SFF has an obligation to explain to me why they gave the grant. I wouldn’t have made that grant, for lots of reasons, but that’s fine, and I generally think the EA community acts too entitled around private grantmakers.
But I do think that confidently asserting that the only thing Jacy did was “ask some people out over FB messenger” is likely inaccurate, and it is important to track that. It might be accurate to say “the only thing he has been publicly accused of is asking people out” or “the only thing he has admitted to is asking people out” or “No one has provided any proof he did anything beyond ask people out”, but none of those are the same as “the only thing he did is ask people out”.
Or there could have been new information I missed, which is why I phrased it as a question.
I’m leaving a lot of your comment unresponded to because I think you’re refuting the claim that the college accusations mean Jacy shouldn’t have gotten the SFF grant, and I agree with that and never meant to imply otherwise. I just want to separately track what Jacy actually did, and what has been publicly acknowledged. Rereading the thread now I see why it didn’t come across that way; I’m pretty sure I read Ariel’s comment in the front page feed without realizing it was a response to something else.
I think that most of your comment is reasonable, so I’m only going to respond to the second-to-last paragraph. Because that is the bit that critiques my comment, my response is going to sound defensive. But I agree with everything else, and I also think what went on with my original comment leads back into what I see as the actual crux, so it’s worth me saying what’s on my mind:
But I do think that confidently asserting that the only thing Jacy did was “ask some people out over FB messenger” is likely inaccurate, and it is important to track that. It might be accurate to say “the only thing he has been publicly accused of is asking people out” or “the only thing he has admitted to is asking people out” or “No one has provided any proof he did anything beyond ask people out”, but none of those are the same as “the only thing he did is ask people out”.
I have long ago edited the original comment where I wrote that. I didn’t change that particular wording because I wrote the original on mobile (which I deeply regretted and am now incredibly averse to) so I didn’t have fancy strikethrough edit features, even when I tried on PC (I didn’t realize it worked like that). Without strikethrough ability, I thought it would be epistemically dishonest to just edit that sentence. Instead I promptly, right after that sentence, told people to make their conclusions elsewhere in a way that I feel clearly tells readers to take that part with a grain of salt. All in all I edited that comment ~5 times. I don’t have the spoons to re-edit again given I think it’s fine.
More importantly, the transparency of info is obviously a problem if someone like me who usually tries to be pretty airtight on EA Forum things had to edit so much going back and forth from “here’s a thing” to “maybe he did worse” to “maybe he did less” to “maybe he did worse” again. That’s not okay. And now I feel like I’m getting punished for trying to do what no other outsider of the case was willing to try to do (that I saw)… figure out the ground truth [and what it means for EA behavior] publicly.
Honestly trying to figure out what happened regarding Jacy was a heckin nightmare with people coming out of left field about it after each correction I tried to make, including over DM (again not publicly), and giving multiple comments to comb through on multiple other posts and with their own attached threads. It’s good people chimed in sharing the existence of different pieces of discussion/info that I’d guess hardly any single person knew every single bit of, but damn, I have to be honest that I’m now really frustrated about what a nightmare it was. I was trying to do a public service and it was a huge waste of time with little to glean for certain. [And some of the more interesting bits are not public and I feel very, very weird about that, even saying that I now know of (know of, not know for certain) stuff others don’t and can’t find out about (I can’t even doublecheck myself).]
Was that always the expected outcome just lurking underneath the surface? If so then why would people judge SFF? I’m no longer surprised SFF just granted tbh. They saved themselves the time I wasted. I no longer expect any single person to get it right and I see that as a problem worth talking about becausethat will lead to either (1) actually-abusive people getting involvement sooner which is a safety risk, or (2) appearing-abusive-but-actually-non-abusive people getting involvement sooner which is a PR-risk and comfort risk.
I apologize for fucking up. I am now frustrated at myself for even trying. But if people other than me care about my messed up original comment they need to look at the systems because other people will fuck up as I did. It just won’t be public til after the decision is made, if ever. And you won’t get to correct them as they make their fumbles along the way.
I’m sorry. it sounds like you’ve taken a lot of flak for that comment, and having had that same experience I know it’s miserable. FWIW I was never responding to or criticizing your comment, only Ariel’s. Probably I saw it in the front page feed without checking the larger context. Or I only skimmed your comment and didn’t notice he was repeating a claim.
Plausibly I’m culpable for not noticing it was a repeated claim rather than original. Maybe the way comments are displayed on the front page with minimal context contributed.
It’s all I’m aware of, to the extent of my knowledge. I’m unfamiliar with the accusations against him in college, and could retract my above comment if given sufficient evidence.
Is that what happened? It’s never been made public, and the accusations against him in college were much more serious.
Do you have details of his college expulsion and accusations? I honestly couldn’t find them. After going through the whole discussion of his apology I could only find his own letter about it from 10 years prior saying it was an incorrect expulsion and also someone linked some other cases of Brown doing a poor job on sexual misconduct cases: IIRC other courts deemed that the brown committee mishandled cases of students accused of sexual misconduct. It appears in one case (not necessarily Jacy’s but I’ve seen this happen myself elsewhere, so I’d actually bet more likely than not that if it was allowed to happen one time it happened in Jacy’s case too) that the students had banded together and written letters of unsubstantiated rumors to the Brown committee (eg, assuming what they’d heard in the gossip mill to be true and then trying to make sure the committee “knew” the unsubstantiated rumors, perhaps stating them as fact not even relaying how they had heard it), and then the Brown committee actually did use the letters as evidence in the University tribunal. The actual US court said that Brown, in doing this, went against due process. To reiterate, that was another Brown case not Jacy’s, but I’d like to hear what actually happened in Jacy’s case if we were to count an offense from 10 years ago (which I now think CEA also mostly did not).
I’m really not trying to defend Jacy here. Actually after reading more and someone even DMed to have a conversation, I do expect he did worse than mentioned in his apology but that any victim won’t go public so those of us on the outside will never know for sure. But I’d also like to exhibit why I didn’t much discuss the college expulsion, and I still won’t jump the gun that, whatever he did, it necessarily deserved expulsion because it looks like Brown at that time may have been both incredibly bad at handling such cases and incredibly rife with rumor mill.
Plus it was still 10 years ago, and as I said elsewhere he has been punished (possibly overpunished) for that. I know that punishment might not assuage concerns of safety (I’ve been repeatedly surprised that questions of rehabilitation and self improvement have been so missing from the discussion of him, like no one seems to care that he also sent apologies directly to the women and also no one has wondered if there is a way he could make it up to the community via self-improvement efforts, although I don’t think he has focused on this), but to me safety is the important thing. I guess I’m still unsure what safety level to put Jacy at in my mind today even if I’m becoming more sure he did some troubling things left out of his apology in his past.
In pushing back on bringing up the college thing, I see myself not as defending Jacy, but as pushing back on an instinct to trust decisions of others, which might lead us into unwarranted disgust reactions and type-casting, which, to me, gets in the way of figuring out what matters about his presence, which, to me, is how safe he is to have around today (10 years after the expulsion).
I know that some people don’t find his work the most worth doing/granting to, but some people do, and if it is worth doing, his actual safety would be worth figuring out and making transparent.
(That said, as I conclude here, I’m now more interested in what is going on upstream, as to why this is so hard to figure out)
[Additional Reflection: I wish potential granters or collaborators of Jacy would speak to the women (maybe CEA would put them in contact?), and see what they think. While I don’t think their perspectives should be “the be all end all”, I find myself really wishing I could defer to their thoughts today about concrete actions like grantmaking given the passage of time. There are cases in my own life regarding men who I’ve had complaints about, where I would continue to have concerns about safety and I’d want others to act as though he is still a risk (forever or for some very long amount of time). But there are also other cases, from my own experience as a victim, where depending on the person’s evident growth, I might say, “I think it’s been long enough and it’s probably okay now”.
If I were a potential collaborator with Jacy I’d personally be very reluctant to assume that victims and people in the know feel the former or the latter, which in my case would mean I’d dig deeper with the EA Community Health Team. I’d also feel frustrated and concerned if I couldn’t find out more, and probably not grant but feel there was some informational injustice occurring. I hope that CEAs processes allow for thorough understanding by well-meaning parties who need the info, and even potential requests to be put in contact with the victims respectfully. If SFF did not go looking for opportunities to thoroughly check things, I do find that troubling/risky/bad of SFF.
But if systems are not in place for that, I’m not sure we can expect potential collaborative actors such as SFF to just trust nontransparent decisions for the rest of time. It will depend on the case as to exactly how long, but after some amount of time without more complaints we should expect the scales for actors who would otherwise collaborate with past-accused to sort of tip against trusting the old nontransparent decision. They will at some point put much higher probability that it is not relevant to decisions they are faced with today. There will also, simultaneously, begin a period of time where people who view the old decision with different credences get upset at those whose scales tipped toward disregarding the old decision sooner than their own scales lead them too. This means there will be division and some predictable social unrest, until enough time has passed that basically everyone is ready to make peace with/disregard the nontransparent case (which may take 50 years idk). This is a bug of the world which will occur within communities of good people, because communities of good people still put different credences on things. It is not fully- mitigated by people trying to be “better” so it has to be fixed on a system level.
Since I started this topic of checking in about Jacy, I’m becoming more sure that Jacy did some serious things, but I’m also becoming less sure we can judge actors like SFF for attempting to collaborate anyway in cases of non-transparency. Jeff K just wrote a good and short piece about this a couple days ago. I see 4 possible cases here:
“The Community Health Team does not have adequate systems for potential collaborators to doublecheck if actors like Jacy are okay to collaborate with today.”
If this is true it implies that systems should be put in place around crosschecking, because with time we should expect people’s will to keep ostracizing to degrade, and this might otherwise mean too-soon reintroduction of the accused.
IMO this should include asking victims, at time of reporting, if people who might need the info can contact them and noting this.
I think it would also include ethically informing victims that without coming forward publically OR offering corroboration in private, that after some time has passed their claims may be discounted, not fully-discounted, despite the CH team’s best efforts. I would want to be informed of this “bug of social reality” when reporting so I can be informed going in of what might happen and make the decision I think is best.
“The CH Team does have systems for ensuring those who need to crosscheck info and plans can do so, but this isn’t well-enough-known, such that SFF didn’t use it because they didn’t realize they could.”
This would imply more publication of this option is needed
This should include mandating that “crosschecking is an option for potential collaborators in need” be attached to any public apology made after a CH Team investigation, like Jacy’s apology.
“The CH Team does have adequate systems for ensuring those who need to crosscheck info and plans can do so, and SFF knew they could use CH Team systems for doublechecking Jacy’s safety, but SFF didn’t use it because [they didn’t think it was worth it or want to or something like that.]”
This would reflect very badly on SFF management and they should be reprimanded and coached to do better, at a minimum (even if SFF is not technically EA if they are making decisions that put EAs at risk, PR-wise and safety-wise, we should try to prompt them to do better).
“The CH Team does have adequate systems for ensuring those who need the info and plans can do so, and SFF did so and determined that Jacy was safe to work with”
If this is the case, I would want to see it noted in SFF’s grant report and a few details.
I’m pretty sure multiple of these possibilities can be ruled out by the people in the know, or even random people who do a little digging, but I’m burned out on it for now.
First, I want to broadly agree that distant information is less valuable, and no one should be judged by their college behavior forever. I learned about the Brown accusation (with some additional information, that I lack permission to pass on, and also don’t know the source well enough to pass it on) in 2016 and did nothing beyond talking to the person and passing it on to Julia*, specifically because I didn’t want a few bad choices while young to haunt someone forever.
[*It’s been a while, I can’t remember whether I told Julia or encouraged the other person to do so, but she got told one way or another]
The reason I think the college accusations are relevant is that, while I tentatively agree he shouldn’t face more consequences for the college accusations, they definitely speak to Ariel’s claim there’s been no recidivism, and in general they shift my probability distribution over what he was apologizing for.
I don’t necessarily think these concerns should have prevented the grant, or that SFF has an obligation to explain to me why they gave the grant. I wouldn’t have made that grant, for lots of reasons, but that’s fine, and I generally think the EA community acts too entitled around private grantmakers.
But I do think that confidently asserting that the only thing Jacy did was “ask some people out over FB messenger” is likely inaccurate, and it is important to track that. It might be accurate to say “the only thing he has been publicly accused of is asking people out” or “the only thing he has admitted to is asking people out” or “No one has provided any proof he did anything beyond ask people out”, but none of those are the same as “the only thing he did is ask people out”.
Or there could have been new information I missed, which is why I phrased it as a question.
I’m leaving a lot of your comment unresponded to because I think you’re refuting the claim that the college accusations mean Jacy shouldn’t have gotten the SFF grant, and I agree with that and never meant to imply otherwise. I just want to separately track what Jacy actually did, and what has been publicly acknowledged. Rereading the thread now I see why it didn’t come across that way; I’m pretty sure I read Ariel’s comment in the front page feed without realizing it was a response to something else.
I think that most of your comment is reasonable, so I’m only going to respond to the second-to-last paragraph. Because that is the bit that critiques my comment, my response is going to sound defensive. But I agree with everything else, and I also think what went on with my original comment leads back into what I see as the actual crux, so it’s worth me saying what’s on my mind:
I have long ago edited the original comment where I wrote that. I didn’t change that particular wording because I wrote the original on mobile (which I deeply regretted and am now incredibly averse to) so I didn’t have fancy strikethrough edit features, even when I tried on PC (I didn’t realize it worked like that). Without strikethrough ability, I thought it would be epistemically dishonest to just edit that sentence. Instead I promptly, right after that sentence, told people to make their conclusions elsewhere in a way that I feel clearly tells readers to take that part with a grain of salt. All in all I edited that comment ~5 times. I don’t have the spoons to re-edit again given I think it’s fine.
More importantly, the transparency of info is obviously a problem if someone like me who usually tries to be pretty airtight on EA Forum things had to edit so much going back and forth from “here’s a thing” to “maybe he did worse” to “maybe he did less” to “maybe he did worse” again. That’s not okay. And now I feel like I’m getting punished for trying to do what no other outsider of the case was willing to try to do (that I saw)… figure out the ground truth [and what it means for EA behavior] publicly.
Honestly trying to figure out what happened regarding Jacy was a heckin nightmare with people coming out of left field about it after each correction I tried to make, including over DM (again not publicly), and giving multiple comments to comb through on multiple other posts and with their own attached threads. It’s good people chimed in sharing the existence of different pieces of discussion/info that I’d guess hardly any single person knew every single bit of, but damn, I have to be honest that I’m now really frustrated about what a nightmare it was. I was trying to do a public service and it was a huge waste of time with little to glean for certain. [And some of the more interesting bits are not public and I feel very, very weird about that, even saying that I now know of (know of, not know for certain) stuff others don’t and can’t find out about (I can’t even doublecheck myself).]
Was that always the expected outcome just lurking underneath the surface? If so then why would people judge SFF? I’m no longer surprised SFF just granted tbh. They saved themselves the time I wasted. I no longer expect any single person to get it right and I see that as a problem worth talking about because that will lead to either (1) actually-abusive people getting involvement sooner which is a safety risk, or (2) appearing-abusive-but-actually-non-abusive people getting involvement sooner which is a PR-risk and comfort risk.
I apologize for fucking up. I am now frustrated at myself for even trying. But if people other than me care about my messed up original comment they need to look at the systems because other people will fuck up as I did. It just won’t be public til after the decision is made, if ever. And you won’t get to correct them as they make their fumbles along the way.
I’m sorry. it sounds like you’ve taken a lot of flak for that comment, and having had that same experience I know it’s miserable. FWIW I was never responding to or criticizing your comment, only Ariel’s. Probably I saw it in the front page feed without checking the larger context. Or I only skimmed your comment and didn’t notice he was repeating a claim.
Plausibly I’m culpable for not noticing it was a repeated claim rather than original. Maybe the way comments are displayed on the front page with minimal context contributed.
It’s all I’m aware of, to the extent of my knowledge. I’m unfamiliar with the accusations against him in college, and could retract my above comment if given sufficient evidence.