I mean, if we are talking about entrepreneurship replacability, that if it was his idea to form a network of digital mind research collaborators and advisors, and he wanted to lead it and was capable of doing so, it could be seen as disrespectful to push him off the idea of the project and find someone to replace him on an essentially-identical project.
Agree that it is not CEA’s job to punish Jacy for his actions at Brown, but this was largely not what happened.
Okay fair, I’m updating that I am misremembering reading what I thought I did, but if I ever find what I’m thinking of I’ll add it.
I agree, and lack of this after 3 years should be a reason to update against its existence or the extent Jacy actually cares about this.
Fair. I mean I kind of wonder if he expected people to get over it (which if it really was minor, he probably would expect), and was recently blindsided by the response to his March post. Maybe we will see a writeup soon (but probably not, you are right)
One quick question-do you think if sexual harassment allegations are true, is the EA community more or less at risk if Jacy is an independent researcher with no interaction to other EA researchers, or if he’s actively trying to form a research network, or if he takes a community building role?
I guess I consider it the wrong question? Like obviously the answer is the former has less risk to the EA community, but I don’t think minimizing risk is the only thing that matters? The degree of risk is the most important thing? Above a certain threshold of risk I would just want to do the most impactful one. We don’t know the risk.
I think in that set of claims, the one doing the most work by far is “establish that risk is pretty low”, which in Jacy’s case, is an open question.
I agree, and I did specifically include that clause for that reason FWIW. I will go back and italicize it to make it clear. I believe that I really did consider this also negates the rest of that paragraph such as thinking of EA woman as cannon fodder etc.
Do you have nonpublic info on Jacy? Can you be more clear on the kinds of situations you are imagining? How many of these do you think would result in a bn from CEA events? I guess my view here is that by most situations that warrant a ban from CEA events I think the word “victim” is appropriate.
No. I can say that relevant thing I was imagining (among other scenarios) was something like repeated asking out after saying no (which is technically harassment) or making sexual or attraction-based comments (also harassment depending on badness of comment and whether the context and relationship implies it is disrespectful or degrading) and a response from CEA something like “he clearly has a tendency to make women uncomfortable and this seems net negative for the events, so why honestly even allow him to come and possibly make another mistake, even if he is learning? Let’s just ban him and be done with it.”. However I acknowledge this is unfounded and these are just some possibilities among other worse possibilities.
I think again this points to the issues around lack of clarity here, as some may be indexing the level of severity based on other things that CEA have banned people for, which are much worse than “Jacy had asked some women out on dates”, while you are basing this off other information or taking Jacy’s apology at face value etc, which doesn’t seem super well justified.
I completely agree with you. And yeah I think that’s a good point, that my taking the apology at face value is not “super well justified”. I actually wasn’t exactly trying to defend Jacy in particular. But trying to begin some discussion which might be relevant to determining if there is a punishment-over-rehabilitation framework in this community and where that line should be drawn. I can’t say anything about Jacy’s case in particular, and I also don’t claim that CEA made a mistake about him or operated under any problematic framework when making their decision about him. To me it does feel really weird though, that if it was so bad, that CEA didn’t make it more public so we could all better trust to steer clear or something. That does seem like it would become a missing stair concern, which actually maybe is what happened with him getting funding, idk. Anyway something bad does seem to be going on here (like maybe an overzealous reaction years later, or, I’m thinking more likely after this and another conversation, a non-transparent-enough culture which might lead to missing stairs. In fact either could be present in EA culture even if not in Jacy’s case). And whatever it may be, I am starting to worry it will catch up with EA and at least some of its members eventually, in unpleasant ways (in some sense this whole thread is one of those ways).
I am now thinking that the root thing, the meta-thing upstreamof us discussing whether Jacy’s funding was okay or not, is more worth addressing than actually answering the question “how and where did Jacy get funding and was it okay knowing what we know”.
I mean, if we are talking about entrepreneurship replacability, that if it was his idea to form a network of digital mind research collaborators and advisors, and he wanted to lead it and was capable of doing so, it could be seen as disrespectful to push him off the idea of the project and find someone to replace him on an essentially-identical project.
Okay fair, I’m updating that I am misremembering reading what I thought I did, but if I ever find what I’m thinking of I’ll add it.
Fair. I mean I kind of wonder if he expected people to get over it (which if it really was minor, he probably would expect), and was recently blindsided by the response to his March post. Maybe we will see a writeup soon (but probably not, you are right)
I guess I consider it the wrong question? Like obviously the answer is the former has less risk to the EA community, but I don’t think minimizing risk is the only thing that matters? The degree of risk is the most important thing? Above a certain threshold of risk I would just want to do the most impactful one. We don’t know the risk.
I agree, and I did specifically include that clause for that reason FWIW. I will go back and italicize it to make it clear. I believe that I really did consider this also negates the rest of that paragraph such as thinking of EA woman as cannon fodder etc.
No. I can say that relevant thing I was imagining (among other scenarios) was something like repeated asking out after saying no (which is technically harassment) or making sexual or attraction-based comments (also harassment depending on badness of comment and whether the context and relationship implies it is disrespectful or degrading) and a response from CEA something like “he clearly has a tendency to make women uncomfortable and this seems net negative for the events, so why honestly even allow him to come and possibly make another mistake, even if he is learning? Let’s just ban him and be done with it.”. However I acknowledge this is unfounded and these are just some possibilities among other worse possibilities.
I completely agree with you. And yeah I think that’s a good point, that my taking the apology at face value is not “super well justified”. I actually wasn’t exactly trying to defend Jacy in particular. But trying to begin some discussion which might be relevant to determining if there is a punishment-over-rehabilitation framework in this community and where that line should be drawn. I can’t say anything about Jacy’s case in particular, and I also don’t claim that CEA made a mistake about him or operated under any problematic framework when making their decision about him. To me it does feel really weird though, that if it was so bad, that CEA didn’t make it more public so we could all better trust to steer clear or something. That does seem like it would become a missing stair concern, which actually maybe is what happened with him getting funding, idk. Anyway something bad does seem to be going on here (like maybe an overzealous reaction years later, or, I’m thinking more likely after this and another conversation, a non-transparent-enough culture which might lead to missing stairs. In fact either could be present in EA culture even if not in Jacy’s case). And whatever it may be, I am starting to worry it will catch up with EA and at least some of its members eventually, in unpleasant ways (in some sense this whole thread is one of those ways).
I am now thinking that the root thing, the meta-thing upstream of us discussing whether Jacy’s funding was okay or not, is more worth addressing than actually answering the question “how and where did Jacy get funding and was it okay knowing what we know”.