I realize that confidentiality prevents me from knowing all the information, but I honestly can’t work out what to do with this information, especially regarding working with Jacy in the future. I have three possible interpretations, and each interpretation suggests a different action I should take (there may be other interpretations, or this situation could also be part way between two interpretations).
A) he’s been doing inappropriate things (possibly not realizing they were not okay), was given a chance to improve his behavior, but did not, causing CEA to ban him and ask for a public apology.
B) he did some quite egregious things—things that a reasonable person would KNOW are not okay—so CEA banned him and asked for a public apology at the same time as alerting him of these complaints.
C) he’s been doing inappropriate things (possibly not realizing they were not okay), and CEA banned him and asked for a public apology at the same time as alerting him of these complaints.
A) seems in contrast to “It has recently been brought to my attention” however, of course this may not be true.
B) could fit. The OP insinuates the problems were due to “forward and direct” approaches, but it could very well be worse than that sounds. I also recognize that even if the intent of an action was not malicious, if the action was bad enough we would still want that person banned.
C) is more like what the OP suggests happened (although it may not be accurate), but if true that doesn’t seem serious enough to cause a ban and a request for an apology, especially since in this case there may be ongoing career repercussions. But if C is correct, that may be cause for concern. It is difficult for many people to navigate social interactions, and some people are particularly clueless as to what is appropriate, so I would like to see attempts to educate before public irreversible actions are made. It may be additionally challenging in EA and rationality circles because many standard social norms are enthusiastically questioned, making it harder for people to know what is okay and what is not.
I think this combined with CEA’s decision should cause people to update in the direction that this is more serious than someone unsuccessfully navigating social interactions and being punished unfairly for it. I acknowledge that Jacy strenuously denies the Brown allegations, but either Jacy is very clueless (and incredibly unlucky, to have suffered through multiple instances of false allegations or “misunderstandings”), or this is a pattern of bad behaviour.
I would like to thank the people who came forward to report their experiences, in this case and in others. You have likely contributed to making the community safer for me and other women.
It’s also worth noting that kbog, who has been vigorously defending Jacy in the comments here, seems to have deleted this information from Jacy’s wikipedia page back in August 2018:
Reese’s career at Brown was cut short, however, by what he claimed were false allegations of sexual misconduct. Despite Reese’s protests that the University’s standard of “preponderance of evidence” against him was insufficient, Reese was expelled from Brown University in 2012 without completing his sophomore year.
The post says”CEA was made aware of these and other concerns about my past behavior” and CEA’s statement reads “after receiving reports from several parties about concerns over several time periods”, and I don’t think CEA would have missed the Brown allegations, so it seems likely that they are part of the concerns that CEA has with Jacy’s behavior. We should be mindful that the Brown allegations might be the source of some or most of the concerns, and hearing about them might have even caused people to view interactions with Jacy in a different light.
The accusation of sexual misconduct at Brown is one of the things that worried us at CEA. But we approached Jacy primarily out of concern about other more recent reports from members of the animal advocacy and EA communities.
Hmm, it is not at all clear to me that the accusations that are being discussed here are separate from the accusations that appear to have caused his apology. I agree that if they were from separate disconnected communities, then that would be significant evidence, but given the things said above, I don’t think we or Jacy would know if the people involved were separate from the people involved in his Brown expulsion (Brown has an Effective Altruism group that was quite active in 2015, so it seems quite likely that EA was already a large part of his social circle at the time [Edit: The article is from 2012, not 2015 as I initially misread. This means the people involved might still be upstream of the complaints, but it’s unlikely they were part of the Effective Altruism social network]).
The link is from 2012. Was there an active EA group at Brown in 2012?
The link talks about Jacy’s membership in a fraternity and it suggests that many (at least) of the actors relevant to the accusation were in the fraternity. I see no reason to think that the fraternity was EA-affiliated. So it seems likely this was a separate, disconnected community.
There was likely no EA group at Brown in 2012, given that Effective Altruism as a term has only really been around since 2013. When I first read the article I thought it was from 2015, probably because the author of the comment you linked to had the name “Brown ’15” (and Jacy signs at the bottom as Jacy ’15). My bad for misreading that.
I do think that makes it less likely that these accusations are from the same people, though I still wouldn’t rule it out. From reading the comments it appears to have been a pretty high-profile case internally at Brown, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if a lot of the evidence that caused this response is still downstream of that.
Yes, I think that is quite plausible. While it isn’t a full 6 years, I have followed up with and reported people who have had a history of abusive behavior in the EA and Rationality communities and moved on to other communities around four years ago. It seems quite plausible that someone would also follow up 6 years later.
Around 25% that a large fraction of the complaints to CEA are from the same people who he interacted with at Brown.
Some additional probability (~10%) that they didn’t directly make most of those complaints, but that they reached out to people close to him, told them about the stuff at Brown and encouraged them to take action against Jacy if they ever perceived anything similar happening around him (which would still result in probably valid reports, but also cause some amount of overreporting).
[Edit: Updated from 20% to 25% after seeing that his Wikipedia page was edited this year from anonymous accounts, with repeated references to the Brown case. Again, this doesn’t mean that the accusations are wrong, but I do think makes it more likely that the accusations discussed here are from the same source]
Thanks for agreeing to state your credences explicitly (and strongly upvoted for that reason).
I thought it was important to get more precision given the evidence showing that qualifiers such as ‘possible’, ‘likely’, etc are compatible with a wide range of values. Before your subsequent clarification, I interpreted your ‘quite plausible’ as expressing a probability of ~60%.
As I mention below, he admits the allegations above but not the brown ones. Are you saying he is admitting to the brown ones in the statement above and therefore that he lied in 2012? And If he denied the brown allegations in 2012 in the public spotlight, why would he stop doing that now just because someone has raised the brown complaints to CEA?
As Holly said above, I do not think that Jacy is actually admitting to significant wrongdoing in the above. I think he has been asked to apologize, and is doing so, and is admitting to the possibility of having caused at least some discomfort, but not that he actually violated any major boundaries.
I think Holly is better placed to continue this discussion.
I don’t think the apology above gives us much more evidence than that Jacy believes “I recognize that I probably caused some unnecessary discomfort, and I apologize for that”, which is definitely not the same as “I admit to sexually harassing other people to a degree that it was right to expel me from my university”.
Just to be clear, I barely know Jacy. I’ve seen him many times at events, including when he came to Harvard on his book tour, but I don’t believe I’ve ever had a private conversation with him. (Fwiw he never came close to being inappropriate with me or giving me a bad vibe.)
Ah, no. This was mostly because I think you are doing a better job at explaining my position than I am myself, and also that I am feeling relatively scared of participating in this conversation publicly, partially for reasons that I expect you to be less influenced by.
I know the two are not the same—this argument was about your claim: “Hmm, it is not at all clear to me that the accusations that are being discussed here [the Brown accusations] are separate from the accusations that appear to have caused his apology.”
I think you’re really grasping at straws here. Is the point to depose Oli, or what? Surely you can’t think you’re going to get more information about what did or did not happen this way. There are many conceivable ways that the Brown allegations could color CEA’s perception of more recent allegation, making the different events not entirely separate.
We were debating the claim “Hmm, it is not at all clear to me that the accusations that are being discussed here [the Brown accusations] are separate from the accusations that appear to have caused his apology.” Julia Wise’s comments has confirmed that the claims were separate. The term ‘separate’ here means ‘different instance of sexual harassment’.
By “not entirely separate,” I meant something more like “the Brown accusations have put him under a level of scrutiny that makes future allegations more likely/more likely to be refelexively believed/make smaller incidents more damning, even if he weren’t doing anything to provoke them.” So I was referring more to whether the judges in the recent events were affected by knowledge of the Brown events, that kind of “not entirely separate.” The events themselves, you’re right, would have to be different instances.
What I thought was grasping at straws was your attempt at gotcha syllogistic reasoning.
Yes but he would say that either way? One question is whether there’s just enough ambiguity to navigate the waters in today’s climate, or subtly more ambiguity.
This is false. Jacy was accused of sexual harassment at Brown, never sexual assault. Some members of this community have conflated Jacy’s case with the case of another student, which for some reason shows up in google searches for Jacy’s name. This is an understandable confusion, but it is a very bad confusion to continue spreading.
Noted, thanks Tyler—that’s an important distinction. I had retracted my comment anyway as the main point of it has been made elsewhere. I think my original comment still stands.
Julia Wise clarified this in her reply elsewhere in this comment section:
The accusation of sexual misconduct at Brown is one of the things that worried us at CEA. But we approached Jacy primarily out of concern about other more recent reports from members of the animal advocacy and EA communities.
it is not at all clear to me that the accusations that are being discussed here are separate from the accusations that appear to have caused his apology. I agree that if they were from separate disconnected communities, then that would be significant evidence
In his apology, Jacy says that he “know[s] very little of the details of these allegations.” But he clearly knows the Brown allegations very well. So even ignoring the other evidence cited by Halstead, the allegations for which he is apologizing clearly can’t include the Brown allegations.
EDIT: I now see it’s also possible that Jacy was presented with so little information that he wouldn’t be able to determine if the allegations CEA was concerned with included the Brown allegations, however well he knew the latter. My reasoning above ignores this possibility. Personally, I think the evidence Halstead offered is pretty conclusive, so I don’t think this makes a practical difference, but it still seemed something worth mentioning.
I sure am curious why you repeated the same comment four times (in addition to a couple of closely related comments) and why 100% of your comments on this site are on this page. It seems obviously inappropriate.
Forgive me. The information appears to be relevant to multiple threads so I posted it multiple times. I am using an anonymous account, like many other commenters here are, presumably given the sensitivity of the topic and the wish for it not to be associated with the rest of their identity. I did not realize that either of these actions was inappropriate.
C also has the highest base rate. And to me, it seems entirely typical that an organization with the CEA’s sociocultural context would punish someone this much after C. (Speaking in descriptive terms; it doesn’t imply it’s desirable.)
I realize that confidentiality prevents me from knowing all the information, but I honestly can’t work out what to do with this information, especially regarding working with Jacy in the future. I have three possible interpretations, and each interpretation suggests a different action I should take (there may be other interpretations, or this situation could also be part way between two interpretations).
A) he’s been doing inappropriate things (possibly not realizing they were not okay), was given a chance to improve his behavior, but did not, causing CEA to ban him and ask for a public apology.
B) he did some quite egregious things—things that a reasonable person would KNOW are not okay—so CEA banned him and asked for a public apology at the same time as alerting him of these complaints.
C) he’s been doing inappropriate things (possibly not realizing they were not okay), and CEA banned him and asked for a public apology at the same time as alerting him of these complaints.
A) seems in contrast to “It has recently been brought to my attention” however, of course this may not be true.
B) could fit. The OP insinuates the problems were due to “forward and direct” approaches, but it could very well be worse than that sounds. I also recognize that even if the intent of an action was not malicious, if the action was bad enough we would still want that person banned.
C) is more like what the OP suggests happened (although it may not be accurate), but if true that doesn’t seem serious enough to cause a ban and a request for an apology, especially since in this case there may be ongoing career repercussions. But if C is correct, that may be cause for concern. It is difficult for many people to navigate social interactions, and some people are particularly clueless as to what is appropriate, so I would like to see attempts to educate before public irreversible actions are made. It may be additionally challenging in EA and rationality circles because many standard social norms are enthusiastically questioned, making it harder for people to know what is okay and what is not.
It appears that Jacy has a history of questionable conduct towards women going back at least 6 years: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2012/12/03/letter-student-alleges-insufficient-evidence-for-possible-expulsion/#comment-868568432
I think this combined with CEA’s decision should cause people to update in the direction that this is more serious than someone unsuccessfully navigating social interactions and being punished unfairly for it. I acknowledge that Jacy strenuously denies the Brown allegations, but either Jacy is very clueless (and incredibly unlucky, to have suffered through multiple instances of false allegations or “misunderstandings”), or this is a pattern of bad behaviour.
I would like to thank the people who came forward to report their experiences, in this case and in others. You have likely contributed to making the community safer for me and other women.
It’s also worth noting that kbog, who has been vigorously defending Jacy in the comments here, seems to have deleted this information from Jacy’s wikipedia page back in August 2018:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jacy_Reese&type=revision&diff=856540437&oldid=856509360
The post says”CEA was made aware of these and other concerns about my past behavior” and CEA’s statement reads “after receiving reports from several parties about concerns over several time periods”, and I don’t think CEA would have missed the Brown allegations, so it seems likely that they are part of the concerns that CEA has with Jacy’s behavior. We should be mindful that the Brown allegations might be the source of some or most of the concerns, and hearing about them might have even caused people to view interactions with Jacy in a different light.
The accusation of sexual misconduct at Brown is one of the things that worried us at CEA. But we approached Jacy primarily out of concern about other more recent reports from members of the animal advocacy and EA communities.
Hmm, it is not at all clear to me that the accusations that are being discussed here are separate from the accusations that appear to have caused his apology. I agree that if they were from separate disconnected communities, then that would be significant evidence, but given the things said above, I don’t think we or Jacy would know if the people involved were separate from the people involved in his Brown expulsion (Brown has an Effective Altruism group that was quite active in 2015, so it seems quite likely that EA was already a large part of his social circle at the time [Edit: The article is from 2012, not 2015 as I initially misread. This means the people involved might still be upstream of the complaints, but it’s unlikely they were part of the Effective Altruism social network]).
The link is from 2012. Was there an active EA group at Brown in 2012?
The link talks about Jacy’s membership in a fraternity and it suggests that many (at least) of the actors relevant to the accusation were in the fraternity. I see no reason to think that the fraternity was EA-affiliated. So it seems likely this was a separate, disconnected community.
There was likely no EA group at Brown in 2012, given that Effective Altruism as a term has only really been around since 2013. When I first read the article I thought it was from 2015, probably because the author of the comment you linked to had the name “Brown ’15” (and Jacy signs at the bottom as Jacy ’15). My bad for misreading that.
I do think that makes it less likely that these accusations are from the same people, though I still wouldn’t rule it out. From reading the comments it appears to have been a pretty high-profile case internally at Brown, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if a lot of the evidence that caused this response is still downstream of that.
Jacy denies one set of allegations but not the others, so presumably they must refer to different cases at different times
So you think a serious possibility that we should consider is that people at Brown from 7 years ago have come to CEA to complain about Jacy?
Yes, I think that is quite plausible. While it isn’t a full 6 years, I have followed up with and reported people who have had a history of abusive behavior in the EA and Rationality communities and moved on to other communities around four years ago. It seems quite plausible that someone would also follow up 6 years later.
“Quite plausible”? What’s your actual credence?
Around 25% that a large fraction of the complaints to CEA are from the same people who he interacted with at Brown.
Some additional probability (~10%) that they didn’t directly make most of those complaints, but that they reached out to people close to him, told them about the stuff at Brown and encouraged them to take action against Jacy if they ever perceived anything similar happening around him (which would still result in probably valid reports, but also cause some amount of overreporting).
[Edit: Updated from 20% to 25% after seeing that his Wikipedia page was edited this year from anonymous accounts, with repeated references to the Brown case. Again, this doesn’t mean that the accusations are wrong, but I do think makes it more likely that the accusations discussed here are from the same source]
Thanks for agreeing to state your credences explicitly (and strongly upvoted for that reason).
I thought it was important to get more precision given the evidence showing that qualifiers such as ‘possible’, ‘likely’, etc are compatible with a wide range of values. Before your subsequent clarification, I interpreted your ‘quite plausible’ as expressing a probability of ~60%.
Alas, that does update me towards using probabilities even more than I usually do. I definitely did not intend to communicate a 60% probability.
As I mention below, he admits the allegations above but not the brown ones. Are you saying he is admitting to the brown ones in the statement above and therefore that he lied in 2012? And If he denied the brown allegations in 2012 in the public spotlight, why would he stop doing that now just because someone has raised the brown complaints to CEA?
As Holly said above, I do not think that Jacy is actually admitting to significant wrongdoing in the above. I think he has been asked to apologize, and is doing so, and is admitting to the possibility of having caused at least some discomfort, but not that he actually violated any major boundaries.
Oli, this doesn’t make sense.
1. In the Brown statement, he strenuously denies wrongdoing and does not admit the possibility of having done something wrong.
2.You are saying that this is an admission to the possibility of having done something wrong and that this refers to the Brown allegations.
This implies:
3. He has changed his view of the Brown allegations.
You deny 3. This is not consistent. Please tell me which part of this you disagree with.
I think Holly is better placed to continue this discussion.
I don’t think the apology above gives us much more evidence than that Jacy believes “I recognize that I probably caused some unnecessary discomfort, and I apologize for that”, which is definitely not the same as “I admit to sexually harassing other people to a degree that it was right to expel me from my university”.
Just to be clear, I barely know Jacy. I’ve seen him many times at events, including when he came to Harvard on his book tour, but I don’t believe I’ve ever had a private conversation with him. (Fwiw he never came close to being inappropriate with me or giving me a bad vibe.)
.
I’m curious about all these deleted comments by Halstead.
Was deleted for tone, no interesting content
Can’t we just allow people to change their mind and retract their statements?
(I thought maybe Oli thought I knew him or something and that’s why he said I was “better placed to continue the discussion.”)
Ah, no. This was mostly because I think you are doing a better job at explaining my position than I am myself, and also that I am feeling relatively scared of participating in this conversation publicly, partially for reasons that I expect you to be less influenced by.
I know the two are not the same—this argument was about your claim: “Hmm, it is not at all clear to me that the accusations that are being discussed here [the Brown accusations] are separate from the accusations that appear to have caused his apology.”
I think you’re really grasping at straws here. Is the point to depose Oli, or what? Surely you can’t think you’re going to get more information about what did or did not happen this way. There are many conceivable ways that the Brown allegations could color CEA’s perception of more recent allegation, making the different events not entirely separate.
We were debating the claim “Hmm, it is not at all clear to me that the accusations that are being discussed here [the Brown accusations] are separate from the accusations that appear to have caused his apology.” Julia Wise’s comments has confirmed that the claims were separate. The term ‘separate’ here means ‘different instance of sexual harassment’.
By “not entirely separate,” I meant something more like “the Brown accusations have put him under a level of scrutiny that makes future allegations more likely/more likely to be refelexively believed/make smaller incidents more damning, even if he weren’t doing anything to provoke them.” So I was referring more to whether the judges in the recent events were affected by knowledge of the Brown events, that kind of “not entirely separate.” The events themselves, you’re right, would have to be different instances.
What I thought was grasping at straws was your attempt at gotcha syllogistic reasoning.
ok thanks, understood. i hope it wasn’t grasping at straws, but maybe this debate has got too sidetracked and should draw to a close.
Yes but he would say that either way? One question is whether there’s just enough ambiguity to navigate the waters in today’s climate, or subtly more ambiguity.
[delete] I realised that Halstead and Pablo have already made this point, and I was repeating them.
This is false. Jacy was accused of sexual harassment at Brown, never sexual assault. Some members of this community have conflated Jacy’s case with the case of another student, which for some reason shows up in google searches for Jacy’s name. This is an understandable confusion, but it is a very bad confusion to continue spreading.
Noted, thanks Tyler—that’s an important distinction. I had retracted my comment anyway as the main point of it has been made elsewhere. I think my original comment still stands.
This feels like something that CEA could confirm or deny quite easily without damaging confidentiality or legal factors.
Julia Wise clarified this in her reply elsewhere in this comment section:
In his apology, Jacy says that he “know[s] very little of the details of these allegations.” But he clearly knows the Brown allegations very well. So even ignoring the other evidence cited by Halstead, the allegations for which he is apologizing clearly can’t include the Brown allegations.
EDIT: I now see it’s also possible that Jacy was presented with so little information that he wouldn’t be able to determine if the allegations CEA was concerned with included the Brown allegations, however well he knew the latter. My reasoning above ignores this possibility. Personally, I think the evidence Halstead offered is pretty conclusive, so I don’t think this makes a practical difference, but it still seemed something worth mentioning.
.
I sure am curious why you repeated the same comment four times (in addition to a couple of closely related comments) and why 100% of your comments on this site are on this page. It seems obviously inappropriate.
Forgive me. The information appears to be relevant to multiple threads so I posted it multiple times. I am using an anonymous account, like many other commenters here are, presumably given the sensitivity of the topic and the wish for it not to be associated with the rest of their identity. I did not realize that either of these actions was inappropriate.
C also has the highest base rate. And to me, it seems entirely typical that an organization with the CEA’s sociocultural context would punish someone this much after C. (Speaking in descriptive terms; it doesn’t imply it’s desirable.)