Meta: I’m writing on behalf of the Community Health and Special Projects team (here: Community Health team) at CEA to explain how we’re thinking about next steps. For context, our team consists of:
Me, Chana Messinger: Normally I specialize (from a community health lens) in EA projects that involve high schoolers or minors, and community epistemics; since November, I’ve been the interim head of the Community Health team
Nicole Ross, the usual team head, who has been focusing on EV US board work since the FTX crisis, and when she transitions back to community health work, she plans to prioritize thinking through what changes should happen in EA given everything that happened with FTX
Julia Wise, who usually serves as a community health contact person for the EA community, but has been working primarily on other projects for a few months
Catherine Low, who serves as a contact person for the EA community among other roles
Eve McCormick, project manager and senior assistant
An affiliate and various contractors
In this comment I’ll sometimes be referring to Effective Ventures (EV) UK and Effective Ventures (EV) US together as the “EV entities” or as Effective Ventures or EV.
Where things stand and next steps:
Someone came to Julia in 2021 with information about possible misconduct by Owen Cotton-Barratt, a few years after the events they were reporting. Julia took steps at the time in response, described here. In 2021, when Nicole became her manager, Julia told Nicole that there were concerns about Owen’s behavior, but as far as they remember Julia didn’t share many details at the time.
Earlier this month, after reading the TIME piece, Julia filled me and Nicole in on more details, and then later we informed the rest of the Community Health team about what had happened. We’re now looking back on whether Julia or Nicole made mistakes in handling this, and whether we should change things about our processes going forward.
As the post notes, an external firm is going to give us their independent assessment; I think this is important, and I’m grateful to the trustees of EV UK and EV US for helping to organize it. There will also be an internal reflection process. Julia and Nicole are going to do retrospectives on this situation, which will then get discussed with me, Ben West (as transition coordinator at CEA), and some senior management and/or trustees of the EV entities, possibly looping in others at CEA or EV as well.
Further steps are yet to be decided (and some will depend on the information we learn), but could include having other members of the team do assessments of the process and decision-making in this situation and getting opinions on this situation and our approach generally from other people who do similar or analogous work, in and out of EA.
Things we will be keeping in mind as we reflect:
potential conflicts of interest, the role of power in EA, and our own incentives as a team
that crucial details can differ between people or be misremembered over years
that the best response to a pattern of making people uncomfortable (for example) can be different from the best response to an isolated incident
that there are important selection effects on what we get to hear, and that we certainly don’t have all the information we would ideally want to have
We are also going to continue our normal work. We are available for calls concerning issues in the community, and you can reach out to us via relevant team members’ emails or our form (which can be anonymous). Feel free to also use the general form or forms for specific team members to give us feedback, questions or other thoughts and perspectives, on this situation or more generally.
We are also considering many possibilities for proactive work to make the EA community safer and better at dealing with this kind of situation (some of which are already happening, and will continue).
If instead you’d like to share thoughts or feelings about this situation to someone not on the team, Habiba Islam, Luzia Bruckamp and Rockwell Schwartz have all kindly volunteered to be listening ears not working at CEA. (Habiba works for 80,000 Hours, which along with CEA is an Effective Ventures project, and Rockwell is paid via CEA Community Building Grant. Luzia is an EA community member who volunteered to help on Twitter.) If you have feedback for the Community Health team you’d like them to pass on, they’re happy to do that, at whatever level of anonymizing / aggregating you wish. They are all volunteering for this additional work, so may have limited time slots available, but will communicate that with you. (Note that these people were asked in an informal capacity and have not been formally assessed or trained by our team.)
There are also resources external to our team that may be useful, such as those compiled by RAINN.
I’m going to do my best in the comments to answer questions people have, with all the obvious caveats about ones I can’t answer or won’t be able to answer quickly.
My heart goes out to everyone who has suffered from sexual harassment or misconduct in this community. I’m sorry, and I care deeply about making sure our team is equipped to handle these issues well.
Can you comment on the scope of the external investigation EV UK commissioned being limited to the specific incident with OCB instead of a wider domain of e.g. how CH/CEA generally handles sexual misconduct and COIs or CH/CEA’s processes in general?
Some background, which is probably pedantic but I want to err on the side of over sharing:
Your question was addressed to Chana, but, despite not being involved in the initial handling of this case, she felt it would not be appropriate for someone on the community health team to limit the scope of any investigation. So this question should probably be addressed to Max, the executive director, not her.
Max has since resigned.
I, his temporary replacement, was not involved in that decision, but I believe that I have the power to override that decision if I disagreed with it. Or, at least, I could attempt to override it, and I have not tried to do so.
So this comment is my thoughts on having an external party review broader processes apart from this specific case. I expect it’s similar to things that Max would have said, but probably not identical.
We already had a proposal from an external entity to audit some of the CH team’s general processes before the news of this specific incident broke, and I expect (~70%) we will end up working with them, although I’m not sure exactly what the details will be like. We have done this kind of external review before and have had mixed results; as with any kind of peer review/best practice sharing, the median result is that there aren’t major changes. Still, I think the potential upside is probably enough to justify doing something like this.
Note that this audit is “external” in the sense that it will be performed by people who don’t work at CEA, but is “internal” in the sense that it’s triggered by CEA, rather than the board. And in yet a third sense of the word “external:” I am involved, so the audit is “external” in the sense that it involves me, a person not on the community health team but who has the power to fire/reassign/etc. anyone on the community health team.
It seems like it’s best to start the investigation into this particular incident and announce it as quickly as possible, so I don’t have a full plan about other audits we might do, but this comment resonates with some of my thoughts on potentially sharing information that comes out of this kind of review.
Thanks. Can you clarify whether the investigation is being handled by EV UK or CEA? I read EV UK’s statement as saying they triggered it and are responsible for it (emphasis added):
we are commissioning an external investigation by an independent law firm into Owen’s behaviour and the Community Health team’s response.
But you are saying that it was triggered by CEA and not EV UK, and also that the ED of CEA is responsible for overseeing it.
I think we might be talking past each other – I understood you to be asking about Chana/CEA’s thoughts on commissioning an investigation whose scope is broader than the one the board commissioned. Is that wrong?
Thanks for this—I imagine this has been a difficult few months for you as the interim head of the community health team.
I just wanted to bring Q4 from this comment to your attention, (specifically, lilly’s set of questions here) as you seem better placed to answer about the general case (as opposed to the specifics around OCB, which might be better suited for Julia)
Separately, I’m wondering what from the investigation if any, would you be happy to pre-commit to sharing publicly? I’d also love to get a sense of how you and the team hope to ensure the CH team has processes and systems in place to manage these kinds of cases going forward, and what you’d be happy to pre-commit to sharing in terms of internal investigations and reflections. Non-exhaustive categories of information I would be interested in would be:
Methodology for investigations
Conflicts of Interests identified
Problems identified
Changes considered / explored
Changes made + reasoning
My sense is that rebuilding trust in the CH team will be important going forward, and such a precommitment combined with transparent and appropriately timely follow-up may be useful here.
I’ll respond to the second set of questions here (we’ll respond to comments from the other post there).
I can’t speak to the external investigation since I’m not involved (it’s going through the board so as to be external to my team).
In terms of our internal investigation, since I don’t currently know the form it will take there’s not much I can precommit to, but I definitely think we should publicly say new processes or other changes we’re putting in place (or if none, that it’s none), so that people know how we’re planning to approach things in the future.
I think the categories you’ve laid out are good ones though I don’t yet know if those will end up being exactly the categories I end up using as Ben and I go through this—appreciate you writing them up and flagging them. My strong guess is that relevant categories will include (as I noted in things I wanted to keep in mind during reflection) conflicts of interest and powerful people in EA.
I want to also address some elephant-in-the-room feeling (which may not be relevant to you, but feels important to say), which is that as I go into this only knowing what I learned recently, it feels important that before an investigation is finished to be able to “split and commit”. I want to hold onto multiple hypotheses, including
that we made serious mistakes and should change a lot
that our processes need serious change
that with the information they had at the time, people acted reasonably
that people didn’t act reasonably but that the processes are basically fine, since no process is going to yield no mistakes.
I don’t put equal weight on all those hypotheses, but I do want to be able to hold them, and at the end of the investigation, to say publicly what conclusions I’ve come to about those things.
Supporting someone/people who are at least at arms length from EVF seems like it would be good asap. Relying on volunteers and good will to essentially cover for (at least perceived) mistakes seems bad.
Hey Joshua—can I ask you to clarify more what you mean about what kinds of people to support? I can imagine a few different things you might be pointing at being important.
Someone doing something similar to the community contact points at CEA but more clearly separated. Much like the people you list in the post as others who have volunteered to be named as contacts but are doing this voluntarily.
Got it—I have lots of thoughts here! Overall, the team has been wanting more contact people for a long time, and I’m definitely in favor of some versions of that (subject to considerations of tractability and prioritization). I still think there might be a few things you mean, but here are some thoughts.
You might mean something like “a different team doing the same work but with different funding and institutional affiliation”.
This might be good. It does bear coordination costs, and for instance it might mean we don’t see problematic patterns as easily. I’m not sure what us setting this up would look like; it takes a lot of trust to vouch for someone to handle tradeoffs and a variety of situations with sensitivity; in general if we found someone with the same skillset as people on our team who had free time, we’d want to hire them! (And this would allow syncing up on approach and process; with more separation, we might put ourselves in a position of vouching for someone where we couldn’t mentor or observe their process; that seems potentially problematic). This would take the kind of work and effort where likely we’d have to be quite sure it was the top priority for our team.
2. You might mean something like having people who aren’t connected to Community Health but pass on information to the Community Health team, perhaps to allow for:
Greater anonymity
Wider variety of people so that more of the community has someone they know and feel comfortable with
Non-CEA support, but still having important information about concerning behavior passed on.
Passing feedback to the Community Health team
Some considerations:
To some extent this exists in the form of contact people for city and university groups, and to some extent in the form of friends—if you have a friend who tells you a concerning story, and they’d rather you convey it to Community Health with some details anonymized, that is just fine by us (and happens pretty often)
We were already looking into programs to allow real-time textual anonymous communication before this incident; that might make some people feel more comfortable talking to us and seeing what thoughts, advice or ideas we have before or instead of deanonymizing themselves
Something I wish more people knew is that contact people are happy to just give advice about sticky situations; not every call has to be a “report”
If we pay people, they do have a connection to Community Health, so supporting this financially may undermine one of the goals. That said, it’s not a blocker; it could still be a good idea on net or we could try to get outside funding
It can be hard to convey stories with enough detail to make it clear why we should take certain actions without deanonymizing people
See the point above about trust required for vouching.
I’m not yet sure how many more people would get support via doing this, despite it seeming good—seems like we’ll learn from this situation
The strongest case for #1 is cases in which CH is conflicted out, either because the subject of the report is a friend of everyone in CH, is in their chain of command, or there are other reasons the reporter might reasonably conclude CH has a disqualifying conflict. Not only is that a bad situation for the reporter, it’s a bad situation to put people in CH in.
I could also argue for at least some sort of external involvement in any case involving alleged significant misconduct by a very senior leader.
Meta: I’m writing on behalf of the Community Health and Special Projects team (here: Community Health team) at CEA to explain how we’re thinking about next steps. For context, our team consists of:
Me, Chana Messinger: Normally I specialize (from a community health lens) in EA projects that involve high schoolers or minors, and community epistemics; since November, I’ve been the interim head of the Community Health team
Nicole Ross, the usual team head, who has been focusing on EV US board work since the FTX crisis, and when she transitions back to community health work, she plans to prioritize thinking through what changes should happen in EA given everything that happened with FTX
Julia Wise, who usually serves as a community health contact person for the EA community, but has been working primarily on other projects for a few months
Catherine Low, who serves as a contact person for the EA community among other roles
Eve McCormick, project manager and senior assistant
An affiliate and various contractors
In this comment I’ll sometimes be referring to Effective Ventures (EV) UK and Effective Ventures (EV) US together as the “EV entities” or as Effective Ventures or EV.
Where things stand and next steps:
Someone came to Julia in 2021 with information about possible misconduct by Owen Cotton-Barratt, a few years after the events they were reporting. Julia took steps at the time in response, described here. In 2021, when Nicole became her manager, Julia told Nicole that there were concerns about Owen’s behavior, but as far as they remember Julia didn’t share many details at the time.
Earlier this month, after reading the TIME piece, Julia filled me and Nicole in on more details, and then later we informed the rest of the Community Health team about what had happened. We’re now looking back on whether Julia or Nicole made mistakes in handling this, and whether we should change things about our processes going forward.
As the post notes, an external firm is going to give us their independent assessment; I think this is important, and I’m grateful to the trustees of EV UK and EV US for helping to organize it. There will also be an internal reflection process. Julia and Nicole are going to do retrospectives on this situation, which will then get discussed with me, Ben West (as transition coordinator at CEA), and some senior management and/or trustees of the EV entities, possibly looping in others at CEA or EV as well.
Further steps are yet to be decided (and some will depend on the information we learn), but could include having other members of the team do assessments of the process and decision-making in this situation and getting opinions on this situation and our approach generally from other people who do similar or analogous work, in and out of EA.
Things we will be keeping in mind as we reflect:
potential conflicts of interest, the role of power in EA, and our own incentives as a team
that crucial details can differ between people or be misremembered over years
that the best response to a pattern of making people uncomfortable (for example) can be different from the best response to an isolated incident
that there are important selection effects on what we get to hear, and that we certainly don’t have all the information we would ideally want to have
We are also going to continue our normal work. We are available for calls concerning issues in the community, and you can reach out to us via relevant team members’ emails or our form (which can be anonymous). Feel free to also use the general form or forms for specific team members to give us feedback, questions or other thoughts and perspectives, on this situation or more generally.
Forms
Chana’s form
Nicole’s Admonymous
Catherine’s Admonymous
Julia’s form
We are also considering many possibilities for proactive work to make the EA community safer and better at dealing with this kind of situation (some of which are already happening, and will continue).
If instead you’d like to share thoughts or feelings about this situation to someone not on the team, Habiba Islam, Luzia Bruckamp and Rockwell Schwartz have all kindly volunteered to be listening ears not working at CEA. (Habiba works for 80,000 Hours, which along with CEA is an Effective Ventures project, and Rockwell is paid via CEA Community Building Grant. Luzia is an EA community member who volunteered to help on Twitter.) If you have feedback for the Community Health team you’d like them to pass on, they’re happy to do that, at whatever level of anonymizing / aggregating you wish. They are all volunteering for this additional work, so may have limited time slots available, but will communicate that with you. (Note that these people were asked in an informal capacity and have not been formally assessed or trained by our team.)
There are also resources external to our team that may be useful, such as those compiled by RAINN.
I’m going to do my best in the comments to answer questions people have, with all the obvious caveats about ones I can’t answer or won’t be able to answer quickly.
My heart goes out to everyone who has suffered from sexual harassment or misconduct in this community. I’m sorry, and I care deeply about making sure our team is equipped to handle these issues well.
Can you comment on the scope of the external investigation EV UK commissioned being limited to the specific incident with OCB instead of a wider domain of e.g. how CH/CEA generally handles sexual misconduct and COIs or CH/CEA’s processes in general?
Some background, which is probably pedantic but I want to err on the side of over sharing:
Your question was addressed to Chana, but, despite not being involved in the initial handling of this case, she felt it would not be appropriate for someone on the community health team to limit the scope of any investigation. So this question should probably be addressed to Max, the executive director, not her.
Max has since resigned.
I, his temporary replacement, was not involved in that decision, but I believe that I have the power to override that decision if I disagreed with it. Or, at least, I could attempt to override it, and I have not tried to do so.
So this comment is my thoughts on having an external party review broader processes apart from this specific case. I expect it’s similar to things that Max would have said, but probably not identical.
We already had a proposal from an external entity to audit some of the CH team’s general processes before the news of this specific incident broke, and I expect (~70%) we will end up working with them, although I’m not sure exactly what the details will be like. We have done this kind of external review before and have had mixed results; as with any kind of peer review/best practice sharing, the median result is that there aren’t major changes. Still, I think the potential upside is probably enough to justify doing something like this.
Note that this audit is “external” in the sense that it will be performed by people who don’t work at CEA, but is “internal” in the sense that it’s triggered by CEA, rather than the board. And in yet a third sense of the word “external:” I am involved, so the audit is “external” in the sense that it involves me, a person not on the community health team but who has the power to fire/reassign/etc. anyone on the community health team.
It seems like it’s best to start the investigation into this particular incident and announce it as quickly as possible, so I don’t have a full plan about other audits we might do, but this comment resonates with some of my thoughts on potentially sharing information that comes out of this kind of review.
Thanks. Can you clarify whether the investigation is being handled by EV UK or CEA? I read EV UK’s statement as saying they triggered it and are responsible for it (emphasis added):
But you are saying that it was triggered by CEA and not EV UK, and also that the ED of CEA is responsible for overseeing it.
I think we might be talking past each other – I understood you to be asking about Chana/CEA’s thoughts on commissioning an investigation whose scope is broader than the one the board commissioned. Is that wrong?
Hi Chana,
Thanks for this—I imagine this has been a difficult few months for you as the interim head of the community health team.
I just wanted to bring Q4 from this comment to your attention, (specifically, lilly’s set of questions here) as you seem better placed to answer about the general case (as opposed to the specifics around OCB, which might be better suited for Julia)
Separately, I’m wondering what from the investigation if any, would you be happy to pre-commit to sharing publicly? I’d also love to get a sense of how you and the team hope to ensure the CH team has processes and systems in place to manage these kinds of cases going forward, and what you’d be happy to pre-commit to sharing in terms of internal investigations and reflections. Non-exhaustive categories of information I would be interested in would be:
Methodology for investigations
Conflicts of Interests identified
Problems identified
Changes considered / explored
Changes made + reasoning
My sense is that rebuilding trust in the CH team will be important going forward, and such a precommitment combined with transparent and appropriately timely follow-up may be useful here.
(commenting in personal capacity etc)
Thanks for your comment and kind words.
I’ll respond to the second set of questions here (we’ll respond to comments from the other post there).
I can’t speak to the external investigation since I’m not involved (it’s going through the board so as to be external to my team).
In terms of our internal investigation, since I don’t currently know the form it will take there’s not much I can precommit to, but I definitely think we should publicly say new processes or other changes we’re putting in place (or if none, that it’s none), so that people know how we’re planning to approach things in the future.
I think the categories you’ve laid out are good ones though I don’t yet know if those will end up being exactly the categories I end up using as Ben and I go through this—appreciate you writing them up and flagging them. My strong guess is that relevant categories will include (as I noted in things I wanted to keep in mind during reflection) conflicts of interest and powerful people in EA.
I want to also address some elephant-in-the-room feeling (which may not be relevant to you, but feels important to say), which is that as I go into this only knowing what I learned recently, it feels important that before an investigation is finished to be able to “split and commit”. I want to hold onto multiple hypotheses, including
that we made serious mistakes and should change a lot
that our processes need serious change
that with the information they had at the time, people acted reasonably
that people didn’t act reasonably but that the processes are basically fine, since no process is going to yield no mistakes.
I don’t put equal weight on all those hypotheses, but I do want to be able to hold them, and at the end of the investigation, to say publicly what conclusions I’ve come to about those things.
Could you clarify whether the Charity commission investigation has any bearing on Owen’s resignation?
Supporting someone/people who are at least at arms length from EVF seems like it would be good asap. Relying on volunteers and good will to essentially cover for (at least perceived) mistakes seems bad.
Hey Joshua—can I ask you to clarify more what you mean about what kinds of people to support? I can imagine a few different things you might be pointing at being important.
Someone doing something similar to the community contact points at CEA but more clearly separated. Much like the people you list in the post as others who have volunteered to be named as contacts but are doing this voluntarily.
Got it—I have lots of thoughts here! Overall, the team has been wanting more contact people for a long time, and I’m definitely in favor of some versions of that (subject to considerations of tractability and prioritization). I still think there might be a few things you mean, but here are some thoughts.
You might mean something like “a different team doing the same work but with different funding and institutional affiliation”.
This might be good. It does bear coordination costs, and for instance it might mean we don’t see problematic patterns as easily. I’m not sure what us setting this up would look like; it takes a lot of trust to vouch for someone to handle tradeoffs and a variety of situations with sensitivity; in general if we found someone with the same skillset as people on our team who had free time, we’d want to hire them! (And this would allow syncing up on approach and process; with more separation, we might put ourselves in a position of vouching for someone where we couldn’t mentor or observe their process; that seems potentially problematic). This would take the kind of work and effort where likely we’d have to be quite sure it was the top priority for our team.
2. You might mean something like having people who aren’t connected to Community Health but pass on information to the Community Health team, perhaps to allow for:
Greater anonymity
Wider variety of people so that more of the community has someone they know and feel comfortable with
Non-CEA support, but still having important information about concerning behavior passed on.
Passing feedback to the Community Health team
Some considerations:
To some extent this exists in the form of contact people for city and university groups, and to some extent in the form of friends—if you have a friend who tells you a concerning story, and they’d rather you convey it to Community Health with some details anonymized, that is just fine by us (and happens pretty often)
We were already looking into programs to allow real-time textual anonymous communication before this incident; that might make some people feel more comfortable talking to us and seeing what thoughts, advice or ideas we have before or instead of deanonymizing themselves
Something I wish more people knew is that contact people are happy to just give advice about sticky situations; not every call has to be a “report”
If we pay people, they do have a connection to Community Health, so supporting this financially may undermine one of the goals. That said, it’s not a blocker; it could still be a good idea on net or we could try to get outside funding
It can be hard to convey stories with enough detail to make it clear why we should take certain actions without deanonymizing people
See the point above about trust required for vouching.
I’m not yet sure how many more people would get support via doing this, despite it seeming good—seems like we’ll learn from this situation
The strongest case for #1 is cases in which CH is conflicted out, either because the subject of the report is a friend of everyone in CH, is in their chain of command, or there are other reasons the reporter might reasonably conclude CH has a disqualifying conflict. Not only is that a bad situation for the reporter, it’s a bad situation to put people in CH in.
I could also argue for at least some sort of external involvement in any case involving alleged significant misconduct by a very senior leader.