It doesn’t seem right for “would never have been investigated.” My understanding is that the community health team looked into this. They talked to affected parties and came to some decision that didn’t call for a public apology or Owen stepping down. Instead, their “steps to take” included writing that post on power dynamics and probably(?) they made a judgment call of the sort “our impression is that Owen learned from mistakes and is very unlikely to do this again.” So, I’d imagine they resolved to keep an eye on things, but decided on no further actions otherwise.
[Edit1: Julia writes “I hope I would have eventually recognized there was more to do here, including telling the board, but it’s possible I wouldn’t have recognized this.” This suggests that maybe the team was overwhelmed with things happening and hadn’t conclusively finalized dealing with this situation before the TIME article came out.]
[Edit2: Oh, I now see that posters above probably meant “official investigation by experts” rather than “investigation by a team at an EA org.” I agree that it looks like this wouldn’t have happened.]
Then, the TIME article brought this up again and pressure mounted to hear more details about the incident and about the fact that the person mentioned is still active in the community, despite the description in the TIME piece sounding crazy and indefensible. And so here we are.
Personally, if we take Owen’s account at face value, I think the incident is bad and shouldn’t have happened, but it was a lot less bad than what I’d have expected based on the TIME piece account. Even so, subjective judgment calls about how much someone learned from mistakes are risky to rely on all by themselves. In this particular instance, I can sympathize with wanting to take a forgiving stance. One reason I was extremely surprised about this post and the circumstances behind it is because I knew Owen (not very closely, but it still felt like a strong impression) as someone who’s unusually committed to high integrity and modest and forthcoming about mistakes he might be making, etc. Still, there’s a strong case that there should be procedures that call for more “objective” actions when complaints of this sort come to light and are even corroborated (“corroborated” in the sense that Owen, given his apology, must have agreed about many facts of what happened, even if he highlighted things that the person who complained about him may not have highlighted or may have thought about differently). So, instead of just making a judgment call about whether the person learned the most from mistakes, I think it would’ve been more appropriate to make a public statement about the incident. This would’ve put more eyes on Owen’s behavior in this area and brought about the conditions for better accountability.
Personally, I think “removal from the board” wouldn’t necessarily be warranted if this had been handled differently at the time when it happened (but as I say further below, some kind of public statement and apology seemed warranted!). But I think it would’ve made sense to ask Owen to step down from mentorship-type roles?
I think that if we just looked at the specific actions, the measures taken should probably be more severe than I just described them. However, if we then add extra context and if I go with my best guess about everything that Owen was thinking and so on, I pretty much believe the account he gave in the apology.
Since things didn’t come out earlier, I want to say that I don’t feel like it’s good that basically nothing happened at the time. Even if the community health team has good judgment about these sorts of things (whether someone made genuine mistakes instead of deliberately using their position of power to push boundaries), it’s much safer for incentives and overall accountability if they draw public eyes on this in some way (perhaps keeping some measure of discretion). (Edit: Also conflict of interest concerns!) To help with that, it would be good if the “public eye” has enough nuance to distinguish cases like the one here from things that would be significantly worse, and not call for the most extreme punitive measures in all cases. My impression is that the EA community is probably good at preserving this sort of nuance (or at least was so before the recent series of polarizing scandals), even though I often see EA forum comments that I disagree with in one direction or the other – too lenient or too strict for my taste for a given situation.
it was a lot less bad than what I’d have expected based on the TIME piece account
From my personal perspective: While the additional context makes the interaction itself seem less bad, I think the fact that it involved Owen (rather than, say, a more tangentially involved or less influential community member) made it a lot worse than what I would have expected. In addition, this seems the firstsecond time (after this one*) I hear about a case that the community health team didn’t address forcefully enough, which wasn’t clear to me based on the Time article.
* edited based on feedback that someone sent me via DM, thank you
(edit: I think you acknowledge this elsewhere in your comment)
Yeah, I’ll note because the memory might slip away that my initial reaction to the TIME article paragraph about Owen was: - horror/disgust - hope that the person was not as central as implied in the text - (get distracted by my own work/life and allow the news to slip into the background of my mind, and allow the hope to transform into an implicit feeling that the person was, hopefully, not as central as Owen was) - have an unjustified implicit belief that the person is not core to EA - find out that that was wrong <-- I am here, and the only reason I can detect my previous implicit beliefs is from the current feeling of surprisal
Yeah, it being more pervasive and entangled with EA culture than I thought is one of my takeaways, and I’ve been spending some time to reflect and think about ways I could help improve things.
This isn’t a story about ‘sexual harassment’ because there was none / ‘sexual harassment’ is in fact widely and deeply rooted, as shown by this incident of ‘sexual harassment’.
I don’t think Owen did anything that requires more than a private apology and a suggestion from friends to be less of an idiot, and even that is only necessary because the people around him are idiots in a different way.
However, I accept that some people think that what he did was awful and reprehensible, and I agree with them that a tendency to behaviors of that sort is likely to be common.
Also, the phrase ‘sexual harassment’ is not a clear symbol pointing to a concept cluster that is structured the same in everyone’s mind, but in fact a muddy and politically contested thing that probably links to a different set of things in my head than yours.
Hence the request elsewhere in the comments for CEA to give a more precise definition of ‘sexual harassment’
It doesn’t seem right for “would never have been investigated.” My understanding is that the community health team looked into this. They talked to affected parties and came to some decision that didn’t call for a public apology or Owen stepping down. Instead, their “steps to take” included writing that post on power dynamics and probably(?) they made a judgment call of the sort “our impression is that Owen learned from mistakes and is very unlikely to do this again.” So, I’d imagine they resolved to keep an eye on things, but decided on no further actions otherwise.
[Edit1: Julia writes “I hope I would have eventually recognized there was more to do here, including telling the board, but it’s possible I wouldn’t have recognized this.” This suggests that maybe the team was overwhelmed with things happening and hadn’t conclusively finalized dealing with this situation before the TIME article came out.]
[Edit2: Oh, I now see that posters above probably meant “official investigation by experts” rather than “investigation by a team at an EA org.” I agree that it looks like this wouldn’t have happened.]
Then, the TIME article brought this up again and pressure mounted to hear more details about the incident and about the fact that the person mentioned is still active in the community, despite the description in the TIME piece sounding crazy and indefensible. And so here we are.
Personally, if we take Owen’s account at face value, I think the incident is bad and shouldn’t have happened, but it was a lot less bad than what I’d have expected based on the TIME piece account. Even so, subjective judgment calls about how much someone learned from mistakes are risky to rely on all by themselves. In this particular instance, I can sympathize with wanting to take a forgiving stance. One reason I was extremely surprised about this post and the circumstances behind it is because I knew Owen (not very closely, but it still felt like a strong impression) as someone who’s unusually committed to high integrity and modest and forthcoming about mistakes he might be making, etc. Still, there’s a strong case that there should be procedures that call for more “objective” actions when complaints of this sort come to light and are even corroborated (“corroborated” in the sense that Owen, given his apology, must have agreed about many facts of what happened, even if he highlighted things that the person who complained about him may not have highlighted or may have thought about differently). So, instead of just making a judgment call about whether the person learned the most from mistakes, I think it would’ve been more appropriate to make a public statement about the incident. This would’ve put more eyes on Owen’s behavior in this area and brought about the conditions for better accountability.
Personally, I think “removal from the board” wouldn’t necessarily be warranted if this had been handled differently at the time when it happened (but as I say further below, some kind of public statement and apology seemed warranted!). But I think it would’ve made sense to ask Owen to step down from mentorship-type roles?
I think that if we just looked at the specific actions, the measures taken should probably be more severe than I just described them. However, if we then add extra context and if I go with my best guess about everything that Owen was thinking and so on, I pretty much believe the account he gave in the apology.
Since things didn’t come out earlier, I want to say that I don’t feel like it’s good that basically nothing happened at the time. Even if the community health team has good judgment about these sorts of things (whether someone made genuine mistakes instead of deliberately using their position of power to push boundaries), it’s much safer for incentives and overall accountability if they draw public eyes on this in some way (perhaps keeping some measure of discretion). (Edit: Also conflict of interest concerns!) To help with that, it would be good if the “public eye” has enough nuance to distinguish cases like the one here from things that would be significantly worse, and not call for the most extreme punitive measures in all cases. My impression is that the EA community is probably good at preserving this sort of nuance (or at least was so before the recent series of polarizing scandals), even though I often see EA forum comments that I disagree with in one direction or the other – too lenient or too strict for my taste for a given situation.
From my personal perspective: While the additional context makes the interaction itself seem less bad, I think the fact that it involved Owen (rather than, say, a more tangentially involved or less influential community member) made it a lot worse than what I would have expected. In addition, this seems the
firstsecond time (after this one*) I hear about a case that the community health team didn’t address forcefully enough, which wasn’t clear to me based on the Time article.* edited based on feedback that someone sent me via DM, thank you
(edit: I think you acknowledge this elsewhere in your comment)
Yeah, I’ll note because the memory might slip away that my initial reaction to the TIME article paragraph about Owen was:
- horror/disgust
- hope that the person was not as central as implied in the text
- (get distracted by my own work/life and allow the news to slip into the background of my mind, and allow the hope to transform into an implicit feeling that the person was, hopefully, not as central as Owen was)
- have an unjustified implicit belief that the person is not core to EA
- find out that that was wrong <-- I am here, and the only reason I can detect my previous implicit beliefs is from the current feeling of surprisal
Could it also mean the sexual harassment problem is much wider and deeper rooted than we think?
Yeah, it being more pervasive and entangled with EA culture than I thought is one of my takeaways, and I’ve been spending some time to reflect and think about ways I could help improve things.
This isn’t a story about ‘sexual harassment’ because there was none / ‘sexual harassment’ is in fact widely and deeply rooted, as shown by this incident of ‘sexual harassment’.
Sorry I’m struggling to understand what this comment is saying. Can you reword it?
I don’t think Owen did anything that requires more than a private apology and a suggestion from friends to be less of an idiot, and even that is only necessary because the people around him are idiots in a different way.
However, I accept that some people think that what he did was awful and reprehensible, and I agree with them that a tendency to behaviors of that sort is likely to be common.
Also, the phrase ‘sexual harassment’ is not a clear symbol pointing to a concept cluster that is structured the same in everyone’s mind, but in fact a muddy and politically contested thing that probably links to a different set of things in my head than yours.
Hence the request elsewhere in the comments for CEA to give a more precise definition of ‘sexual harassment’
That’s what I was commenting on. I agree with your other points (which are arguably more important from a “what does this mean for EA?” perspective).
Ok, sorry in case that was a bit of a strawman!
Strongly agree with (both parts of) this.