I can’t shake the feeling this is a misidentification of the problem. I feel like people have been writing for years about how to make communities more diverse, inclusive, and safer for the people in them. The problem is not a lack of ideas that needs to be rectified by brainstorming—we have the information already. The problem seems to be that no one wants to act on this information.
I don’t know what kind of norm has yet to be stated that would convince people it’s bad to have an expert panel that’s just 5 white guys. I don’t know what kind of “norm” I need to explicitly articulate to make it clear that it’s not okay to come to a discussion of gender relations in EA and, as a man, open the discussion by asking how to hit on girls without it being creepy.
I get the feeling everyone wants to pay lip service to these values without actually addressing the problem (thus the great karma on this post with no comments actually replying to the content of it [although I also agree, in line with Vaidehi and a great Cards Against Humanity card, that Hell will freeze over before we have a sane and respectful discussion of gender and race on the internet]). But the problem is behavior. The behavior simply needs to change. We are past brainstorming. Stop doing the things that make EA spaces hard to be in.
Hi Isabel, thanks for commenting. I think your frustration is understandable, but I’m more optimistic than you about the usefulness of collecting experiences and examples in a place where people can easily refer back to them, and giving people a space to contribute their perspectives. It’s hard for any one person to have a full picture of the situation across many local communities in many countries; even the couple of examples you gave are useful for me in thinking about which interventions to prioritize. (Of course, to the extent that this has already been done, I’m happy to just fall back on that work rather than reinventing the wheel—please let me know if there are specific resources you think more people should see, and I’ll link them in the original post).
I also wanted to note that people who read the EA forum are a relatively small proportion of the people who go to EA meetups, attend EA events, and so on. So one of the intentions of my post was to better understand the best ways for the people reading this to spread the message from your comment more broadly.
I can’t shake the feeling this is a misidentification of the problem. I feel like people have been writing for years about how to make communities more diverse, inclusive, and safer for the people in them. The problem is not a lack of ideas that needs to be rectified by brainstorming—we have the information already. The problem seems to be that no one wants to act on this information.
I don’t know what kind of norm has yet to be stated that would convince people it’s bad to have an expert panel that’s just 5 white guys. I don’t know what kind of “norm” I need to explicitly articulate to make it clear that it’s not okay to come to a discussion of gender relations in EA and, as a man, open the discussion by asking how to hit on girls without it being creepy.
I get the feeling everyone wants to pay lip service to these values without actually addressing the problem (thus the great karma on this post with no comments actually replying to the content of it [although I also agree, in line with Vaidehi and a great Cards Against Humanity card, that Hell will freeze over before we have a sane and respectful discussion of gender and race on the internet]). But the problem is behavior. The behavior simply needs to change. We are past brainstorming. Stop doing the things that make EA spaces hard to be in.
Hi Isabel, thanks for commenting. I think your frustration is understandable, but I’m more optimistic than you about the usefulness of collecting experiences and examples in a place where people can easily refer back to them, and giving people a space to contribute their perspectives. It’s hard for any one person to have a full picture of the situation across many local communities in many countries; even the couple of examples you gave are useful for me in thinking about which interventions to prioritize. (Of course, to the extent that this has already been done, I’m happy to just fall back on that work rather than reinventing the wheel—please let me know if there are specific resources you think more people should see, and I’ll link them in the original post).
I also wanted to note that people who read the EA forum are a relatively small proportion of the people who go to EA meetups, attend EA events, and so on. So one of the intentions of my post was to better understand the best ways for the people reading this to spread the message from your comment more broadly.