One downside of having the bad-ness of say, sexual violence[1]be mitigated by their perceived impact,(how is the community health team actually measuring this? how good someone’s forum posts are? or whether they work at an EA org? or whether they are “EA leadership”?) when considering what the appropriate action should be (if this is happening) is that it plausibly leads to different standards for bad behaviour. By the community health team’s own standards, taking someone’s potential impact into account as a mitigating factor seems like it could increase the risk of harm to members of the community (by not taking sufficient action with the justification of perceived impact), while being more unfair to people who are accused of wrongdoing. To be clear, I’m basing this off the forum post, not any non-public information
Additionally, a common theme about basically every sexual violence scandal that I’ve read about is that there were (often multiple) warnings beforehand that were not taken seriously.
If there is a major sexual violence scandal in EA in the future, it will be pretty damning if the warnings and concerns were clearly raised, but the community health teamchose not to act because they decided it wasn’t worth the tradeoff against the person/people’s impact.
Another point is that people who are considered impactful are likely to be somewhat correlated with people who have gained respect and power in the EA space, have seniority or leadership roles etc. Given the role that abuse of power plays in sexual violence, we should be especially cautious of considerations that might indirectly favour those who have power.
More weakly, even if you hold the view that it is in fact the community health team’s role to “take the talent bottleneck seriously; don’t hamper hiring / projects too much” when responding to say, a sexual violence allegation, it seems like it would be easy to overvalue the bad-ness of the immediate action against the person’s impact, and undervalue the bad-ness of many more people opting to not get involved, or distance themselves from the EA movement because they perceive it to be an unsafe place for women, with unreliable ways of holding perpetrators accountable.
That being said, I think the community health team has an incredibly difficult job, and while they play an important role in mediating community norms and dynamics (and thus have corresponding amount of responsibility), it’s always easier to make comments of a critical nature than to make the difficult decisions they have to make. I’m grateful they exist, and don’t want my comment to come across like an attack of the community health team or its individuals!
While I agree that both sides are valuable, I agree with the anon here—I don’t think these tradeoffs are particularly relevant to a community health team investigating interpersonal harm cases with the goal of “reduc[ing] risk of harm to members of the community while being fair to people who are accused of wrongdoing”.
One downside of having the bad-ness of say, sexual violence[1]be mitigated by their perceived impact,(how is the community health team actually measuring this? how good someone’s forum posts are? or whether they work at an EA org? or whether they are “EA leadership”?) when considering what the appropriate action should be (if this is happening) is that it plausibly leads to different standards for bad behaviour. By the community health team’s own standards, taking someone’s potential impact into account as a mitigating factor seems like it could increase the risk of harm to members of the community (by not taking sufficient action with the justification of perceived impact), while being more unfair to people who are accused of wrongdoing. To be clear, I’m basing this off the forum post, not any non-public information
Additionally, a common theme about basically every sexual violence scandal that I’ve read about is that there were (often multiple) warnings beforehand that were not taken seriously.
If there is a major sexual violence scandal in EA in the future, it will be pretty damning if the warnings and concerns were clearly raised, but the community health team chose not to act because they decided it wasn’t worth the tradeoff against the person/people’s impact.
Another point is that people who are considered impactful are likely to be somewhat correlated with people who have gained respect and power in the EA space, have seniority or leadership roles etc. Given the role that abuse of power plays in sexual violence, we should be especially cautious of considerations that might indirectly favour those who have power.
More weakly, even if you hold the view that it is in fact the community health team’s role to “take the talent bottleneck seriously; don’t hamper hiring / projects too much” when responding to say, a sexual violence allegation, it seems like it would be easy to overvalue the bad-ness of the immediate action against the person’s impact, and undervalue the bad-ness of many more people opting to not get involved, or distance themselves from the EA movement because they perceive it to be an unsafe place for women, with unreliable ways of holding perpetrators accountable.
That being said, I think the community health team has an incredibly difficult job, and while they play an important role in mediating community norms and dynamics (and thus have corresponding amount of responsibility), it’s always easier to make comments of a critical nature than to make the difficult decisions they have to make. I’m grateful they exist, and don’t want my comment to come across like an attack of the community health team or its individuals!
(commenting in personal capacity etc)
used as an umbrella term to include things like verbal harassment. See definition here.