Alexander Turner 🔸 comments on EA sexual harassment: Where’s the evidence we’re worse than baseline?

[Alexander Turner 🔸]

Agreed. I wrote one of the linked comments and don’t have reason to believe EA is worse than other areas.

there’s something strange about a community that advocates for reducing suffering and encourages moral ambition retreating into “well, what’s the baseline?” when sexual harassment comes up.

Agreed. “Let’s take all efficient moves to improve this bad situation” would be a nice response to hear, rather than “can you prove it’s worse than other places though?”. If Nathan’s argument is “there aren’t efficient moves left to take, we’ve entered diminishing returns” (as gestured at by “weigh the tradeoffs”), I think he should directly make that argument instead.

ETA: Here is my full comment that Nathan quoted. If anyone has a social-economics rebuttal, I’d be interested in hearing it. Whether or not EA is doing better than other communities, the dynamic I pointed out is bad:

I’ve repeatedly encountered the harmful notion that it is easy for victims to speak up; that they are immediately rallied behind, celebrated, and believed. This is not true. I was not rallied behind. I had to put in an unspeakable amount of effort for more than a year, and eventually invoke outside legal counsel, to see what I consider basic recognition.

I’ve heard this from female friends, I’ve read about this (e.g. in the TIME article), and I myself paid social costs in sharing a different kind of negative experience. Victims often pay significant social costs to talk about their experiences.

Community norms should not impose costs on sharing such information. I’m sorry you had to pay these costs, Frances. Thank you for speaking out. Hopefully this post decreases the cost in these communities. In fact, such important information should be socially subsidized, not taxed (since e.g. speaking out often requires reliving trauma, which is unpleasant; and most of the benefit is external).