Kathy Forth was proven right though: EA/rationalism does have a sexual assault problem. A few weeks after her suicide note was made public it was revealed that in fact CFAR personnel had in fact known about the accusations against Brent Dill and had refused to make them public.
I find Scott Alexander’s conduct in this affair extremely questionable. Despite the fact that Brent had revealed his manipulative nature on SSC , Scott effectively introduced Brent to the Bay Area community, and AFAIK he has not made a blog post publicly calling out Brent Dill as he did with Kathy Forth.
I have documented a timeline of relevant events below:
April 18, 2014 Brent Dill comments “I suppose ‘reactionary’ is just the closest affiliation I can latch onto; my actual worldview is a weird sort of nihilistic, depersonalized, ultra-authoritarian fascism straight out of 1984, so it’s kinda hard to find people to flag tribal affiliation towards. 🙁” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/18/confounder-of-the-day-how-sexy-your-parents-were/
June 3, 2014 Scott Alexander suggests to Brent Dill that he should move to the Bay Area. Elsewhere in the thread, Brent Dill says “Well, I have a LOT of medical debt, but I am also a pretty good computer programmer. On the gripping hand, I’m not conventionally hirable due to mental instability. 🙁” and “I left Phoenix Arizona for here after burning out all of the Phoenix community’s goodwill with my mental health drama.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/03/southeast-michigan-meetup-68/
August 10, 2014 Brent Dill says “manipulation is my only natural skill, and the one that I’ve honed the most. (Remember, narcissistic upbringing; probably a lot of unpleasantly narcissistic tendencies in myself as well.)”, “I completely get and agree with Neoreaction, my only objection is about scale. In the world I want to live in, I am a Sovereign King of my own household, where the only options are Obedience and Exit.”, ” I lived with a harem of attractive, submissive women who called me their ‘Master’ and pretty much voluntarily structured their lives around making me happy.” in SSC comments section https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/09/friendship-is-still-countersignaling/
Kathy Forth was NOT right. How can you say that when she falsely accused someone of sexual assault, and tried to smear their character in her own way when proven wrong? She was demonstrably wrong. Please just let the dead rest. No one will like it, including Kathy’s family and friends, if this gets brought up again. Honestly it is not appropriate that you posted her suicide letter which has falsehoods within, and we know how drama hungry the EA community is. I personally witnessed the pain and chaos her delusions prompted her to cause and it does not need to be repeated. Many people witnessed that pain but mostly we don’t talk about it out of respect for the dead, because it is so evident she was unwell not malicious. It’s very sad. If you don’t see her claims constantly being refuted out in the open that’s why. Most correction about Kathy happens over DM so as to not publicly embarrass her memory. But it’s been 5 years and people on the EA Forum need to stop giving her falsehoods platform in your comments. So now I am writing this public response.
BTW you start off saying “EA/rationalism does have a sexual assault problem”. Actually, this still remains to be proven that EA has issues with sexual misconduct (let alone assault) worse than other, say, millenial-coded, social communities. Yes there was a big blowup with Brent Dill and Vassar 5 years ago. Appalling stuff. But I fail to see how this necessarily translates to the average EA’s experiences. As someone who has spent time in many social scenes (rave, burning man, nerd, gamer, poly, startup, animal liberation, spiritual/woo, and university social scenes to name a few) blowups happen everywhere thanks to the worst men. Women also have bad experiences everywhere. Unfortunately it is part of being a woman in a coed space. EA’s social scene is very respectful/boundary-respecting toward women in my experience, and their reporting processes are good (even Kathy praised the reporting systems of EA/CEA). Is there room for improvement? Almost definitely, like anywhere else. I hope to see more improvement. But in my opinion EA does not have a noteworthy sexual misconduct problem in 2023. Let alone an assault problem.
Just my opinion based on my own experience. But it is just as valid a data point as anyone else’s. If you are going to share stories, you could share the stories of women who have not experienced harassment too. Pushing back on this salacious narrative does not mean dismissing women’s reports btw. We EAs should take reports extremely seriously. And I expect most reports will be true or mostly true. But we should also refrain from labelling the whole diverse community as being plagued with a “sexual assault problem” because some women have had problems. Men do troubling things in every community. Reports are extremely important so we can attend to those specific people and situations, but they tell us almost nothing about frequency/endemicness of harassment within the broader community. Hopefully we get broader data soon.
Here’s an open letter to Vitalik Buterin discussing miricult.com, the donations from Jeffrey Epstein, and other things (if the facebook discussion mentioned in the link is real, it’s pretty damning):
I really can’t overstate how important it is for there to be answer about what happened with miricult.com, but all I really know is that no one seems to be willing to talk about it.
I have read all that before. I really have to wonder if you actually read the Facebook threads, because that isn’t damning at all. Especially not against Yudkowsky.. it’s actually overtly vindicating of him. And it is intellectually dishonest that you even link the archived miricult website when even the medium piece and the Facebook posts malign it as essentially a highly inaccurate hit-piece. So, your second link contradicts the first. (The first is so nutty it’s not believable anyway it’s very pizzagate-ish).
And tbh, the facebook threads themselves discredit much of the second link where they are ironically posted within as proof of the claims it tries to make.
Also it is funny that if you read those Facebook threads, Michael Vassar is named as a primary source for some of those claims they discuss whether or not they could they be true. And Vassar is actually one of the few people that is agreed to be a sexual harasser/assaulter and serious agent of chaos. He is one of the men RuffleJax names in your 3rd and 4th links. So, your third and fourth links which implicate Vassar as a bad actor, in so doing also discredit the 1st and 2nd about MIRI involvement in statutory rape/blackmail/etc.
As for the RuffleJax tweet allegations, yes serious stuff. I can’t comment on the Rettek stuff because I am not in the rationality community to the extent to know, but Vassar has been discussed on here before and has been banned from EA and SlateStarCodex events for quite a while. Please read that link. Plus RuffleJax admits that the only reason she included EA in her tweets, not only rationality, was out of respect for Kathy naming EA. RuffleJax only had issues in rationality, but it is proven that Kathy was wrong about EAs so there was never any reason for RuffleJax to mention EA and doing so was a mistake on her part tbh. Relatedly, I wish you too would not speak of EA and rationality as though they are interchangeable.
That same Vassar discussion also is a good enough rebuttal to the Time piece, though there is a lot more to be concerned about with the veracity and relevance if you dig for anything that doesn’t already confirm your ideas that EA has an abnormally high rate of sexual assaulters:
Questions like, were any women with recent experiences who spoke to journalists actually interacting with EAs, or were they interacting with startup and coliving people in the bay and assigning the responsibility to EAs? As 2023 has progressed, people have become a lot more aware that EA does not necessarily include E/acc and other random bay area armchair-philosophizer, polyamorous, and AI-obsessed types. But tbh most people could be forgiven for being mistaken about this when the TIME journalist was doing interviews. More questions you might care about could be: Had the EA community health team handled those complaints already to the victim’s satisfaction? Are perpetrators cast out and what are the banning procedures? Should it matter for EA’s reputation that the EA community had not been given the chance to handle some of those complaints? (Some women spoke to TIME without ever having told anyone of the behavior they experienced and I think this matters, because men do sexual misconduct everywhere behind closed doors. So I think it is more how a community handles misconduct when reported that should matter for that community’s reputation. How else would other EAs not experiencing harassment know about it? Reports are so essential). And is this quantity of complaints one can dig up unusually large for a community of this size and diversity, especially if you allow yourself to go back 5 or more years in collecting reports? (In my experience no this is not an unusual quantity of complaints going back 5 years)
It feels like you are just throwing everything you can think of to prove your preconceptions, but the intellectually honest thing would be to pick the things you think are valid only. Your links either contradict each other (as with the first 4) or are redundant and outdated (as Vassar is implicated strongly in both RuffleJax’s tweets and the Time piece and has been dealt with) and actually paint a picture of a hit-piece not a serious critique or expose at all.
I don’t want to comment much on what did or didn’t happen. What I will comment on myself is this: Those instances where we can actually identify the alleged bad actors were a long time ago:
The miricult stuff was alleged to have happened 10 years ago (and I’m not sure this relates to EA anyway tbh). Personally I don’t find them believable allegations anyway. But I’ll leave it at 10 years.
The RuffleJax/Vassar/Rettek stuff was alleged 5 years ago and has been dealt with, and has nothing to do with EA by her own admission.
The one thing in the Time piece that was definitely attached to EA and not Vassar or startup/AI culture (the OCB stuff) was also 5 years ago and has been dealt with. In fact the woman had told CEA that she was satisfied with CEA’s handling prior to the TIME piece being written. The dynamics were also quite a lot more socially complicated than it was made out to be in the Time piece.
If your claim is still that EA and/or rationality has a sexual harassment or assault problem today, I’m sorry but your data just does not prove that in the slightest. If you disagree with this still then I really don’t know what to say. Maybe, “encourage women to make more reports that include date and names?” Because right now it is impossible to say what has been going on in recent years. It’s always going to be harder to prove a negative (that sexual misconduct doesn’t happen much in EA or rationality), but at least if reporting were the norm, lacking recent reports would be a good signal. Right now it’s hard to say if it means that misconduct instances or low, or just that women were avoiding reporting and wanted to exit the community asap.
It’s funny because back in 2018 I was extremely hard on the rats about the Brent Dill stuff. Now 5 years later I’m the one who is reminding everyone that time has passed and it’s possible things changed. I witnessed the rat community wake up to abuses and people really started paying a lot more attention to twisted dynamics. I am actually really hopeful that not only have things gotten better, but that EA (and maybe even rationality!!) is a more respectful place for women than other counterfactual communities. Again, it looks like we will have better data soon. But your links are not good data at all that there is a current issue. I don’t understand the rush to condemn an entire diverse community, almost every one of whom cares deeply about sexual misconduct as much as anyone else who, say, read that TIME piece. You should withhold judgement just a bit longer.
Also it is funny that if you read those Facebook threads, Michael Vassar is named as a primary source for some of those claims they discuss whether or not they could they be true.
Read the facebook thread again and don’t equivocate. Vassar was the primary source only for the claim that MIRI gave into blackmail. Vassar was not the source for the claims of statutory rape.
The comment that says “I am confident that some of the things on the Miri cult website have nonzero truth to them” was not from Vassar. The discussions about whether the statue of limitations still applies did not involve Vassar either.
So yeah, I think the question of whether Yudkowsky is a pedophile (or “ephebophile”, to use Yudkowsky’s preferred term) does relate to EA, because his opinion seems to hold a lot of weight in this community.
I’d say Vassar was a primary source for the salaciousness of the wording of the whole situation. Which is what matters if you are going to say it is damning. Because, surely you don’t think a 17yo who consented and is still in the community 10 years later who has shown no apparent problem looking back on it, is that big of a deal?
Did you know that in every European country and 38⁄50 US states the legal age of sexual consent is 17 or below?
Don’t you think this makes 18 more of a legal quirk than a boundary on which to park your moral disgust reactor? Now I personally like the age of consent being high because it makes taking legal action extremely easy in case people behave badly. It means people should behave carefully. And I think it is dumb and often emotionally risky to have sex with a 17 yo. But dumb is not the same as unethical, and often emotionally risky is not the same as always emotionally risky. From what I have heard elsewhere, that person was one month from turning 18, and they weren’t like, plucked off the street for having a sexy body or something. It seems everyone knew each other and had been friends/friendly for months. I’m not seeing proof of abuse of power or objectification going on.
FWIW you can literally ask people for details as I have done before now. These are real people who had the experiences you are gossiping about. 10 years ago. I have never understood this desire to gossip rather than actually do something meaningful to root out and address problems. I think if you wouldn’t have the guts to approach the now-27yo or someone else you think might have been involved, that is probably your conscience telling you “ah tbh you are overstepping and you know it isn’t really a real issue” in which case you shouldn’t have the guts to spread their private info on internet forums. It really reads to me as pretending something was a big deal that you really know was not. If you really think someone was abused there (and especially if you think that risk remains today!) please reach out to some relevant parties. I would applaud you for putting your effort where your mouth is.
So anyway I still think it is not damning. And even if it were damning, you have no idea who it was. You have no idea if that person whoever it was still even works at MIRI. It almost def wasn’t Yudkowsky according to that thread. So why are you using that to support to your thesis that EA has problems today? Very strange. I’m all in support of rooting out bad behavior toward women or minors. But your chain of reasoning does not hold to support such a grand conclusion about a community of tens of thousands of people across dozens of cities. It does not even hold to support the claim that MIRI has an issue. It’s been 10 years. In case it isn’t obvious, I’m not dying on the hill that nothing bad happened. I have only even responded to you again and again because I am under the impression you are trying to prove that EA has a problem with sexual misconduct today.
As for the rest of your comment… It’s super weird you are tracking this all down about Yud. It has absolutely nothing to do with your original thesis and it is moving the goalposts, for a new goal which I’m not even sure what it might be. If you don’t like Yudkowsky, just say that. You are free to say that. You can say you think Yudkowsky is a dick, or a jerk, or is wrong about things.* What you are not allowed to do is take your feelings about someone, feelings based of of cherrypicked pieces from an extremely prolific writer, and use those feelings for motivated reasoning to share those cherrypicked bits as suggestion that that person has abused children or teens, and then even further, use that as proof that the community he is a part of has a drastic sexual assault or harassment problem. TO MAKE THOSE CLAIMS IS SO WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE AND FAR-FETCHED IT IS ESSENTIALLY SLANDEROUS. And if you aren’t making those claims, I have no idea what you are trying to say tbh.
If I were you I would really ask yourself what you are trying to do here. Is it help women? If so, how is what you are doing helping? What could you do that is more helpful for women, that doesn’t just leave a bunch of chaos and misinformation in your wake about people (EAs, including EA women who try to address sexual misconduct) who don’t deserve it?
I will not be responding to further comments. I only expect more gish gallop from you. I warn everyone reading this to significantly downgrade their trust in what you write next in this thread. To the extent a reader can agree I have refuted your first-choice arguments, and your second-choice, and then your third-choice, I highly doubt your 4th and 5th choice set of gish gallops will suddenly be intellectually honest and prove your original thesis. Which again, is all I’m here for. Not dying on the hill that nothing bad ever happened, obviously. I actually view that claim as an impossibility, because I think crappy men occasionally do bad things to women in every coed community.
*FWIW Yud is right though that pedophilia is different than ephebophilia. [[Edit 1: IDK why he wrote that and neither do you. For all we know, he could have been saying “Inb4 any edgelords reply that pedophilia isn’t inherently harm-causing. If you believe that, you must be thinking of ephebophilia and regardless of what I think, I refuse to have this conversation today. Reminder that I’m talking about pedophilia, not ephebophilia.” And we don’t even know if he meant ephebophilia in the sense of “an insatiable fetish” or “the possibility to feel some attraction for some teens.”
But no matter why he wrote it, or in what sense he meant that term, I agree with his statement. E and P are NOT the same.]] It’s disgusting to speak as though attraction to or sex with a 17yo is the same as attraction to or sex with a 12yo, 8yo, or 4yo. Ephebophilia even includes 18 and 19 year-olds so you aren’t even necessary venturing into illegal territory. If you equivocate E with P, then I claim you are nothing more than a moral relativist robot who bases morality on the letter of whatever local law you happen to exist under, and doesn’t understand what is truly twisted about sex with children. I’m actually angry that you’d try to corner me in this discussion as being the one with the unacceptable opinion if I agree with Yud’s obviously correct opinion there. Everyone agrees with that around the world. Which is why 17 and even 16 years old are very, very common legal ages of consent. Much more so than age 18, which is a relatively uncommon legal age of consent. About 25% of countries/states have a legal age of sexual consent that is 18 or older. And the remaining 75% have 17 or under. I think there are valid reasons to have the law at 18 or higher, but they are not that potential sex with, let alone attraction to, a 17yo is objectively wrong. They are more to add strength to a potential victim’s toolkit. I don’t think it makes sense for someone else (you) to yell statutory rape regarding a consenting 17 year old. Only the victim themselves doing so makes sense to me, if they are that old at time of consent. If someone thinks they were taken advantage of at 17yo, when reflecting years later, let them take it to court or their community under statutory rape. And let everyone in our culture be aware this is a thing that can happen. I want everyone to be careful and screw them if they were careless enough to cause a problem for someone down the line. Support people if they come forward, but if not, mind your business I’d say, and don’t go imagining coercive cultures that you’ve got no proof of. I realize it might sound salacious in a PC culture, but please get yourself together and realize that once in a while a 17 year old will strongly desire to have sex and be able to meaningfully consent to sex. Most other countries, states, and people understand that.
[[Edit 2: I just want to make it very clear that if someone came forward unhappy with their 17yo experiences at the hands of older people, I would support them in taking retributive action. Problems can obviously occur in those types of arrangements. But I still don’t expect a case from 10 years ago to be proof of broader problems today. I have seen and experienced way too much sexual misconduct by men to believe that episodes ten years ago(and prior to the Me Too Movement too, when I witnessed a lot of men “wake up” about this stuff and become better at policing their communities)should prompt us to typecast and trash an org, community, or subculture today. I’d have to throw the whole world out, and I promise I’m not overdramatizing when I say that.]]
I don’t know these people, so I can’t speak to the veracity of any incident, but I’m a little worried about the passage here:
[[Edit 2: I just want to make it very clear that if someone came forward unhappy with their 17yo experiences at the hands of older people, I would support them in taking retributive action. Problems can obviously occur in those types of arrangements. But I still don’t expect a case from 10 years ago to be proof of broader problems today. I have seen and experienced way too much sexual misconduct by men to believe that episodes ten years ago(and prior to the Me Too Movement too, when I witnessed a lot of men “wake up” about this stuff and become better at policing their communities)should prompt us to typecast and trash an org, community, or subculture today. I’d have to throw the whole world out, and I promise I’m not overdramatizing when I say that.]]
I think we need to be careful with statements like this. It can take many years, or even entire lifetimes, for bad actors to be outed. You can think of famous examples like Bill cosby or jimmy saville here, who ran free for decades before their actions were exposed.
“we haven’t heard about an incident for ten years” does not necessarily mean that a group doesn’t still have a problem. They could have just gotten better at hiding it.
I do think that groups and even individuals that were previously sketchy can get better. I was in a group that I believe successfully eliminated it’s sexual misconduct problem. But we did so proactively, by kicking people out and instituting preventative measures. I think some parts of EA have done this and are following best practices, but I am concerned about others, in particular the Bay Area rationalists, who it seems (purely from a biased outside perspective) have been far too dismissive of allegations like the time article. I would be happy to be proven wrong about this!
You and I don’t disagree. Which is why I ended my prior two comments with calls for patience and links to a survey so we can get better data. I feel like I touched on that throughout but my point wasn’t to make an active claim about the community, it was to get someone else to stop making active claims backed up with tripe.
Honestly, I am frustrated by this comment. It reveals to me that I’m not sure what I can say to keep from being misunderstood. I added in that edit you quote as a way of trying to say something very similar to what you have just said. I was acknowledging that there still could have been a problem, despite all my talk about 17yo consent. And I was acknowledging that things can take years to come out, that is how these things can happen, so even though it has been a decade, I would support if something came out. I added in that edit out of raw fear that people would misunderstand me and I would get cancelled. But somehow you have taken that edit as proof of something very different, almost the opposite, the opinion that “if we haven’t heard about an incident for ten years, that means that a group doesn’t still have a problem.” That is an opinion that I don’t hold, and yeah which I could be unduly cancelled for, so I guess my edit got me into hotter water. Sigh.
Again, I don’t think it’s impossible that something bad occurred. But if you read the FB thread, the one now-27 yo (then 25 I think) remarks on it in a very unperturbed fashion and also claims they were the only minor. That was the more important thing that made it “not damning”. And less so the time gap, although the two bits look strong put together I guess. IMO at this point it is violating privacy to assume bad things happen and go spreading such links.
And again, I don’t think it’s impossible there is a current problem worse than other communities.[1] Or that the group doesn’t “still” have a problem.[2] I agree, there could be “a [bigger than average] problem”. I just think there is very, very poor proof of this. And I think you and I would agree that a problem ten years ago, if it was a problem, when you don’t even know who it was or if they still at work at the same org or in the movement, is generally very bad proof that there is a noteworthy problem today. You might say “sure but it would be weak proof if it was reported as a problem retroactively!” Would it? Because I promise you I can walk into any longrunnning large social community and ask them if they had a problem with any man doing messed up things to women in the past ten years, and the answer will be yes. Especially if that community is tens of thousands of people, and especially if you go back to the founding most-casual years of that community before systems inevitably get put in place. Honestly, I’m having a hard time imagining that even, say, Rotary Club, has been exempt in the past decade. They just don’t have a culture of airing grievances publicly, which is EA’s bread and butter.
So nothing I have seen, in the density of complaints I have seen over time, including even if that consensual statutory incident was actually problematic, proves or disproves the idea that EA could have a big problem. Thomas was making a positive claim of a big problem, which is why my focus on trying to bring back neutrality could perhaps be misconstrued as arguing for the opposite claim. People are used to seeing two opposite claims duking it out, not just someone trying to return neutrality. So, to make my position abundantly clear, I am not arguing for any particular claim except sharing my own experience as a data point, and I am trying to get other people to stop using bad evidence to back up claims. And using bad evidence naturally means that the claim won’t hold up well when you look close, if that poor evidence is all or most of what you have. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to prove the opposite of the claim, it means they set up their argument that badly.
Does EA have a big problem? It’s hard to prove one way or another, and it has not been proven. But we will have more data soon. Until then, I would like to remind critics of what definitely matters if they are going to make claims about our community today as though their claims are the unobjectifiable truth: women’s safety today. That is essentially the only evidence that definitely matters if the claim is not “EA or rationality used to have a problem”. We should use 5 years past, 10 years past, suspicion of problems to do more digging into whether EA has a current major problem and if so, how our recent systems that focus on sexual misconduct have been inadequate. Which is indeed what is being done.
Please keep in mind, it is extremely stressful to write the types of comments I wrote above. I do it to try to protect real people and our very real movement from unwarranted hasty kneejerk cancellation, which derails lives, waylays futures, and causes emotional health crises for those effected. Unfortunately, I am well aware that while doing so, I risk such cancellation myself, which is very scary and necessitates (IMO) me writing a cringe novel so people can fully understand the context of my words and not come after me/ruin my future. But the more words I write, the more sentences I create which also demand perfection or risk being nitpicked And people interpret things in different ways, or forget points I make if I haven’t revisited it in the last few paragraphs. It would be a lot nicer if people on this forum would afford some grace to those of us who take on this reputational risk for the good of others in the community (and under our real names, so it actually means something). If I saw someone share a letter that was proven to falsely accuse Titotal, I would step in for you too. And wouldn’t it annoy you, perhaps even greatly concern you, if, after a defense of you had been mounted, saying validly “we don’t know there was a problem here”, then someone comes in and says “but there still might be a problem tho”? Like, yes, but I just want it to sink in with an audience that attacking others, posting proven falsehoods, and making grand unsupported claims about these things is not okay, and let that stand on it’s own. I really think EAs should stick up for ourselves and each other here.
A note to forum readers in general: Instead of trying to pick everything apart on the defensive side, where I/people like me are simply trying to add neutrality back in and police interpersonal decency so as to prevent slander and privacy-violations, you could pick apart the other side. The side that initially tries to make active (not neutral) claims which they “prove” with blatant falsehoods, outlandishly farfetched speculation, and uncalled-for judgements on people/the movement who are multiple steps removed from theoretical or actual bad situations. I wait a good bit of time usually from when I see an unacceptable comment, but hardly anyone ever steps in. If anyone thinks they can do it better, please do. But right now I have to wonder if I’m one of the few who notices and cares that journalists and people with pitchforks sometimes hang out here, and based on noticing that risk, does time-urgent comms in response to potentially-damaging comments.[3] We should not expect downvotes and disagreevotes to stop journalists or people with pitchforks—they can just DM the person who got downvoted or copypaste anyway. They can easily use that as proof that EAs just don’t want to hear “valid” critiques. The truth was that the critiques were not valid, but people will never know unless EA Forum users like you and me respond. Journalists can share the truth if they want, but I can’t be the only one who no longer expects journalists to figure out what is true let alone what true things are relevant to a grand thesis. In that case, someone needs to do the factchecking and, frankly, critical thinking for such comments/posts on the spot before gish gallops and the like snowball. This is why I responded to the Kathy Forth stuff and so on and so on to whatever might have slanderous aspects or I see as unfair to others. You can do this too. Please.
I am sorry for going off here Titotal, but I really don’t need the feedback that “we need to be more careful with statements like this” or “X does not mean Y”. I was very careful. And I know that X does not mean Y. It is already nightmare fuel for me that I had that conversation with Thomas all through the weekend, and I tried very hard for many hours, and I only did so for the good of others. Maybe focus on the other side to be careful with their statements. If you want to add or highlight another point, it would be nicer if you check for what I think in the thread, or ask a question of what I really meant, or frame it as a heads up to the audience, rather than (apparently) try to correct me on the one thing in thousands of words you think I might not have gotten.
Okay I admit I do have strong expectation that EA does not have more assault than other communities, which was the original claim I was pushing back against, but that is still just my belief and I’m still trying to focus on data and wait for more to come out
Although I will say that if we have a Bill Cosby in our community, someone who would be doing ongoing bad things for many years and still today, it was probably Brent Dill or Michael Vassar. People are looking for these types now.
I’m sure some people notice and care but don’t have the time. I’m more puzzled that lots of people do seem to have the time to comment on community drama, but don’t seem to notice or care enough to comment when blatantly unreasonably negative claims about others (and our movement) get made that could very easily end up as another hit piece or viral twitter thread that meaningfully makes lives worse, both our lives (EA’s) and the lives of the people/animals we try to help via our movement, while being unwarranted. We could find out claims are unwarranted, but it would be too late to take it back after people’s reputations are trashed
For the public record: I was not trying to “call you out”, I don’t think you are harmful, and I recognize how emotionally exhausting it is to discuss these subjects. I think Thomas was trying to throw out as much negative things as possible in a way that was fairly counterproductive, and I dont blame you for trying to rebut that.
I felt the need to write the comment because I think it is still incredibly important to get this right, and not let reactions to attacks let you go too far in the other direction. If you find out someone did something sketchy ten years ago, it is evidence that they are sketchy now. Not complete and total “cancellable” evidence that overwrites the rules of charity and society, but evidence nonetheless.
By pure statistical chance, even if it was the the best community in the world re harrassment. there are probably still some people being abused. They need to know that they can come out, and that their claims will be treated fairly and not minimised for bad reasons. That is more important than anything I can write here. And for the record, I don’t think you would do that, but unfortunately others might, and I have seen that before here.
EDIT: Somewhat in mitigation, having checked one of the threads Scott Alexander did tell Brent “you are creeping me out, tone it down” the first time he started talking about being a fascist who loves domination and torture. Not that mitigating in my view.
It’s kind of the fault of the original post bringing up an unrelated case in the first place.
Also, frankly, I think it is always worth people being made to face the discomfort of the fact that someone widely regarded as a beloved community leader was prepared to ask people to help someone out after they boasted on his blog about their fascism and misogyny and manipulativeness. Worth being only dubiously on topic for that.
I do object to the idea that someone who made accusations against multiple specific individuals is vindicated just because one of those individuals was guilty or the community they were part of has a bad record on abuse. Either they made at least some false accusations or they didn’t. If they did (something I have no knowledge of or opinion about either way), they aren’t somehow really correct anyway, no matter what else is true.
Kathy Forth was proven right though: EA/rationalism does have a sexual assault problem. A few weeks after her suicide note was made public it was revealed that in fact CFAR personnel had in fact known about the accusations against Brent Dill and had refused to make them public.
I find Scott Alexander’s conduct in this affair extremely questionable. Despite the fact that Brent had revealed his manipulative nature on SSC , Scott effectively introduced Brent to the Bay Area community, and AFAIK he has not made a blog post publicly calling out Brent Dill as he did with Kathy Forth.
I have documented a timeline of relevant events below:
April 18, 2014 Brent Dill comments “I suppose ‘reactionary’ is just the closest affiliation I can latch onto; my actual worldview is a weird sort of nihilistic, depersonalized, ultra-authoritarian fascism straight out of 1984, so it’s kinda hard to find people to flag tribal affiliation towards. 🙁” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/18/confounder-of-the-day-how-sexy-your-parents-were/
June 3, 2014 Scott Alexander suggests to Brent Dill that he should move to the Bay Area. Elsewhere in the thread, Brent Dill says “Well, I have a LOT of medical debt, but I am also a pretty good computer programmer. On the gripping hand, I’m not conventionally hirable due to mental instability. 🙁” and “I left Phoenix Arizona for here after burning out all of the Phoenix community’s goodwill with my mental health drama.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/03/southeast-michigan-meetup-68/
August 10, 2014 Brent Dill says “manipulation is my only natural skill, and the one that I’ve honed the most. (Remember, narcissistic upbringing; probably a lot of unpleasantly narcissistic tendencies in myself as well.)”, “I completely get and agree with Neoreaction, my only objection is about scale. In the world I want to live in, I am a Sovereign King of my own household, where the only options are Obedience and Exit.”, ” I lived with a harem of attractive, submissive women who called me their ‘Master’ and pretty much voluntarily structured their lives around making me happy.” in SSC comments section https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/09/friendship-is-still-countersignaling/
September 19, 2014 Scott Alexander makes a blog post, asking for people to help Brent Dill move to the Bay Area https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/19/open-thread-5-my-best-friends-threadding/
Date unknown, 2014 Brent Dill joins a Berkeley rationalist group house https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent
November 11, 2017 “An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential” posted by Kathy Forth https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gFpaHk2aKq2jGijnd/an-exploration-of-sexual-violence-reduction-for-effective
November 17, 2017 “Sexual Violence Risk Reduction—Let’s Do Tracking!” posted by Kathy Forth https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/suiTJeeEMnv7aPu8p/sexual-violence-risk-reduction-let-s-do-tracking
January, 2018 (precise date unknown) ACDC receives report of Brent Dill’s abuse from a former partner of his https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent
March 14, 2018 “EA Survey: Sexual Harassment Questions—Feedback Requested” posted by Kathy Forth https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3oukNayDZXWLzte7c/ea-survey-sexual-harassment-questions-feedback-requested
March 17, 2018 Kathy Forth commits suicide
April 15, 2018 announcement of Kathy Forth’s death https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s93F5JmhCxKDxWukD/remembering-the-passing-of-kathy-forth#
April 2018 (precise date unknown) ACDC recommends not banning Brent Dill from CFAR events, CFAR leadership follows this recommendation https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent
June 18, 2018 Kathy Forth suicide letter published https://medium.com/@itai.ilyich/if-i-cant-have-me-no-one-can-kathleen-rebecca-forth-born-april-11-1980-31c49ed15121
June 22, 2018 9:05 PM Scott Alexander publishes a response to Kathy Forth suicide letter, accusing Kathy of false accusations of sexual assault https://web.archive.org/web/20221111065956/https://www.tumblr.com/slatestarscratchpad/175157697076/content-warning-sexual-harassment-suicide-i
September 17, 2018 mittenscautious publishes “Brent, a warning” https://medium.com/@mittenscautious/brent-a-warning-38e447c55ab0
September 19, 2018 mittenscautious publishes “Warning 2”, <real name redacted>’s account of Brent https://medium.com/@mittenscautious/warning-2-153ed9f5f1f3
September 19, 2018 mittenscautious publishes “Warning 3”, <real name redacted>’s account of Brent https://medium.com/@mittenscautious/warning-3-8097bb6747b1
September 21, 2018 8:22 AM CFAR internal memo regarding Brent Dill is leaked https://pastebin.com/fzwYfDNq
September 21, 2018 CFAR temporarily bans Brent Dill, publishes apology https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2018/acdc
September 21, 2018 r/slatestarcodex mods remove all references to Brent Dill, including external links to medium posts https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9ghlh1/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_17/e6e9sbn/?context=999
November 23, 2018 CFAR publishes further update regarding Brent Dill, specifying that he is permanently banned from CFAR events https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2018/further-updates
February 17, 2019 Bay Area REACH declines to make investigation of Brent Dill public, ostensibly to avoid legal liability https://archive.is/6kyIM
Kathy Forth was NOT right. How can you say that when she falsely accused someone of sexual assault, and tried to smear their character in her own way when proven wrong? She was demonstrably wrong. Please just let the dead rest. No one will like it, including Kathy’s family and friends, if this gets brought up again. Honestly it is not appropriate that you posted her suicide letter which has falsehoods within, and we know how drama hungry the EA community is. I personally witnessed the pain and chaos her delusions prompted her to cause and it does not need to be repeated. Many people witnessed that pain but mostly we don’t talk about it out of respect for the dead, because it is so evident she was unwell not malicious. It’s very sad. If you don’t see her claims constantly being refuted out in the open that’s why. Most correction about Kathy happens over DM so as to not publicly embarrass her memory. But it’s been 5 years and people on the EA Forum need to stop giving her falsehoods platform in your comments. So now I am writing this public response.
BTW you start off saying “EA/rationalism does have a sexual assault problem”. Actually, this still remains to be proven that EA has issues with sexual misconduct (let alone assault) worse than other, say, millenial-coded, social communities. Yes there was a big blowup with Brent Dill and Vassar 5 years ago. Appalling stuff. But I fail to see how this necessarily translates to the average EA’s experiences. As someone who has spent time in many social scenes (rave, burning man, nerd, gamer, poly, startup, animal liberation, spiritual/woo, and university social scenes to name a few) blowups happen everywhere thanks to the worst men. Women also have bad experiences everywhere. Unfortunately it is part of being a woman in a coed space. EA’s social scene is very respectful/boundary-respecting toward women in my experience, and their reporting processes are good (even Kathy praised the reporting systems of EA/CEA). Is there room for improvement? Almost definitely, like anywhere else. I hope to see more improvement. But in my opinion EA does not have a noteworthy sexual misconduct problem in 2023. Let alone an assault problem.
Just my opinion based on my own experience. But it is just as valid a data point as anyone else’s. If you are going to share stories, you could share the stories of women who have not experienced harassment too. Pushing back on this salacious narrative does not mean dismissing women’s reports btw. We EAs should take reports extremely seriously. And I expect most reports will be true or mostly true. But we should also refrain from labelling the whole diverse community as being plagued with a “sexual assault problem” because some women have had problems. Men do troubling things in every community. Reports are extremely important so we can attend to those specific people and situations, but they tell us almost nothing about frequency/endemicness of harassment within the broader community. Hopefully we get broader data soon.
Brent Dill was not the only case. There were also accusations of statutory rape against Eliezer Yudkowsky (and others):
https://archive.ph/Kvfus
Here’s an open letter to Vitalik Buterin discussing miricult.com, the donations from Jeffrey Epstein, and other things (if the facebook discussion mentioned in the link is real, it’s pretty damning):
https://fredwynne.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-vitalik-buterin-ce4681a7dbe
I really can’t overstate how important it is for there to be answer about what happened with miricult.com, but all I really know is that no one seems to be willing to talk about it.
Anyways, there’s more:
https://twitter.com/RuffleJax/status/1009140252085243906
https://twitter.com/RuffleJax/status/1009630452322316289
Time Magazine article
https://time.com/6252617/effective-altruism-sexual-harassment/
I have read all that before. I really have to wonder if you actually read the Facebook threads, because that isn’t damning at all. Especially not against Yudkowsky.. it’s actually overtly vindicating of him. And it is intellectually dishonest that you even link the archived miricult website when even the medium piece and the Facebook posts malign it as essentially a highly inaccurate hit-piece. So, your second link contradicts the first. (The first is so nutty it’s not believable anyway it’s very pizzagate-ish).
And tbh, the facebook threads themselves discredit much of the second link where they are ironically posted within as proof of the claims it tries to make.
Also it is funny that if you read those Facebook threads, Michael Vassar is named as a primary source for some of those claims they discuss whether or not they could they be true. And Vassar is actually one of the few people that is agreed to be a sexual harasser/assaulter and serious agent of chaos. He is one of the men RuffleJax names in your 3rd and 4th links. So, your third and fourth links which implicate Vassar as a bad actor, in so doing also discredit the 1st and 2nd about MIRI involvement in statutory rape/blackmail/etc.
As for the RuffleJax tweet allegations, yes serious stuff. I can’t comment on the Rettek stuff because I am not in the rationality community to the extent to know, but Vassar has been discussed on here before and has been banned from EA and SlateStarCodex events for quite a while. Please read that link. Plus RuffleJax admits that the only reason she included EA in her tweets, not only rationality, was out of respect for Kathy naming EA. RuffleJax only had issues in rationality, but it is proven that Kathy was wrong about EAs so there was never any reason for RuffleJax to mention EA and doing so was a mistake on her part tbh. Relatedly, I wish you too would not speak of EA and rationality as though they are interchangeable.
That same Vassar discussion also is a good enough rebuttal to the Time piece, though there is a lot more to be concerned about with the veracity and relevance if you dig for anything that doesn’t already confirm your ideas that EA has an abnormally high rate of sexual assaulters:
Questions like, were any women with recent experiences who spoke to journalists actually interacting with EAs, or were they interacting with startup and coliving people in the bay and assigning the responsibility to EAs? As 2023 has progressed, people have become a lot more aware that EA does not necessarily include E/acc and other random bay area armchair-philosophizer, polyamorous, and AI-obsessed types. But tbh most people could be forgiven for being mistaken about this when the TIME journalist was doing interviews. More questions you might care about could be: Had the EA community health team handled those complaints already to the victim’s satisfaction? Are perpetrators cast out and what are the banning procedures? Should it matter for EA’s reputation that the EA community had not been given the chance to handle some of those complaints? (Some women spoke to TIME without ever having told anyone of the behavior they experienced and I think this matters, because men do sexual misconduct everywhere behind closed doors. So I think it is more how a community handles misconduct when reported that should matter for that community’s reputation. How else would other EAs not experiencing harassment know about it? Reports are so essential). And is this quantity of complaints one can dig up unusually large for a community of this size and diversity, especially if you allow yourself to go back 5 or more years in collecting reports? (In my experience no this is not an unusual quantity of complaints going back 5 years)
It feels like you are just throwing everything you can think of to prove your preconceptions, but the intellectually honest thing would be to pick the things you think are valid only. Your links either contradict each other (as with the first 4) or are redundant and outdated (as Vassar is implicated strongly in both RuffleJax’s tweets and the Time piece and has been dealt with) and actually paint a picture of a hit-piece not a serious critique or expose at all.
I don’t want to comment much on what did or didn’t happen. What I will comment on myself is this: Those instances where we can actually identify the alleged bad actors were a long time ago:
The miricult stuff was alleged to have happened 10 years ago (and I’m not sure this relates to EA anyway tbh). Personally I don’t find them believable allegations anyway. But I’ll leave it at 10 years.
The RuffleJax/Vassar/Rettek stuff was alleged 5 years ago and has been dealt with, and has nothing to do with EA by her own admission.
The one thing in the Time piece that was definitely attached to EA and not Vassar or startup/AI culture (the OCB stuff) was also 5 years ago and has been dealt with. In fact the woman had told CEA that she was satisfied with CEA’s handling prior to the TIME piece being written. The dynamics were also quite a lot more socially complicated than it was made out to be in the Time piece.
If your claim is still that EA and/or rationality has a sexual harassment or assault problem today, I’m sorry but your data just does not prove that in the slightest. If you disagree with this still then I really don’t know what to say. Maybe, “encourage women to make more reports that include date and names?” Because right now it is impossible to say what has been going on in recent years. It’s always going to be harder to prove a negative (that sexual misconduct doesn’t happen much in EA or rationality), but at least if reporting were the norm, lacking recent reports would be a good signal. Right now it’s hard to say if it means that misconduct instances or low, or just that women were avoiding reporting and wanted to exit the community asap.
It’s funny because back in 2018 I was extremely hard on the rats about the Brent Dill stuff. Now 5 years later I’m the one who is reminding everyone that time has passed and it’s possible things changed. I witnessed the rat community wake up to abuses and people really started paying a lot more attention to twisted dynamics. I am actually really hopeful that not only have things gotten better, but that EA (and maybe even rationality!!) is a more respectful place for women than other counterfactual communities. Again, it looks like we will have better data soon. But your links are not good data at all that there is a current issue. I don’t understand the rush to condemn an entire diverse community, almost every one of whom cares deeply about sexual misconduct as much as anyone else who, say, read that TIME piece. You should withhold judgement just a bit longer.
Read the facebook thread again and don’t equivocate. Vassar was the primary source only for the claim that MIRI gave into blackmail. Vassar was not the source for the claims of statutory rape.
The comment that says “I am confident that some of the things on the Miri cult website have nonzero truth to them” was not from Vassar. The discussions about whether the statue of limitations still applies did not involve Vassar either.
Yudkowsky, for his part, went on the record saying that “pedophilia is not the same as ephebophilia.” around the same time. Do you think that is an acceptable opinion?
The very same Eliezer Yudkowsky came on this forum telling EAs that they should keep money they received from FTX—money that was known to be stolen from FTX customers in SBF’s criminal fraud.
So yeah, I think the question of whether Yudkowsky is a pedophile (or “ephebophile”, to use Yudkowsky’s preferred term) does relate to EA, because his opinion seems to hold a lot of weight in this community.
I’d say Vassar was a primary source for the salaciousness of the wording of the whole situation. Which is what matters if you are going to say it is damning. Because, surely you don’t think a 17yo who consented and is still in the community 10 years later who has shown no apparent problem looking back on it, is that big of a deal?
Did you know that in every European country and 38⁄50 US states the legal age of sexual consent is 17 or below?
Don’t you think this makes 18 more of a legal quirk than a boundary on which to park your moral disgust reactor? Now I personally like the age of consent being high because it makes taking legal action extremely easy in case people behave badly. It means people should behave carefully. And I think it is dumb and often emotionally risky to have sex with a 17 yo. But dumb is not the same as unethical, and often emotionally risky is not the same as always emotionally risky. From what I have heard elsewhere, that person was one month from turning 18, and they weren’t like, plucked off the street for having a sexy body or something. It seems everyone knew each other and had been friends/friendly for months. I’m not seeing proof of abuse of power or objectification going on.
FWIW you can literally ask people for details as I have done before now. These are real people who had the experiences you are gossiping about. 10 years ago. I have never understood this desire to gossip rather than actually do something meaningful to root out and address problems. I think if you wouldn’t have the guts to approach the now-27yo or someone else you think might have been involved, that is probably your conscience telling you “ah tbh you are overstepping and you know it isn’t really a real issue” in which case you shouldn’t have the guts to spread their private info on internet forums. It really reads to me as pretending something was a big deal that you really know was not. If you really think someone was abused there (and especially if you think that risk remains today!) please reach out to some relevant parties. I would applaud you for putting your effort where your mouth is.
So anyway I still think it is not damning. And even if it were damning, you have no idea who it was. You have no idea if that person whoever it was still even works at MIRI. It almost def wasn’t Yudkowsky according to that thread. So why are you using that to support to your thesis that EA has problems today? Very strange. I’m all in support of rooting out bad behavior toward women or minors. But your chain of reasoning does not hold to support such a grand conclusion about a community of tens of thousands of people across dozens of cities. It does not even hold to support the claim that MIRI has an issue. It’s been 10 years. In case it isn’t obvious, I’m not dying on the hill that nothing bad happened. I have only even responded to you again and again because I am under the impression you are trying to prove that EA has a problem with sexual misconduct today.
As for the rest of your comment… It’s super weird you are tracking this all down about Yud. It has absolutely nothing to do with your original thesis and it is moving the goalposts, for a new goal which I’m not even sure what it might be. If you don’t like Yudkowsky, just say that. You are free to say that. You can say you think Yudkowsky is a dick, or a jerk, or is wrong about things.* What you are not allowed to do is take your feelings about someone, feelings based of of cherrypicked pieces from an extremely prolific writer, and use those feelings for motivated reasoning to share those cherrypicked bits as suggestion that that person has abused children or teens, and then even further, use that as proof that the community he is a part of has a drastic sexual assault or harassment problem. TO MAKE THOSE CLAIMS IS SO WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE AND FAR-FETCHED IT IS ESSENTIALLY SLANDEROUS. And if you aren’t making those claims, I have no idea what you are trying to say tbh.
If I were you I would really ask yourself what you are trying to do here. Is it help women? If so, how is what you are doing helping? What could you do that is more helpful for women, that doesn’t just leave a bunch of chaos and misinformation in your wake about people (EAs, including EA women who try to address sexual misconduct) who don’t deserve it?
I will not be responding to further comments. I only expect more gish gallop from you. I warn everyone reading this to significantly downgrade their trust in what you write next in this thread. To the extent a reader can agree I have refuted your first-choice arguments, and your second-choice, and then your third-choice, I highly doubt your 4th and 5th choice set of gish gallops will suddenly be intellectually honest and prove your original thesis. Which again, is all I’m here for. Not dying on the hill that nothing bad ever happened, obviously. I actually view that claim as an impossibility, because I think crappy men occasionally do bad things to women in every coed community.
*FWIW Yud is right though that pedophilia is different than ephebophilia. [[Edit 1: IDK why he wrote that and neither do you. For all we know, he could have been saying “Inb4 any edgelords reply that pedophilia isn’t inherently harm-causing. If you believe that, you must be thinking of ephebophilia and regardless of what I think, I refuse to have this conversation today. Reminder that I’m talking about pedophilia, not ephebophilia.” And we don’t even know if he meant ephebophilia in the sense of “an insatiable fetish” or “the possibility to feel some attraction for some teens.”
But no matter why he wrote it, or in what sense he meant that term, I agree with his statement. E and P are NOT the same.]] It’s disgusting to speak as though attraction to or sex with a 17yo is the same as attraction to or sex with a 12yo, 8yo, or 4yo. Ephebophilia even includes 18 and 19 year-olds so you aren’t even necessary venturing into illegal territory. If you equivocate E with P, then I claim you are nothing more than a moral relativist robot who bases morality on the letter of whatever local law you happen to exist under, and doesn’t understand what is truly twisted about sex with children. I’m actually angry that you’d try to corner me in this discussion as being the one with the unacceptable opinion if I agree with Yud’s obviously correct opinion there. Everyone agrees with that around the world. Which is why 17 and even 16 years old are very, very common legal ages of consent. Much more so than age 18, which is a relatively uncommon legal age of consent. About 25% of countries/states have a legal age of sexual consent that is 18 or older. And the remaining 75% have 17 or under. I think there are valid reasons to have the law at 18 or higher, but they are not that potential sex with, let alone attraction to, a 17yo is objectively wrong. They are more to add strength to a potential victim’s toolkit. I don’t think it makes sense for someone else (you) to yell statutory rape regarding a consenting 17 year old. Only the victim themselves doing so makes sense to me, if they are that old at time of consent. If someone thinks they were taken advantage of at 17yo, when reflecting years later, let them take it to court or their community under statutory rape. And let everyone in our culture be aware this is a thing that can happen. I want everyone to be careful and screw them if they were careless enough to cause a problem for someone down the line. Support people if they come forward, but if not, mind your business I’d say, and don’t go imagining coercive cultures that you’ve got no proof of. I realize it might sound salacious in a PC culture, but please get yourself together and realize that once in a while a 17 year old will strongly desire to have sex and be able to meaningfully consent to sex. Most other countries, states, and people understand that.
[[Edit 2: I just want to make it very clear that if someone came forward unhappy with their 17yo experiences at the hands of older people, I would support them in taking retributive action. Problems can obviously occur in those types of arrangements. But I still don’t expect a case from 10 years ago to be proof of broader problems today. I have seen and experienced way too much sexual misconduct by men to believe that episodes ten years ago (and prior to the Me Too Movement too, when I witnessed a lot of men “wake up” about this stuff and become better at policing their communities) should prompt us to typecast and trash an org, community, or subculture today. I’d have to throw the whole world out, and I promise I’m not overdramatizing when I say that.]]
I don’t know these people, so I can’t speak to the veracity of any incident, but I’m a little worried about the passage here:
I think we need to be careful with statements like this. It can take many years, or even entire lifetimes, for bad actors to be outed. You can think of famous examples like Bill cosby or jimmy saville here, who ran free for decades before their actions were exposed.
“we haven’t heard about an incident for ten years” does not necessarily mean that a group doesn’t still have a problem. They could have just gotten better at hiding it.
I do think that groups and even individuals that were previously sketchy can get better. I was in a group that I believe successfully eliminated it’s sexual misconduct problem. But we did so proactively, by kicking people out and instituting preventative measures. I think some parts of EA have done this and are following best practices, but I am concerned about others, in particular the Bay Area rationalists, who it seems (purely from a biased outside perspective) have been far too dismissive of allegations like the time article. I would be happy to be proven wrong about this!
You and I don’t disagree. Which is why I ended my prior two comments with calls for patience and links to a survey so we can get better data. I feel like I touched on that throughout but my point wasn’t to make an active claim about the community, it was to get someone else to stop making active claims backed up with tripe.
Honestly, I am frustrated by this comment. It reveals to me that I’m not sure what I can say to keep from being misunderstood. I added in that edit you quote as a way of trying to say something very similar to what you have just said. I was acknowledging that there still could have been a problem, despite all my talk about 17yo consent. And I was acknowledging that things can take years to come out, that is how these things can happen, so even though it has been a decade, I would support if something came out. I added in that edit out of raw fear that people would misunderstand me and I would get cancelled. But somehow you have taken that edit as proof of something very different, almost the opposite, the opinion that “if we haven’t heard about an incident for ten years, that means that a group doesn’t still have a problem.” That is an opinion that I don’t hold, and yeah which I could be unduly cancelled for, so I guess my edit got me into hotter water. Sigh.
Again, I don’t think it’s impossible that something bad occurred. But if you read the FB thread, the one now-27 yo (then 25 I think) remarks on it in a very unperturbed fashion and also claims they were the only minor. That was the more important thing that made it “not damning”. And less so the time gap, although the two bits look strong put together I guess. IMO at this point it is violating privacy to assume bad things happen and go spreading such links.
And again, I don’t think it’s impossible there is a current problem worse than other communities.[1] Or that the group doesn’t “still” have a problem.[2] I agree, there could be “a [bigger than average] problem”. I just think there is very, very poor proof of this. And I think you and I would agree that a problem ten years ago, if it was a problem, when you don’t even know who it was or if they still at work at the same org or in the movement, is generally very bad proof that there is a noteworthy problem today. You might say “sure but it would be weak proof if it was reported as a problem retroactively!” Would it? Because I promise you I can walk into any longrunnning large social community and ask them if they had a problem with any man doing messed up things to women in the past ten years, and the answer will be yes. Especially if that community is tens of thousands of people, and especially if you go back to the founding most-casual years of that community before systems inevitably get put in place. Honestly, I’m having a hard time imagining that even, say, Rotary Club, has been exempt in the past decade. They just don’t have a culture of airing grievances publicly, which is EA’s bread and butter.
So nothing I have seen, in the density of complaints I have seen over time, including even if that consensual statutory incident was actually problematic, proves or disproves the idea that EA could have a big problem. Thomas was making a positive claim of a big problem, which is why my focus on trying to bring back neutrality could perhaps be misconstrued as arguing for the opposite claim. People are used to seeing two opposite claims duking it out, not just someone trying to return neutrality. So, to make my position abundantly clear, I am not arguing for any particular claim except sharing my own experience as a data point, and I am trying to get other people to stop using bad evidence to back up claims. And using bad evidence naturally means that the claim won’t hold up well when you look close, if that poor evidence is all or most of what you have. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to prove the opposite of the claim, it means they set up their argument that badly.
Does EA have a big problem? It’s hard to prove one way or another, and it has not been proven. But we will have more data soon. Until then, I would like to remind critics of what definitely matters if they are going to make claims about our community today as though their claims are the unobjectifiable truth: women’s safety today. That is essentially the only evidence that definitely matters if the claim is not “EA or rationality used to have a problem”. We should use 5 years past, 10 years past, suspicion of problems to do more digging into whether EA has a current major problem and if so, how our recent systems that focus on sexual misconduct have been inadequate. Which is indeed what is being done.
Please keep in mind, it is extremely stressful to write the types of comments I wrote above. I do it to try to protect real people and our very real movement from unwarranted hasty kneejerk cancellation, which derails lives, waylays futures, and causes emotional health crises for those effected. Unfortunately, I am well aware that while doing so, I risk such cancellation myself, which is very scary and necessitates (IMO) me writing a cringe novel so people can fully understand the context of my words and not come after me/ruin my future. But the more words I write, the more sentences I create which also demand perfection or risk being nitpicked And people interpret things in different ways, or forget points I make if I haven’t revisited it in the last few paragraphs. It would be a lot nicer if people on this forum would afford some grace to those of us who take on this reputational risk for the good of others in the community (and under our real names, so it actually means something). If I saw someone share a letter that was proven to falsely accuse Titotal, I would step in for you too. And wouldn’t it annoy you, perhaps even greatly concern you, if, after a defense of you had been mounted, saying validly “we don’t know there was a problem here”, then someone comes in and says “but there still might be a problem tho”? Like, yes, but I just want it to sink in with an audience that attacking others, posting proven falsehoods, and making grand unsupported claims about these things is not okay, and let that stand on it’s own. I really think EAs should stick up for ourselves and each other here.
A note to forum readers in general: Instead of trying to pick everything apart on the defensive side, where I/people like me are simply trying to add neutrality back in and police interpersonal decency so as to prevent slander and privacy-violations, you could pick apart the other side. The side that initially tries to make active (not neutral) claims which they “prove” with blatant falsehoods, outlandishly farfetched speculation, and uncalled-for judgements on people/the movement who are multiple steps removed from theoretical or actual bad situations. I wait a good bit of time usually from when I see an unacceptable comment, but hardly anyone ever steps in. If anyone thinks they can do it better, please do. But right now I have to wonder if I’m one of the few who notices and cares that journalists and people with pitchforks sometimes hang out here, and based on noticing that risk, does time-urgent comms in response to potentially-damaging comments.[3] We should not expect downvotes and disagreevotes to stop journalists or people with pitchforks—they can just DM the person who got downvoted or copypaste anyway. They can easily use that as proof that EAs just don’t want to hear “valid” critiques. The truth was that the critiques were not valid, but people will never know unless EA Forum users like you and me respond. Journalists can share the truth if they want, but I can’t be the only one who no longer expects journalists to figure out what is true let alone what true things are relevant to a grand thesis. In that case, someone needs to do the factchecking and, frankly, critical thinking for such comments/posts on the spot before gish gallops and the like snowball. This is why I responded to the Kathy Forth stuff and so on and so on to whatever might have slanderous aspects or I see as unfair to others. You can do this too. Please.
I am sorry for going off here Titotal, but I really don’t need the feedback that “we need to be more careful with statements like this” or “X does not mean Y”. I was very careful. And I know that X does not mean Y. It is already nightmare fuel for me that I had that conversation with Thomas all through the weekend, and I tried very hard for many hours, and I only did so for the good of others. Maybe focus on the other side to be careful with their statements. If you want to add or highlight another point, it would be nicer if you check for what I think in the thread, or ask a question of what I really meant, or frame it as a heads up to the audience, rather than (apparently) try to correct me on the one thing in thousands of words you think I might not have gotten.
Okay I admit I do have strong expectation that EA does not have more assault than other communities, which was the original claim I was pushing back against, but that is still just my belief and I’m still trying to focus on data and wait for more to come out
Although I will say that if we have a Bill Cosby in our community, someone who would be doing ongoing bad things for many years and still today, it was probably Brent Dill or Michael Vassar. People are looking for these types now.
I’m sure some people notice and care but don’t have the time. I’m more puzzled that lots of people do seem to have the time to comment on community drama, but don’t seem to notice or care enough to comment when blatantly unreasonably negative claims about others (and our movement) get made that could very easily end up as another hit piece or viral twitter thread that meaningfully makes lives worse, both our lives (EA’s) and the lives of the people/animals we try to help via our movement, while being unwarranted. We could find out claims are unwarranted, but it would be too late to take it back after people’s reputations are trashed
For the public record: I was not trying to “call you out”, I don’t think you are harmful, and I recognize how emotionally exhausting it is to discuss these subjects. I think Thomas was trying to throw out as much negative things as possible in a way that was fairly counterproductive, and I dont blame you for trying to rebut that.
I felt the need to write the comment because I think it is still incredibly important to get this right, and not let reactions to attacks let you go too far in the other direction. If you find out someone did something sketchy ten years ago, it is evidence that they are sketchy now. Not complete and total “cancellable” evidence that overwrites the rules of charity and society, but evidence nonetheless.
By pure statistical chance, even if it was the the best community in the world re harrassment. there are probably still some people being abused. They need to know that they can come out, and that their claims will be treated fairly and not minimised for bad reasons. That is more important than anything I can write here. And for the record, I don’t think you would do that, but unfortunately others might, and I have seen that before here.
I don’t see the connection between this comment and the post.
EDIT: Somewhat in mitigation, having checked one of the threads Scott Alexander did tell Brent “you are creeping me out, tone it down” the first time he started talking about being a fascist who loves domination and torture. Not that mitigating in my view.
It’s kind of the fault of the original post bringing up an unrelated case in the first place.
Also, frankly, I think it is always worth people being made to face the discomfort of the fact that someone widely regarded as a beloved community leader was prepared to ask people to help someone out after they boasted on his blog about their fascism and misogyny and manipulativeness. Worth being only dubiously on topic for that.
I do object to the idea that someone who made accusations against multiple specific individuals is vindicated just because one of those individuals was guilty or the community they were part of has a bad record on abuse. Either they made at least some false accusations or they didn’t. If they did (something I have no knowledge of or opinion about either way), they aren’t somehow really correct anyway, no matter what else is true.
My comment was meant to address the part of the original post that says “Alice has similarities to Kathy Forth”