Link-post for the article “Effective Altruism Promises to Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse”
A few quotes:
Three times in one year, she says, men at informal EA gatherings tried to convince [Keerthana Gopalakrishnan] to join these so-called “polycules.” When Gopalakrishnan said she wasn’t interested, she recalls, they would “shame” her or try to pressure her, casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach.
After a particularly troubling incident of sexual harassment, Gopalakrishnan wrote a post on an online forum for EAs in Nov. 2022. While she declined to publicly describe details of the incident, she argued that EA’s culture was hostile toward women. “It puts your safety at risk,” she wrote, adding that most of the access to funding and opportunities within the movement was controlled by men. Gopalakrishnan was alarmed at some of the responses. One commenter wrote that her post was “bigoted” against polyamorous people. Another said it would “pollute the epistemic environment,” and argued it was “net-negative for solving the problem.”
This story is based on interviews with more than 30 current and former effective altruists and people who live among them. Many of the women spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid personal or professional reprisals, citing the small number of people and organizations within EA that control plum jobs and opportunities.
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Many of them asked that their alleged abusers not be named and that TIME shield their identities to avoid retaliation.
One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”
The women who spoke to TIME counter that the problem is particularly acute in EA. The movement’s high-minded goals can create a moral shield, they say, allowing members to present themselves as altruists committed to saving humanity regardless of how they treat the people around them. “It’s this white knight savior complex,” says Sonia Joseph, a former EA who has since moved away from the movement partially because of its treatment of women. “Like: we are better than others because we are more rational or more reasonable or more thoughtful.” The movement “has a veneer of very logical, rigorous do-gooderism,” she continues. “But it’s misogyny encoded into math.”
Several of the women who spoke to TIME said that EA’s polyamorous subculture was a key reason why the community had become a hostile environment for women. One woman told TIME she began dating a man who had held significant roles at two EA-aligned organizations while she was still an undergraduate. They met when he was speaking at an EA-affiliated conference, and he invited her out to dinner after she was one of the only students to get his math and probability questions right. He asked how old she was, she recalls, then quickly suggested she join his polyamorous relationship. Shortly after agreeing to date him, “He told me that ‘I could sleep with you on Monday,’ but on Tuesday I’m with this other girl,” she says. “It was this way of being a f—boy but having the moral high ground,” she added. “It’s not a hookup, it’s a poly relationship.” The woman began to feel “like I was being sucked into a cult,” she says.
Standard disclaimers apply about ‘not all polyamory’ - there are plenty of perfectly healthy polyamorous relationships out there—but its implementation in EA seems to play a significant role in many of the examples cited.
Perhaps more worrying is the fact that the women would only speak under conditions of anonymity due to EA’s centralisation of power over funding and employment in a few (overwhelmingly male) hands.
I’m responding on behalf of the community health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism. We work to prevent and address problems in the community, including sexual misconduct.
I find the piece doesn’t accurately convey how my team, or the EA community more broadly, reacts to this sort of behavior.
We work to address harmful behavior, including sexual misconduct, because we think it’s so important that this community has a good culture where people can do their best work without harassment or other mistreatment. Ignoring problems or sweeping them under the rug would be terrible for people in the community, EA’s culture, and our ability to do good in the world.
My team didn’t have a chance to explain the actions we’ve already taken on the incidents described in this piece. The incidents described here include:
Ones where we already took action years ago, like banning the accused from our spaces
Ones where we offered to help address the situation and the person affected didn’t answer
Ones we weren’t aware of
We’ll be going through the piece to see if there are any situations we might be able to address further, but in most of them there’s not enough information to do so. If you want to share any information about a problem you know of, you can always contact us (including anonymously).
When I first learned about the problems described in the piece, I felt disappointed and angry. I still feel that way. I recognize that problems happen in every community, but that doesn’t make it ok. That’s why we’ve been working for years to prevent and address community problems.
This isn’t a problem that one team or organization can address alone. We regularly talk with group organizers and organization staff who want to build a healthy and supportive culture. I’ve seen many people in the community stand up for people who experienced harm, and work toward the kind of healthy community they feel so strongly about. That strengthens the determination I feel to keep working on this.
If you’ve experienced a problem, we want to help. You can always contact us to discuss a problem.
There’s a lot of discussion here about why things don’t get reported to the community health team, and what they’re responsible for, so I wanted to add my own bit of anecdata.
I’m a woman who has been closely involved with a particularly gender-imbalanced portion of EA for 7 years, who has personally experienced and secondhand heard about many issues around gender dynamics, and who has never reported anything to the community health team (despite several suggestions from friends to). Now I’m considering why.
Upon reflection, here are a few reasons:
Early on, some of it was naiveté. I experienced occasional inappropriate comments or situations from senior male researchers when I was a teenager, but assumed that they could never be interested in me because of the age and experience gap. At the time I thought that I must be misinterpreting the situation, and only see it the way I do now with the benefit of experience and hindsight. (I never felt unsafe, and if I had, would have reported it or left.)
Often, the behavior felt plausibly deniable. “Is this person asking me to meet at a coffeeshop to discuss research or to hit on me? How about meeting at a bar? Going for a walk on the beach?” I was unsure what crossed into inappropriate territory, and whether it was I who was problematically sexualizing everything. Most of this is only obvious in hindsight, and because I have enough experience to notice patterns in behavior across individuals. Moreover, most of these interactions were respectful, and grew to be a problem only because they happened so systematically—for a while, it felt like every senior researcher I tried to get project mentorship from tried to date me instead, then avoided me after I turned them down, which has had serious career consequences. I didn’t report this because it was unclear what to report—no particular individual was clearly acting inappropriately, and (at least the first few times) I doubted myself.
I moved to the bay a few years ago for a PhD, and access to collaborative workspace, networking events, and supplemental funding (very necessary for me, with health problems on an academic stipend) are all gated by a couple of people here. They are all men (as far as I know), one or more them have asked me out or shown romantic interest (respectfully), and there are few enough women in my field here that I didn’t feel I had any hope of remaining anonymous. I thought making a big fuss about these things would tank my career, or at least lose me the trust I need to access these spaces and resources, and I wasn’t willing to do that. I moved here and made a bunch of personal sacrifices to work on incredibly important problems, after all.
Over the past 7 years, my motivation has developed from mostly-1 to mostly-2 to mostly-3. Regardless, I honestly don’t know of anything that the community health team could do to help with any of this. There were no extreme situations that warranted a specific individual being banned. The problematic dynamics were subtle, and I didn’t see how any broad communication could help with them. I didn’t want the team to take any action that might de-anonymize me, for career reasons. I don’t see anything to blame the community health team for here.
In my personal experience a good deal of sexual assault/harassment etc. goes unreported (especially at universities) because especially if you personally know the perpetrator as a friend or romantic partner you often have pretty complicated feelings about escalating things.
I think making clear the default outcome of reporting is “you have a conversation with someone a good deal more experience than you about what steps tend to be taken in these cases and if they’ve heard anything else and you get agency around the result” rather than “you set in motion a process against this person you have a very hazy understanding of” helps a lot. (the health team’s policy around confidentiality seems good for this reason).
Thank you for sharing your experience here. I’m really sorry to hear about these gender dynamics and how it’s affected you personally, your motivation and your career.
Do you have any suggested actions you’d like to see to help prevent this being repeated?
(I imagine organisations having policies about appropriate professional conduct and actively working on DEI would help to some extent with these issues. But I’m not sure what specifically, how much it’d help, and if there’s other things that you implied that I missed.)
—
Also, on a separate note, my understanding is that the community health team would like to hear about general experiences like this (even if you don’t want to “report” anything/anyone specifically and want any action taken) as they often provide advice to organisations/groups/community spaces/write forum posts about ways of improving the health of the community more generally and hearing things like this would help to put good policies in place and spread ideas around appropriate conduct etc.
To give a little more detail about what I think gave wrong impressions -
Last year as part of a longer piece about how the community health team approaches problems, I wrote a list of factors that need to be balanced against each other. One that’s caused confusion is “Give people a second or third chance; adjust when people have changed and improved.” I meant situations like “someone has made some inappropriate comments and gotten feedback about it,” not something like assault. I’m adding a note to the original piece clarifying.
What proportion of the incidents described was the team unaware of?
I think this question is very important. There must be a reason why people are not reporting bad behaviour to the health team. Either they don’t know what the team does, or they know what it’s meant to do, but don’t trust it. Either case points to room for improvement, either in the team or in the wider EA community.
As an example: None of the newcomer resources seem to mention the community health team at all. It seems possible that a significant proportion of people that are new or more casually involved are unaware of it’s existence. Given that predatory behaviour is often focused on newcomers and inexperienced members, this seems like a clear oversight.
I think this is a good point (that lots of people especially newcomers might not be aware of the community health team’s role when they might need it). I’ve been engaging with EA a lot online since maybe 2015, and in person since 2018, and I was aware of the community health team for a while but I wasn’t aware that it played this particular role of investigating claims and taking action e.g. banning people, until I think last year.
Thanks Julia. While I do not want to imply the problem is solved, I think our community is a lot better due to your team’s work, and I deeply appreciate that. Having a thoughtful and proactive team working on this seems very helpful for keeping our movement healthy.
I do think, insofar as is possible, some more transparency and specifics (especially on this one) could be very reassuring to myself and the community.
I’m worried and skeptical about negative views toward the community health team and Julia Wise.
My view is informed by the absence of clear objective mistakes described by anyone. It also seems very easy and rewarding to criticize them[1].
I’m increasingly concerned about the dynamic over the last few months where CEA and the Community Health team constantly acts as a lightning rod for problems they have little control over. This dynamic has always existed, but it has become more severe post-SBF.
This seems dysfunctional and costly to good talent at CEA. It is an even deeper issue because these seem to be one of the few people trying to take ownership and help EA publicly right now.
I’m not sure what happens if Julia Wise and co. stop.
The Guzey incident is one example where a detractor seems excessive toward Wise. I share Will Bradshaw’s view that this is both minor and harmless, although I respect and would be interested in Nuno’s dissenting view.
(Alexey Guzey wrote a book chapter, that he would be releasing publicly, that was critical of MacAskill’s content in DGB, to Julia Wise. Wise sent the chapter to MacAskill, which Guzey asked her not to do. It’s unclear to me why this chapter was sensitive, what Wise was supposed to do with the chapter. I read the chapter, and think there is a large supply of content on the internet and social media similar in quality. I can see how Wise just forwarded it absent-mindedly).
I think this might be partly due to the complex structure (and subsequent re-structure) of CEA. ‘CEA’ used to be a dual name for both a legal entity and the community building organisation.
I think this led me in the past to having a vague idea of what ‘CEA’ was, and thinking that the public-facing Community Health Team was representing all of it and responsible for more than they were.
This is kind of a separate issue though, here I’d just like to say I’m grateful for the work the Community Health Team does, and don’t want to distract from the discussion of the accusations made here.
I believe the TIME article has been updated since its original publication to reflect your response. If you have the chance, would you be able to comment on the updated version?
Excerpt taken as of 18:30 PST 3 Feb 2023:
“In an email following the publication of this article, Wise elaborated. “We’re horrified by the allegations made in this article. A core part of our work is addressing harmful behavior, because we think it’s essential that this community has a good culture where people can do their best work without harassment or other mistreatment,” Wise wrote to TIME. “The incidents described in this article include cases where we already took action, like banning the accused from our spaces. For cases we were not aware of, we will investigate and take appropriate action to address the problem.””
I suspect a very relevant factor influencing whether people are willing to come forward and talk to the team is “how alienated/ accepted do they feel by EA culture in general”, given that you come across as very much of that culture; for me this is something that helps a lot compared to say your average HR dept?
From the Time article:
How can any victim of sexual harassment feel comfortable approaching you with any concerns given these comments?
These are quotations from a table that are intended to illustrate “difficult tradeoffs”. Does seeing them in context change your view at all?
(Disclosure: married to Wise)
I think the “or third chance” could be phrased differently. Sure, in specific circumstances, that might be appropriate, but it shouldn’t sound like a general rule. Second chances should suffice. People rarely change.
In the article it isn’t presented as a general rule or suitable for all situations, though? It’s presented in the table of things they’re trying to balance as the opposite of “Don’t try to be a rehabilitation space—that’s not a good use of the EA community”, which is also not appropriate in all circumstances.
(Also, at the time this was posted no one pushed back on this, and the top comment is Nuno’s “I appreciate the section on tradeoffs, and I think it makes me more likely to trust the community health team.”)
Okay, that seems right. In the article, it’s worded like this:
The second part of the sentence adds some nuance, as does the contrast table.
Still, I remember feeling a bit weird about the wording even when that article came out, but I didn’t comment. (For me, the phrase “third chance” evokes the picture of the person giving the third chance being naive.) (Edit: esp. when it’s presented as though this is a somewhat common thing, giving people third chances in “evidence this person is a bad actor” contexts.)
Because at face value it makes sense to tailor the severity of the countermeasure to the severity of the offense, and I imagine that Wise was commenting on incidents order of magnitude less severe than the ones mentioned in the article.
How can situations with false accusations be caught and handled, together with real sexual misconduct?
I want to clarify — you did give me info about some concerns, and I really appreciate that. That allowed me to take action to keep the accused people out of CEA spaces.
I agree there’s room for improvement. Thank you for the services you provide here — I’ll be in touch.
Thanks for chiming in.
I suspect the best way to move this conversation forward is for people who are dissatisfied with the community health team to read the appendix in Julia’s article, identify specific cases from the appendix they believe were likely mishandled, and explain what should’ve been done differently in order for more survivors to come forward. (Of course, it is impossible to say for sure without knowing more details of each case, but I for one would be curious to read your guesses.)
I feel the conversation is more likely to generate productive change if we focus on specific ways things could’ve been done differently in specific cases. I fear that a vaguer, higher-level discussion runs the risk of not going anywhere, and just creating frustration.
I don’t think that appendix has enough information to give people the ability to comment on what would have made people be more or less comfortable coming to us with a concern in those situations. I want there to be room for broader discussion (though if people do have specific ideas, I’m interested to hear them). Our team will be continuing to work on improving our practices here, and we welcome suggestions for what we could be doing better.
This is so many levels of concerning. I don’t think people are really understanding this / processing it.
If there have really been minors raped in EA or serious infringements by high-up EAs, then EA would be repeating some of the worst ills of the Catholic church, secularly. Why would one want any part in such a community.
There are some important misunderstandings here. [Username redacted], I’ll reach out privately to clarify.
Thanks so much for all your incredible work. I can only hope the situation improves somehow.
Want to confirm that I got this email when I woke up this morning; Julia and I are discussing it right now (it is still morning Eastern Time, so we had not gotten to it by the time you wrote this comment, though we were planning to talk about it during this meeting before we saw your comment). Thank you very much for sending it our way, we will be in touch shortly.
I’m sure J_J knows this, but for everyone else: If you learn of information about abuse of a minor, you may be a mandated reporter of child abuse and have a legal obligation to report it to the local child-welfare agency. Reporting to Community Health does not count.
I’ll join the choir to say I strongly appreciate your work, and am sorry that you get to carry this burden, and for the negative reactions you got in the comments on this post.
I especially appreciate that you’re trying to do what you believe to be “the best approach to preventing SA/sexual misconduct,” rather than any other consideration.
You’re doing great work. That info was for everyone else—in some jurisdictions, everyone is a mandated reporter of child abuse, while in others the categories are broader than people might assume. So I thought it was worthwhile to educate other people about their potential legal obligations.
Really appreciate what you do. Stay strong and thank you so much.
It’s very understandable you dont want to handle this yourself. But I would strongly encourage you not to tell survivors to trust CEA.
This was incredibly upsetting for me to read. This is the first time I’ve ever felt ashamed to be associated with EA. I apologize for the tone of the rest of the comment, can delete it if it is unproductive, but I feel a need to vent.
One thing I would like to understand better is to what extent this is a bay area issue versus EA in general. My impression is that a disproportionate fraction of abuse happens in the bay. If this suspicion is true, I don’t know how to put this politely, but I’d really appreciate it if the bay area could get its shit together.
In my spare time I do community building in Denmark. I will be doing a workshop for the Danish academy of talented highschool students in April. How do you imagine the academy organizers will feel seeing this in TIME magazine?
What should I tell them? “I promise this is not an issue in our local community”?
I’ve been extremely excited to prepare this event. I would get to teach Denmark’s brightest high schoolers about hierarchies of evidence, help them conduct their own cost-effectiveness analyses, and hopefully inspire a new generation to take action to make the world a better place.
Now I have to worry about whether it would be more appropriate to send the organizers a heads up informing them about the article and give them a chance to reconsider working with us.
I frankly feel unequipped to deal with something like this.
A response to why a lot of the abuse happens in the Bay Area:
”I am one of the people in the Time Mag article about sexual violence in EA. In the video below I clarify some points about why the Bay Area is the epicenter of so many coercive dynamics, including the hacker house culture, which are like frat houses backed by billions in capital, but without oversight of HR departments or parent institutions. This frat house/psychedelic/male culture, where a lot of professional networking happens, creates invisible glass ceilings for women.”
tweet: https://twitter.com/soniajoseph_/status/1622002995020849152
Hi! I listened to your entire video. It was very brave and commendable. I really hope you’ve started something that will help get EA and the Bay Area rationalist scene into a much healthier and more impactful place. I think your analysis of the problem is very sharp. Thank you for coming forward and doing what you did.
Thanks for the video, I found it very helpful. If you don’t mind me asking, what does the ‘psychedelic’ in your description point towards? I don’t think you mention it in the video and I’m curious as I was part of some “psychedelic communities” and wonder what dynamics I may not have been paying attention to.
Thanks for these responses, I’m glad the video was helpful!
The psychedelic use is a great point—I didn’t go into it as much as I should have.
Casual psychedelic use is very much part of tech Bay culture. When a woman is on psychedelics, she often cannot consent to sexual activity because she does not have proper awareness of her environment or what is happening. The casual psychedelic use creates situations where date rape is more likely to happen.
You’re venting, but I’ll try to answer helpfully. The right thing to say is surely:
Sexual assault is very bad.
If anyone is aware of any specific incident, they should contact the CEA team or their local law enforcement.
We try to prevent it, and expel those who commit it (including some of the people in this story).
It occurs in every community.
There is little reason to think the EA community in general is much more or less problematic here than other movements (unless you think polyamory and drugs are risk factors).
It is impossible for any large decentralized movement to reduce the rate to zero.
One of the major examples in the story is about someone who basically noone regards as an EA (and does not call himself an EA).
You shouldn’t take journalists with an agenda to push at face value, especially as they tend to highlight the most extreme and unrepresentative examples.
The EA movement has a bunch of critics who are willing to use dishonest means to attack it because it threatens their moral superiority.
This sounds like a lot to deal with. But at the end of the day, this is basically a common issue that has occurred for most movements. For an extreme example, rape accusations against their leaders didn’t stop both Republican and Democrat parties repeatedly uniting behind and getting the accused men elected President.
There are other risk factors, though. Drug use definitely. I don’t think polyamory is a risk factor, but a relative lack of committed relationships in EA definitely is one (makes for more propositioning in general).
As well as being younger-skewed and male-skewed—that increases risk.
Encouraging a lot of people to start their own projects and get funded directly by someone in the community, as opposed to working at a larger org, increases risk.
Group housing and sharing accommodation, while not inherently bad, definitely increases risk.
In general, the intense mixing of personal and professional boundaries is an even more important risk factor, especially in combination with the other factors.
A lot of these factors are less present in other communities.
(To be clear, a lot of these risks also can have offsetting benefits.)
This seems like a very strange view? Polyamory allows for more propositioning in general because even people in committed relationships can proposition people.
I guess I mean to say “I don’t think polyamory is a risk factor, but more open / single relationship status in EA definitely is one”. Like if you have a polyamory relationship set that you’re happy with and it’s closed and you don’t proposition anyone to add, that would have the same level of security as a married non-poly couple.
Probably worth tabooing ‘poly’ here. As far as I can tell, basically every critic of poly is referring to relationships that are at open to new participants, and every defender of poly wants to defend those relationships also.
If you want you can come up with a new definition:
open_poly: a person in a relationship with someone else who is still open to more relationships.
The debate then becomes whether it is fine to be open_poly, or if there are significant costs and hence open_poly people should cease to be open. I think basically every critic of poly would be satisfied if the existing relationships continued but ceased accepting new members.
And based on your comment it seems like you basically think that open_poly does bring significant incremental risk vs a counterfactual of non-open.
What I’m getting at is the risk factor comes from open anything, regardless of whether it is poly or mono. Agree that tabooing is helpful here.
(Though to be clear I’m obviously not suggesting people stop trying to find romantic partners. Just like I’m not asking people to stop being male or young. Risk factors are risk factors even if they’re out of our control or have clear benefits.)
This is absolutely not how I’m going to go about dealing with it.
If I were on their side and somebody at any point responded to my concerns with a trivializing reminder that rape and abuse, in fact, happens in every community, I would nope out immediately.
I appreciate that this comment is trying to be helpful, but I feel a responsibility to point out that this is outright harmful advice.
EDIT: Sorry, I phrased myself with unnecessary meanness. To be clear the reason this, in my opinion, is poor advice is not because the arguments themselves are wrong. The reason is that what matters in good communication is to signal an understanding of the counterpart’s concerns, and even if these arguments are right they send the wrong signal.
Either you believe these problems are much more common in the EA community than other communities and this poses a risk to the kids or you don’t.
If you do believe we are much worse than average, and this would put the kids at risk, asking how you should do movement building to highschoolers is probably the wrong question. You just shouldn’t do that movement building.
Probably however you don’t believe that the EA movement is much worse than average, (because there is basically no evidence for this), and don’t believe that your community building would actually put the kids in any significant danger. If this is the case, this is the crux of the matter. It’s important to acknowledge their concerns and show you’re not being dismissive, both as a matter of politeness and honesty and as a rhetorical matter. That was the purpose of the first bullet points. But you also need to explain the actual reason for your view. They are intelligent people capable of making their own decisions in light of the evidence, and they deserve the right to evaluate the facts and come to their own conclusions. Relative frequency estimates aren’t ‘trivializing’, they are the most important fact for their decision making.
I think you are right and I overreacted.
No worries comrade, glad to help.
Yeah… I’d feel completely overwhelmed if I had to do the interpersonal crisis management that you have to do there on top of the normal preparations. There are people in the community who are good at community health–related crisis management though. Maybe someone (me?) could put together a rolodex of community health contractors who could help out in such situations, either paid by CEA or by the teams they are helping?
I am an outsider to this community.
You are still doing good things.
You can change the affiliation. Wipe “Effective Altruism” away. At the end of the day, your good work is being co-opted. Your gut feelings are real, and you should react appropriately.
Tell them that it is a piece of journalism designed to sensationalize an issue. Tell them that taking things written by a journalist seriously as an accurate, balanced or fair description of a situation is generally a mistake, and that the article gives them no trustworthy information, and if they want to ask questions about the particular policies, practices and culture in whatever local group they want to work with, they are welcome to.
I’m sorry, but this seems to me like a completely inappropriate response.
The article clearly shares incidents that make clear that there is an issue with safety in EA spaces, I am fine with saying that these are incidents and that this is not everyone’s experience, but discrediting Time / journalism is just not an appropriate response, it is going to come off as defensive and as if we are not taking these issues seriously.
We should clearly say that as a movement we have made mistakes and that we are working on addressing these. And then we should actually do so. I am very happy that the statement Wise made in the article basically says exactly this.
I roll to disbelieve on these numbers. “Multiple reports a week” would be >100/year, which from my perspective doesn’t seem consistent with the combination of (1) the total number of reports I’m aware of being a lot smaller than that, and (2) the fact that I can match most of the cases in the Time article (including ones that had names removed) to reports I already knew about.
(It’s certainly possible that there was a particularly bad week or two, or that you’re getting filled in on some sort of backlog.)
I also don’t believe that a law school, or any group with 1300 members in it, would have zero incidents in 3-5 years. That isn’t consistent with what we know about the overall rate of sexual misconduct in the US population; it seems far more likely that incidents within those groups are going unreported, or are being reported somewhere you don’t see and being kept quiet.
Sorry if this sounds accusatory, I just want to ask for a clarification, but do you get paid for this work?
I ask because some of your comments read a bit like advertisements, especially the first one (which you deleted)
Thanks for promptly clarifying
My comment was insulting and accusatory, but I think it was important enough to clarify for everyone what the situation was and to make sure that interpretation was mistaken (like you just did, again thanks for promptly and accurately doing that)
”It’s disheartening that so many jumped to support and upvote your comment, when in so many other comments, I’ve spoken to what I’ve done to help your org—again, without charging. Also, one of the survivors vouched for me in the comments. Julia Wise also backed me up in that she confirmed that I have helped CEA in the past. I’ve also spoke to Chana, again, without charging. “
The numbers you saw are not the number of people upvoting the comments, you can hover the mouse on the numbers to see that it was only one person.
I’m truly sorry you were hurt by the accusation
Thanks for your work.
You stated elsewhere in this thread that
It seems possible to me that you became the center of the EA whisper network by chance even though you’re not in EA (perhaps because you’re not in EA), and that being the center of the EA whisper network is giving you a skewed impression of the per capita number of incidents.
The article mentioned “more than 6,000 attendees at EA global conferences in 2022”. That happens to be about the same number of people as the undergraduate student population at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. For reference, this list of Title IX coordinators on Yale’s “sexual misconduct” subdomain has 20-30 names on it.
(I don’t mean to discount the experiences of survivors with my comment—Jeff does a good job explaining why comparisons with Harvard/Yale/Princeton could be relevant.)
Thanks for supporting victims of assault – for what it’s worth, I would find your statistics more helpful if they separated “EA” and “tech”. Just Google alone has 50x more employees in the bay than there were attendees at EAG SF,[1] and my subjective impression from living in the bay is that a large fraction of residents are involved in “tech” for some definition of the term.
“Attended EAG SF” seems like an ok proxy for whether someone is an EA who lives in the bay, though it’s certainly not perfect.
Sure, I’m just reporting what would be helpful to me (and perhaps people will up/downvote if it’s also helpful to them); it’s obviously your decision about whether doing that is the best use of your time.
Do you happen to have a further breakdown between “EA” and “EA adjacent”?
Thanks!
I appreciate your comment! Learned a lot. I’ve never been to the bay area EA/tech scene, so I can’t speak to that. But from what I can tell by reading all the things today, to me there does seem to be a difference between EA spaces.
It’s only a guess of course, as I don’t have numbers (would really appreciate if somebody had any, although probably hard to get good data), but I’m ~90% confident that other EA spaces are better than that particular one. Especially the ones I know well (EA Germany, EA Netherlands, other small EU countries, and what I’ve heard from Australia & Chile) seem more like the other spaces you mention, at least to me. (But I want to reiterate that I don’t have data. I’m not in the community health team for EA Germany or anything, so I could be wrong.)
I think it might somewhat map to gender ratios. From what I can tell, the bay are EA/tech spaces perform particularly bad with those. And of course it doesn’t help with stuff like this if there are mostly (or just) men around, so that intuitively checks out for me.
My priors also map to your experience regarding the sex positivity scene. From what I can tell, those spaces are way above average in how clear they are about interpersonal stuff (consent, consent, etc.) and people are (usually) more conscientious and better than average at communication. I think a lot of tech spaces go more the other direction than not. Especially if the gender ratio is skewed a lot.
So, my guess (although I don’t know how much it is worth) would be that a lot of it might be the intersection of EA/tech/bay area. I don’t know how strong each factor is & too hesitant to speculate. But my experience with EA at least (and a lot of people I talked about this topic today) has been different (not perfect, but… better.)
(I want to add that of course this comment is not meant to defend the EA bay area scene, I really have no experience with that other than what I read here, so I’m just updating on what you and others write. Also want to add that there’s a good chance my estimation of how it is in other EA spaces is wrong, as everything is so underreported, and it’s incredibly hard to try to correct for that.)
The EA/Rationalist scene in the Bay Area is very large and very heterogeneous/sometimes weird
My brief experiences of it have been that there are some parts of it which were lovely, some parts which did seem to have a well-meaning culture but tolerated questionable people and I have a vague sense some parts were terrible.
i am against doing things for the reputation of any one movement (i think it’s talking about this that is coming across as vaguely threatening?) and pro doing them because they’re the right thing to do
Happy to publicly support—thanks for the valuable work that you do!
Yeah, we can in that way, agree 100%. I just meant “I can’t do it in my head for the purpose of this comment”. Otherwise, completely agree.
I feel like a fairly high order bit here in how trusted people are/ how comfortable people are coming forward with this stuff is “word of mouth”—my sense was that Julia Wise & co had very much cultivated a reputation here, but clearly not with everyone
(ed: I think a long private conversation where you try to settle your differences seems considerably more likely to be productive than continuing a big fight and being subjected to a lot of scrutiny in a public forum like this, if you have not already had one)
Thanks for your insight. I probably think your comments have been some of the most concerning to me in this whole set.
Can I ask some questions?
What concrete changes would you recommend?
It sounds to me like you think that sexual harassment in the bay area EA/tech scene is 10-100x worse than you’d expect. Is that about right?
Do you see patterns of bad behaviour that you think could be corrected with certain resources?
In the spirit of education/training, I’m sharing my low-confidence model around this so others can critique it.
I think in addition to false accusations, our society’s rules around consent are inconsistently defined and inconsistently enforced. So when a man hears about a case like the ones you handle, it’s natural to wonder whether it represents some sort of misunderstanding or super-draconian enforcement. Most guys are paranoid about being caught in a situation like that, so the possibility occupies a lot of mental real estate for us.
I think for most/all of the cases you deal with, this paranoia is unjustified, and the complaint is being made in good faith. And if it were somehow possible to demonstrate this in a convincing way, people would believe survivors more readily.
There is a tension because on the one hand, we don’t want survivors to blame themselves. On the other hand, to address the paranoia fully, you’d want to explore and eliminate the possibility that there was some kind of misunderstanding (due process to determine culpability, essentially). But the very process of doing that exploration could cause the survivor to blame themselves, which could worsen their mental health. (Being believed could also be important for mental health by itself.)
“Misunderstandings” are also a tricky category because they allow the possibility of continued boundary pushing, and create a shield for bad actors to hide behind.
Assuming this model is true, I’m not exactly sure what the solution is.
One piece of the puzzle might be: Even in the hypothetical where you dotted every possible i and crossed every possible t, getting affirmative verbal consent for every individual muscle movement as though you were in some sort of parody video—if she feels violated afterwards, something went wrong.
Not necessarily in the sense of you being culpable, but in the sense that “feeling violated” is by itself a very bad outcome, and you want to learn from this to avoid causing bad outcomes in the future. An analogy would be a civil engineer who follows every regulation when building a bridge, and then the bridge falls down anyway. A good engineer’s first thought is to study the heck out of that collapsed bridge, not protest that they followed the regulations.
Maybe it’s a Kathy Forth type situation where your post mortem ends up finding that everything you did was fairly reasonable—but the post mortem was still worth doing.
I think this mental model could be useful for spotting bad actors. If someone is clearly not “studying the heck out of that collapsed bridge”, and their bridges keep collapsing, it’s time suspend their license as an engineer, even if there’s a possibility they are following the regulations.
It’s also helpful to keep in mind if someone shares their story with you. A collapsed bridge is always something to take seriously, regardless of whether regulations were followed.
I additionally think it would be helpful to make the consent rules more consistently defined and enforced, and more consistent across time, but that seems less tractable.
(Again, I appreciate critical feedback, I realize this topic is fraught)
I’m really sorry to read about your experiences and the experiences of the people you’ve helped :-(
This is useful to hear, thanks.
Understandable! I wasn’t trying to garner sympathy. My goal was to address the paranoia problem because I thought it would be instrumentally useful for addressing various problems you’ve brought up in this thread, related to self-blame and being believed. You mentioned education/training could help, so it seemed relevant.
All else equal, win/win solutions seem best. I think people tend to reflexively frame this issue in terms of zero-sum conflict, but I suspect there are actually significant positive-sum opportunities.
Thanks for your critical feedback!
Sorry you’re feeling tired and overwhelmed—please take care of yourself!
Sorry for clarity, there are 40 − 50 people who if you had to guess you’d think are sexual assaulters/rapists who you think are likely to do it again who are part of the EA community? That’s what you’re saying?
Does being non-publicly banned from events meet your criteria?
How does a decentralised community manage this? ie if CEA bans people from events but they still go to parties, what’s the recourse there?
Thank you for your time, please don’t feel obliged to answer this, I know it’s your job and this is effectively free work.
We (the Community Health team at CEA) would like to share some more information about the cases in the TIME article, and our previous knowledge of these cases. We’ve put these comments in the approximate order that they appear in the TIME article.
Re: Gopalakrishnan’s experiences
We read her post with concern. We saw quite a few supportive messages from community members, and we also tried to offer support. Our team also reached out to Gopalakrishnan in a direct message to ask if she was interested in sharing more information with us about the specific incidents.
Re: The man who
Expressed opinions about “pedophilic relationships”
“Another woman, who dated the same man several years earlier in a polyamorous relationship, alleges that he had once attempted to put his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping.”
We don’t know this person’s identity for sure, but one of these accounts resembles a previous public accusation made against a person who used to be involved in the rationality community. He has been banned from CEA events for almost 5 years, and we understand he has been banned from some other EA spaces. He has been a critic of the EA movement for some time.
We were aware of the second allegation and were in contact with the woman. We did not know about the first allegation until recently.
Re: Masturbation comment
Time magazine described it as “After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.””
We know lots of people are particularly concerned about this, which makes sense. Our understanding is that more information will be forthcoming, and we hope to be able to say more about it next week.
Re: Rochelle Shen “says she has firsthand experience of the ways the movement dismisses allegations. “They want to keep it all in the family.””
As far as we know, we hadn’t interacted with Shen at the time this was written. We don’t have a complete picture of how others in the community have handled allegations that have come to them. In general, the community health team encourages people to consider all their options for handling a problem, including getting legal advice if they think a crime may have happened.
Re: The Bay Area House
The TIME article describes the house as “roughly a third of the residents were EAs, and the house regularly hosted EA events.” We were aware of the existence of this house after some concerns were raised about a year ago. We weren’t aware of EA events hosted in the house, but it is common for people in the EA community to invite other community members around to their houses.
Re: “male co-leader of the house was accused of sexual misconduct by an ex-girlfriend who says she met him at an EA conference”
Community Health became aware of concerns about this person about a year ago. He had been to an EA Global conference around 5 years ago, and we decided not to admit him to any future CEA-run events. We reached out to the accuser asking if we could help.
Re: “the other residents of the house started a Google Doc to collectively discuss how to handle them.”
Community Health was not aware of this document or the process in the house generally.
Re: “an EA living in the house suggested bringing in a mediator named Aurora Quinn-Elmore”
Community Health has not referred people to Quinn-Elmore. She last attended an EA conference around 5 years ago.
Re: “a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college”
To our knowledge, we don’t know about this specific situation
Re: Man who “asked how old she was, she recalls, then quickly suggested she join his polyamorous relationship. Shortly after agreeing to date him, “He told me that ‘I could sleep with you on Monday,’ but on Tuesday I’m with this other girl,”
To our knowledge, we don’t know about this specific situation.
Re: other concerns raised in the comments section
A commenter wrote that they had heard some very serious allegations. They later removed their own comments about this.
We were aware of one of these situations and had already taken action to ban the accused from CEA events (although the accused doesn’t seem to have been involved with the EA community in some time).
Some of the other situations this commenter referred to were not ones we had heard about, and did not contain enough information for us to identify the situation or learn more. We have asked the commenter for more information. If anyone has specific information about these or other problems in the community, our door is very much open.
…….
If you have more information about these cases, or other situations of harassment or abuse in the EA community, we would really like to help.
Please reach out to me by email (catherine@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) or fill in this form (anonymously if you wish) to reach the whole Community Health team. You can read more about Julia Wise and my roles as contact people for the EA community here.
If the situation may have involved a crime, you may wish to reach out to
Legal help. Many countries have free hotlines that can help people navigate the legal and justice systems (e.g. sexual violence hotline in US, resources for crime victims in the US, this list of legal hotlines in the UK)
The police
If the situation involves mental health issues, you may wish to seek professional help
Hi Catherine, thank you for clarifying what measures were taken regarding each instance reported in the TIME article and for directly addressing each point.
Regarding my previous post, here’s more context from a previous discussion on why I haven’t yet involved CEA’s Health team: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sD4kdobiRaBpxcL8M/what-happened-to-the-women-and-effective-altruism-post?commentId=MxJqDoNTqLxkPthzy I’ll probably share more thoughts, especially regarding why I spoke to TIME, women-friendly culture updates a movement can take and more perspectives when time permits me to think more clearly about this topic and write them down. Obviously, SA is a high stress discussion; a lot of context is lost in translation and in medium of communication; people can misrepresent/misinterpret; people also have jobs and other commitments; but I’m hoping we will have more clarity over time/ update to a better state overall as a society given enough time.
Meanwhile, I’d like more clarification on one matter. I’m one of those people who connected Charlotte, the author of the TIME article with the curious case of the Aurora Quinn Elmore, an unofficial SA mediator who interviews people via facebook and recommends actions for accused and accuser in EA-adjacent/rationalist communities in the bay. This person was introduced to the EA-adjacent group house situation by an active EA (out of good intentions/ lack of awareness I think, it was a high stress situation and all sides were acting sub-optimally) and it was told to me that this EA got the idea of involving the mediator from her work of mediating SA cases at CFAR or Center For Applied Rationality. I was told that this person has mediated at least 5+ SA cases as far as this EA knows, and probably more. Can you verify this information? How many cases has she mediated in totality? Why is CFAR with millions in funding using an unofficial individual (who is a PM in her day job) with no formal training in / affiliation to women’s organizations to arbitrate SA cases? Some women who have had their situations arbitrated by this mediator have told me that they faced retaliation for speaking up, that they were informed of a “no-gossip policy”, ie, if the mediator has arbitrated the case and ruled in favor of an accused and if the accuser then speaks about the case to her friends or others, she will face consequences up to and including career consequences and being removed from communities. Can someone from CFAR share more context/data? Thank you.
Thanks Keerthana. I’m afraid I don’t know anything about CFAR’s processes. It might be worth you reaching out to CFAR directly: contact@rationality.org.
I look forward to reading your
> women-friendly culture updates a movement can take
If and when you choose to share.
I understand that CEA doesn’t have any special insight into CFAR’s decision to use Aurora Quinn Elmore for mediation. But I’d guess CEA has quite a lot of information about CFAR including non-public info, and that other EAs could benefit from knowing at least the gist of this. If someone was considering attending CFAR programming (or working for CFAR) and asked the community health team if there were any concerns they should know about, what would you tell them? Has the community health team received complaints about CFAR aside from the Brent incident, and if so, how many? Does the community health team have any concerns about CFAR soliciting attendees via the EA Forum?
CFAR’s use of Aurora for mediation is part of a pattern of highly questionable policies and decision-making. I’m sure CEA is aware of the utter debacle around CFAR’s mistakes regarding Brent and their failure to safeguard a minor (among other mistakes) in that situation. There has been discussion of other issues as well, not all related to sexuality, but many related to troubling power dynamics. As one EA put it :
When a community builder who was asked for recommendations of people who might like to attend a CFAR workshop wisely inquired “what safeguards, if any, are now in place to avoid similar situations in the future”, she received no response. CFAR’s co-founder and President has acknowledged that “adults should indeed not expect that we are vetting a particularly careful or safe environment particularly reliably” and that “many bad mistakes were made, then [at the time of the Brent incident] and previously and afterwards.” Does the community health team consider these to be red flags (especially given CFAR’s track record of problems)? If not, why not?
It’s a bad sign that you were being downvoted! I gave you my upvote!
Thanks Anthony, I appreciate the support!
Despite any downvotes (which I anticipated), I think this is an important issue and I hope the community health team responds. And FWIW I’m open to the idea that their response could make me feel less concerned about CFAR than I currently do.
+1 :)
I am one of the people mentioned in the article. I’m genuinely happy with the level of compassion and concern voiced in most of the comments on this article. Yes, while a lot of the comments are clearly concerned that this is a hard and difficult issue to tackle, I’m appreciative of the genuine desire of many people to do the right thing here. It seems that at least some of the EA community has a drive towards addressing the issue and improving from it rather than burying the issue as I had feared.
A couple of points, my spontaneous takeaways upon reading the article and the comments:
This article covers bad actors in the EA space, and how hard it is to protect the community from them. This doesn’t mean that all of EA is toxic, but rather the article is bringing to light the fact that bad actors have been tolerated and even defended in the community to the detriment of their victims. I’m sensing from the comments that non-Bay Area EA may have experienced less of this phenomenon. If you read this article and are absolutely shocked and disgusted, then I think you experienced a different selection of EA than I have. I know many of my peers will read this article and feel uncomfortable about the familiarity towards these examples, and reflect on their own behavior in protecting or ignoring abuse. They are the ones who need to change their behavior.
There’s a common pattern I’ve noticed (often in men) where they will conflate extremely severe abuse (one of the men in the article had over 5 allegations of criminal sexual assault) with less severe abuse. This can lead to nonpredatory people enabling predators, because they’re blind to the difference. In practice this looks like a person who is afraid of false accusations from miscommunications with a romantic partner protecting someone who actually actively targets intoxicated, disabled, young or otherwise vulnerable people with the intent to violate. Predators capitalize on that spectrum and try to find allies in men by insisting that they aren’t so different.
There’s also some conflation between predation and polyamory/kink. I think it’s bad faith to equate the two, and I’ve encountered numerous counterarguments relying on cultural relativism in different sexual cultures to add ambiguity to what is actually in fact a cut-and-dry rape case. That being said, polyamory/kink is very often used as a tool of social pressure by predators to force women into a bad choice of either a situation they would not have otherwise agreed to or being called “close minded” and potentially withheld social/career opportunities. Polyamory/kink cultures should self-police to get rid of these bad actors. YOUR loving and consensual poly/kink relationship is not a valid argument against a discussion of abuse.
Julia Wise’s question:
Q: “How do you figure out what is a community problem versus what is a Bay Area problem or sex problem or something else?”
A: I can answer this very concretely. The problem is with people who enjoy taking advantage of skewed power dynamics for their own personal gain. There is a subculture of people sharing tips and tricks on how to get away with more predatory behavior, how to gaslight women, how to get them drunker/higher faster, how to make them feel so small afterwards that they’re afraid to even admit the abuse to their friends. THIS is the problem. If you are not a part of that subculture, please relax. If you are, please stop deluding yourself about being an effective altruist. You are in fact a selfish person who sees EA as an easy rhetorical hack to generate narratives around yourself. You are a rationalizer, not a Rationalist.
Q: “don’t unfairly harm someone’s reputation,” “don’t make men feel that a slip-up or distorted accusation will ruin their life, ” and “give people a second or third chance.”
A: In my case against my house cofounder, there were (during the initial case, more now) no less than FIVE allegations of abuse ranging from inappropriate touching at conferences to statutory rape, from women who did not previously know each other. An EA in the house wrote up a document calculating a joint conditional probability on whether or not he might have done anything wrong and concluded that the percentage was far enough from 100% that he couldn’t possibly justify any serious consequences. I don’t know you so I can’t tell whether your point is meant in good or bad faith, but I can say that you do need to draw the line SOMEWHERE, otherwise how on earth do you make any moral calculations at all? My recommendation is to make a code of conduct for the community, and refer to it when dealing with allegations to avoid people moving goalposts around second/third/fourth/fifth/sixth chances.
MY RECOMMENDATIONS
Given my experiences, I have a few insights that may help guide good future practices.
My recommendation here is to create systems of checks and balances that do not allow for conflicts of interest to enable biased decisions. I think that expecting a person in a position of power to make the correct judicial decision regarding a conflict with people they are close with is an incredibly difficult ask, and I am not surprised that cases are often handled poorly or to the dissatisfaction of the community.
Create some kind of educational content around how to be a good ally to victims and how to identify bad situations so people can intervene. As a bystander, if you see a peer piling drinks onto the youngest girl at the party with the intent to take her upstairs, it would be nice to intervene rather than ignore the intended consequences. If a victim comes to you following a traumatic event, it would be nice if you’ll be compassionate and understand that they often intentionally won’t tell you what happened out of pain or shame, and it would be fantastic if you patiently wait to hear their story rather than gather evidence out of the omissions to build a case to convince yourself nothing ever happened.
Identify when situations involve biased actors and correct by introducing unbiased actors. If the person mediating the situation is in a close personal or professional relationship with ANY of the parties, OR if the person is incentivized as a leader of a system to guard its influential members, it is expected that their personal biases will cloud their ability to make sound decisions. I am neither surprised nor upset to see that the EA response from Julia Wise is basically a beautifully articulated shrug. It’s a hard position to be in, and I can say this from personal experience as well, I feel a deep pain holding my long time colleague to be accountable to his past behaviors.
Hire an external arbiter. Companies have HR departments. Countries have legal systems. EA is big enough that it should probably have an unbiased arbiter help out with the situation. Companies hire consulting firms to fix fundamental operating flaws that they otherwise would not see. EA likewise can use an external party as a lens to discover its own safety issues and improve them. In the case of Aurora, people should be allowed to recuse themselves if they have personal biases introduced from outside relationships. If the recommendations are not up to scratch, you can fire them and try again.
More pointedly, please work with [J_J] (who is in the comments) who has been doing grassroots justice in the Bay Area for some time now. She’s a lawyer and has been working for some time now to set up systems of justice and recourse for organizations. She’s helped with dozens if not more cases in the SF community, and offers mediation services. While she’s not an EA, I’m sure many of you will see the meaning in her sacrifice of thousands of hours of her life towards trying to create justice. I’d talk to her, she was very helpful in understanding how to deal with these difficult situations
I’ve removed the name of a user from the above comment after a request to the mod team, in light of our new policies on revealing personal information on the Forum
Now that I realize who you are and which house this was—do you think it’s fair to describe that house as an EA house?
You are absolutely right that it was not an EA house. Only 30-50% of the house was EA-affiliated at any point, and it is noted as so in Time. It was primarily the EA members who were involved with the harassment I experienced. Moreover, EA’s who I didn’t even know, including the moderator, who did not live in the house became involved as the situation escalated. I am happy to share more details offline to prove that this absolutely was an EA related situation, but I am avoiding disclosing the whole story out of courtesy to individuals and in hopes that we can have a productive conversation about how to improve the toxic culture that produced these negative experiences.
yeah from my experience there are at least two clusters of incidents of
people who talk about dark secret psychological/sociological hacks the normies don’t want you to know (these people tend to lean more rationalisty and are going to be an extremely tiny percentage of people who comment on this forum)
(usually much less severe) possibly autistic people who are socially oblivious of how they are throwing their weight around but well meaning
i think there’s probably quite a lot of value in warning people to be cautious around people who seem like they’re in the first cluster (and I’d mostly associate poly/kink types with the second)
if you are mostly talking about the first cluster I think we are to a very real extent talking past each other—especially in the bay area ea/rat circles are extremely ideologically heterogeneous
Are such threats believable? Is there a broader culture where people feel that they’re constantly under evaluation such that personal decisions like this are plausibly taken into account for some career opportunities, or is this something that arises mainly where the career opportunities are within someone’s personal fiefdom?
My understanding is that the original “don’t unfairly harm someone’s reputation”, “don’t make men feel that a slip-up or distorted accusation will ruin their life ” and “give people a second or third chance” comments were not in any way referring to sexual assault allegations.
(see Julia’s comment here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=tFxjdj34q8xoaWut3).
When I click your link it says “comment not found”.
That being said, it is confusing to suggest that these criteria are nothing to do with sexual assault allegations when the appendix contains at least three cases related to sexual misconduct, and potentially more, depending on whether you read between the line (e.g. hosting couchsurfers).
Link should work now
This is not a fair description. The way people get such statistics is by assuming all accusations are true unless there is strong evidence against them, but there is a large number with no strong evidence either way, and researchers should not just assume they are all true.
A good first place to start is the Wikipedia Article on the subject, which features a wide range of estimates, almost all of which are higher than the 2-3% you say, some of which being dramatically higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape
Alexander also has a good blog post on this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-social-media-part-5-of-%E2%88%9E/
Your own website lists a slightly higher range, 2-4%
[redacted]
If we look at the source you supply for the 2% we see a different story:
Only 2.1% were designated by the cops as false, but that was after the majority of accusations had been withdrawn or determined ‘no further action’. Many of those withdrawn or no-further-action accusations would also have been designated as false if they had been investigated.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/study-reported-rapes-victoria-2000-2003-summary-research-report
This sounds like you are suggesting (correct me if I’m wrong) that many or most withdrawn and ‘no-further-action’ accusations are actually false, which is not a fair conclusion to draw from the information you presented. It also seems to claim that cases designated as withdrawn or ‘no further action’ are not investigated, which is also not accurate. Specifically, the paragraph you shared mentions many of the reasons victims will withdraw or not seek further action:
Withdraw:
“when complaints were withdrawn, suspects were more likely to be current or former partners of the complainant” Victims of domestic violence are often in immediate physical danger when attempting to leave or report, or are extremely financially limited due to their situation in an abusive relationship. Following through on an accusation could pose more danger to the victim than withdrawing.
Investigating sexual assault cases can be extremely invasive, and often re-traumatize the victim. Cases can then take years to prosecute and involve cross-examining the victim. Some victims withdraw to avoid this process.
No-Further-Action: This is a police designation indicating they decided not to investigate for any number of reasons, including lack of forensic evidence, uncooperative witnesses, lack of resources, or a belief that they will not be able to successfully prosecute. None of these directly imply a false claim.
At least in the US, the reports often initially come through Patrol officers who typically don’t receive the specialized training in responding to sexual assault victims (e.g., trauma-informed training) that investigators working in domestic violence or sex crimes units do, and may be less likely to take reports seriously.
“Cases that resulted in “no further police action” were more likely to involve younger victims” Sexual assault is rarely the only issue in cases with young victims, and gathering evidence is made more complicated by this.
“victims who had consumed alcohol or other drugs near the time of the offense” In addition to the potential for police prejudice against these victims, there’s also the consideration of whether or not a jury is likely to find a victim’s story compelling. This indicates a judgement on the potential for a successful prosecution, not on whether a crime was actually committed.
I agree that this is a “different story,” just not one indicating a secret cache of false claims hidden by statistics. Instead, it’s a depiction of the extremely messy process of reporting, investigating, and prosecuting these cases.
I can’t access the full article from which you pulled that abstract, but I used a number of the resources below in my response. I hope you find them informative:
https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/252689.pdf (Particularly the qualitative interviews where police describe lack of resources, lack of training for patrol officers)
https://www.uml.edu/News/stories/2019/Sexual_Assault_Research.aspx (short summary of the above)
https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/london_rape_review_final_report_31.7.19.pdf (seemingly a similar type of report to the abstract you included, but with context around the findings)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-new-home/201810/rape-allegations (on some reasons people don’t report, which seem relevant here)
It is logical that people would be more likely to withdraw, and the police less likely to investigate, accusations that seem less compelling. If any of these cases are false, the 2.1% is an under-estimate; if they are false at a higher rate than cases accuser and police followed through with, the 2.1% is a significant underestimate.
‘Any’ is different than ‘many,’ as you originally claimed. I think if the report you seem most focused on was estimating that 2.1% of all rape claims are false accusations, your concern would be more understandable. But this is a paper on rapes reported in a specific geographical area over a 3-year period and 2.1 is the percentage of reports designated false by the police, making this an odd choice of information to focus in on as telling a “different story.” Most groups that compile these data in order to make estimates do place those estimates in ranges, anywhere from 2-3 to 2-10%.
This still seems to suggest that cases resulting in withdrawals or no further action are more likely to be false, and you don’t have enough information for that assumption to be well-founded. Further, this assumption feeds into harmful myths about the underlying causes for withdrawal and case attrition in sexual assault reports, many of which are addressed in the sources I’ve linked above.
I’ve removed the website of a user from the above comment after a request to the mod team, in light of our new policies on revealing personal information on the Forum
This thread, and these kinds of discussions are very revealing and worth pursuing to the end.
Let’s go with Scott Alexander’s estimate of a 3% lifetime chance of a man being falsely accused of rape and a 15% chance of a woman being raped. Let’s assume EA is 70% men vs 30% women.
How much “weight” should the community give to guarding against false accusations vs to guarding against the prevalence of sexual abuse (since not believing accusations lets the perpetrator repeat their actions)? This includes a value judgement on the harm from sexual assault vs the harm from reputational damage, etc.
Since this seems to be a difficult tradeoff and the community health team/EA organization leaders are making these tradeoffs that include value judgements (and EAs don’t usually have the same value judgements as the rest of society), the current community members and people in charge should be transparent about these value judgements and overall weights (maybe through a survey?).
It would help current and future EAs decide if they want to be a part of the community based on how they value their own welfare.
I think one question would be the extent to which the types of actions Community Health can take would reduce a perpetrator’s ability to commit future assaults. I don’t know the answer to that but would be interested in what others thought.
I understand the desire to for quantification and transparency, but my guess is this particular quantity is relatively far down the list of parameters to publicly estimate, especially given the methodological difficulty. If you thought it was particularly pressing maybe you could have a go at it? Or perhaps there is some existing economic literature on the subject. I suppose the level burden of proof applied in court cases is a starting point.
This debate seems like an unhelpful tangent given that the original comments about false accusations weren’t even referring to sexual assault, based on Julia’s clarification: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=tFxjdj34q8xoaWut3.
I’m sorry you deleted the original text of your response, as I would have liked to engage with it. Unfortunately I did not save a copy before you deleted and replaced it.
I did however get a copy of this comment you made prior to changing your forum username, where you linked to us all to your website.
Strangely you seem to have deleted this comment now and completely forgotten about having written it. It is very ironic that, in the context of a discussion about the frequency of false accusations, that you would attempt to alter the digital record and then falsely imply I am a creep.
Perhaps this was an accident. It is easy to forget what exactly we have said, especially if we regret it later. If so I hope you take this lesson to heart about how easy it is for even people with the best of intentions to accidentally make a false accusation.
- - -
Screenshot of the above comment in case of further edits:
I’ve removed the name and website of a user from the above comment after a request to the mod team, in light of our new policies on revealing personal information on the Forum
I’m not sure I understand the rationale for removing information that was supplied by the very same person who now says they want it removed, especially when this information was supplied merely a week ago, on the EA Forum, and in this same thread. The policy that this decision seems to exemplify appears to effectively give anyone the right to censor any information about themselves in posts or comments made by others, regardless of how that information was obtained or how public it is.
Note that the case for disclosing the information in this particular instance was pretty strong: J_J implied that temp_ was a creep for knowing J_J’s website, but it turns out that J_J had included a prominent link to their website in a comment posted just one day earlier. I do not want the Forum to be a place where people can make unfair accusations about others and retain a right to suppress evidence establishing the unfairness of those accusations.
Thank you for the feedback,
As mentioned in the policy, we do think that there are cases when some personal information is important to share, and we don’t think everyone should have the right to censor any information about themselves.
We do consider how public the information is and “when information is easily accessible elsewhere, we will err on the side of keeping it”, but we also strongly consider how relevant the information is to EA.
In this case, I felt that the name and website of the user are not relevant enough for effective altruism to justify keeping the information in the comment against the user’s wishes.
I agree, but I think that in the edited comment it’s still clear that J_J had included a prominent link to their website in a comment posted just one day earlier. If that’s not the case I should have edited it differently (possibly writing [user’s website] in the black box). Do you think it should be clarified?
Thanks for the reply. I think the crux of our disagreement may be that I don’t regard “being relevant to EA” as a necessary condition for declining a request to remove personal information, unless that phrase is given a very broad interpretation that includes things like “keeping the EA Forum a place where people can’t make unfair accusations about others”.[1] Separately, if a user voluntarily discloses a piece of personal information, I think this should be beyond the scope of mod action, unless something happened in the intervening period that clearly justifies removing or encoding the information. People can still ask others not to share this info, but I think it should be up to each person to honor those requests, rather than being something enforceable by the admin team.
In this case, as you note, it was possible to remove the personal information while preserving the relevant evidence publicly, although I think the removal made it somewhat more difficult to appreciate what was really going on. But one can imagine other situations in which this cannot be done.
J_J did not accuse temp_ of being a creep. J_J said she was creeped out. There is a subtle but important difference between these two statements.
As I wrote, “J_J implied that temp_ was a creep”, and implying that someone is a creep is a way of making an accusation, in this case an unfair one.
What she said is that she felt creeped out. The implication that the person who’s actions she was creeped out by was a creep is an implication you are adding to her statement, and not one I did personally. It is very much possible to feel creeped out by someone who isn’t a creep.
Reading it as an underhanded way to make an unfair allegation seems very uncharitable to me in light of all her comments.
I don’t understand what rule you think I broke. This was a link to a public website that she herself shared on the thread; it does not fall into any of the categories in the linked website. This is someone who is making serious allegations about EA, and looking to be paid for it—she should not be able to demand others users delete any record of what she has done.
The closest reference I can see in the rules is this:
But then you should have encoded it, not deleted it and edited my screenshots.
Maybe some context would be helpful. There was a previous case in EA with a woman named Kathy Forth who made a bunch of accusations. The consensus seems to be that those accusations were false and/or overblown. It seems many people knew this and shared it through a whisper network, and Scott Alexander was one of a fairly small number of people willing to state it publicly. So, hopefully this explains why dismissing him might be a bit of a red flag with me and some other people here.
BTW, I’m wondering if a good heuristic is: If someone makes a lot of accusations, they’re likely to be a liar. If someone receives a lot of accusations, they’re likely to be guilty. The idea being that genuine victimhood (from a crime/false accusation) happens to people at a fairly even background rate, but people who are bad actors tend misbehave more than once.
In my personal experience talking to victims since, I’ve noticed that this is one of the most scary heuristics of all. Every woman I’ve spoken to in this community who comes forth about SA once feels like they are now more than twice as vulnerable for being targeted by predators.
Very personally, several of my house co-founder’s friends had an intentionally loud conversation outside my door about unfortunate things that might happen to “girls who cry wolf” since nobody will believe them on subsequent claims.
That’s horrifying, sorry to hear about it
wait, what? how do we know this?
I underwent a palpable shock at this factoid, it was unexpected, while also being sad etc.
I don’t mean this as a comment on the particular case reported in the TIME article, though I’d reject using naive base rate calculations as a last word on someone’s probabilistic guilt. but the “only 2-3% of allegations are false” stuck out to me because I read a better estimate is probably more like 2-10%. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-social-media-part-5-of-∞/ there’s a lot of ambiguity here—issues like not every “report” is an “allegation” because sometimes reports don’t name a perpetrator. I have no idea what the correct figure is, but it seems to me the 2-3% figure gets probably bandied around a lot probably with a sense of precision and finality that isn’t warranted by the evidence. Happy to see new evidence or information to the contrary, and whether the rate is 2% or 10% it can certainly be described as “low”.
The article is a nearly a decade old, and for all I know there might be newer research. But I hope when people are thinking about best practices for the future, they do so on the basis of the best evidence available.
Thank you for your explanation. I appreciate you taking the time to explain your reasoning on that point and find it useful for being confident in the rest of what you have to say here.
I think the main reason that EA/rationalist spaces and activist spaces have historically often not gotten along well is that in EA/rat spaces there is a strong norm against a certain kinds of strongly worded moral injunctions.
I think the reason for this is that EA tends to attract people driven to do good but with perhaps an OCDish tendency to worry if they’re doing enough and push themselves too hard. If we instead went around saying it was shameful people were still eating meat and also shameful people weren’t giving more money instead of using it to vist friends and also shameful they weren’t thinking enough about how to prevent sexual assault people would pretty quickly burn out.
(There are certainly people in the community who can and do translate a lot of things activists say into EA/rat friendly language)
Of course, if you assume the best of too many people you let in bad actors and I suspect a lot of people might find it stifling. But it does create a safe space for many of us.
fwiw if I were were CEA’s health team I would phrase this as “although they are a small minority we have occasionally come across accusations which were as far as we could tell false” or some such.
I’m not sure what can be gained over nitpicking over the exact number—this is going to vary from place to place
I think the “don’t want change” faction is a good deal smaller than the “we would like time to digest and decide what changes seem like a good idea and what typical problems actually look like (given how heterogeneous EA is) and how to make these changes while keeping some aspects of the culture we find valuable” faction
(also, as a trans women, I’m going to have to raise an eyebrow at “men and AMAB”—i think the actual risk factor is hormones fwiw but...
ed: you know what I think these are “rape by envelopement doesn’t count” numbers, which exclude the overwhelming majority of rape women commit.
these are regrettably just what a lot of official sources will give you
ed2: an explanation https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/346/
this has updated me strongly towards “I would personally not trust you if I were to report a sexual assault”)
my reading on this is EA/rationality has quite a few people who are very well informed and thoughful and like to geek out about this stuff, although culturally not quite the same as you and also more than a few people (and I say this while still saying I have much respect for the guy) who should read something on this topic by someone not named Scott Alexander
I got a lot out of archive binging Ozy Brennan’s blog (probably helpful to search by tags eg sex positivity, feminism)
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/
https://thingofthings.substack.com/
I think you’ll find varying views on this, some people talk about how trans female upbringings/ability to assimulate to the local “male” culture are in many ways different to baseline cis men and there is a lot of truth in this as well, certainly the median pretransition trans woman is probably several sd less assertative than the median cis man.
I guess I’m nonzero of a biodeterminist of this because of things like sex drive being pretty different, I don’t think this necessarily implies a pessimistic viewpoint on this. People who steal cars are more likely to like cars, but presumably there are other character traits that cause people to steal cars and we don’t throw up our hands and say solving car theft is impossible
ok I guess trans women are more likely to be in very sexually open subcultures, unclear if this helps or harms
(in general I endorse the style guide for a lot of this stuff being ‘cis men are like so, cis women are like so, i have no idea what trans people are like’ instead of guessing)
It sounds like you want to engage constructively to reduce abuse in the community, and I appreciate that. The community will be stronger in the long run if it can be a safer and more welcoming space.
I know we’re a bunch of weirdos with a very specific set of subcultural tics, but I hope everyone appreciates your efforts to help. I think people here really are unusually motivated to do good and there is a lot of goodwill as a result. On the other hand, I think a lot of that is ego driven. And it’s a very nerdy culture, male-dominated and probably many people here have a predictable set of blind spots as a result.
Wish I had more to say, or could do more to help, but I’m not in the bay area, don’t work in tech, and don’t have very much context for the cultural problems you’re encountering.
This is a highly misleading summary. 0.3% is not Alexander’s estimate, it is his attempt to get an ultra-conservative impossible-to-be-lower-than-this lower bound. His best guess was literally 10x higher:
This is over 100x higher than your number. And it’s not even his upper bound, which is significantly higher still.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-social-media-part-5-of-%E2%88%9E/
EA has copped a lot of media criticism lately. Some of it (especially the stuff more directly associated with FTX) is well-deserved. There are some other loud critics who seem to be motivated by personal vendettas and/or seem to fundamentally object with the movement’s core aims and values, but rather than tackling those head-on, seem to be trying to simply through everything that’ll stick, no matter how flimsy.
None of that excuses dismissal of the concerning patterns of abuse you’ve raised, but I think it explains some of the defensiveness around here right now.
You’ve mentioned here a few times that you spoke to Julia about a few of the people implicated in the TIME article. Were you happy with what Julia/the community health team did as a response? How much of this can you share? Do you know if the decision of the victims to talk to the journalist was prompted by the community health team’s response?
Would someone from CEA be able to comment on this incident?
’A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”‘
Was this ‘influential figure in EA’ reported to Community Health, and if so, what were the consequences?
[Caveat: Assuming this is an influential EA, not a figure who has influence in EA but wouldn’t see themselves as part of the community.]
I also found this incredibly alarming and would be very keen to hear more about this.
The woman did bring this concern to us. I don’t want to share details that would break her privacy, but I did my best to follow her wishes as far as how the matter was handled. My post on power dynamics was informed by that situation.
Looking back at the situation, I’m not sure about some aspects of how I handled it. We’re taking a renewed look at possible steps to take here.
Thanks. Is this person still active in the EA community? Does this person still have a role in “picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs”?
Seconding Peter Wildeford’s questions.
Just bumping this in case you’ve forgotten. At the moment there only seem to be two possibities: 1/ you forgot about this comment or 2/ the person does still have a role “picking out promising students” as Peter asked. I’m currently assuming it’s 2, and I imagine other people are too.
We are working actively on this, but it is going to take more time. As a general point (not trying to comment on this situation in particular), those are not the only two possibilities, and I think it’s really crucial to be able to hold on to that in contexts where there’s issues of legality, confidentiality and lots of imperfect information flow.
Edit note: I at first had “local point” instead of “general point”, which I meant in a mathy way, like the local logic of the situation point rather than speaking to any of the context, but looking back I don’t think that was very clear so I’ve edited to clarify my meaning.
Hey, thanks for the response. I think simply acknowledging my message and telling me you are working on it is a great first step, and I really appreciate that. Saying “We’re looking into this, hold on for a few weeks” is actually genuinely helpful.
I also recognize that you and the Community Health team have a very difficult job even under the best of circumstances, so I have a lot of sympathy for this being very hard.
So I apologize though that my role here still has to be pushing you for more information, since I run an organization with multiple concerned staff members (including myself). Like you, I am also under a lot of pressure here, especially given it is an unusually tense time.
So to be clear, I am not looking to learn the identity of the person. Though I’d love to know who it was, I understand it may just not be possible to know. I get that. I don’t even really need details. But I would really love to hear about (A) whether this person is still in the movement and (B) whether they still have a role that allows them 1-1 contact with a lot of young women. I don’t particularly need any details, though I guess an
(A) Yes (B) Yesanswer would definitely make me want more details. Also given the lack of response, you must understand that imaginations naturally run rampant to fill the gaps in negative ways, as much as we might want to tamper them.Thank you again for all your work.
I totally understand how you’re seeing your role and why you’re pushing here. I’m really sorry, I can’t answer questions right now, but really hope to be able to next week.
Thanks Chana. I’m glad we can both see each other’s perspectives. I look forward to hearing more next week. Committing to a response and a rough timeline is already very helpful.
Just to be clear so I don’t look better than I deserve now (and possibly worse in some future timelines), the “hope” is operative there; I wish I could make a firm commitment, but I can’t. But it gives us a starting point that we can come back to if needed.
Hi Peter—these posts (from Owen and from the UK boards) + comments from me and Julia on the latter have just gone up that might have the information and comments you’re looking for.
Thank you. I am still considerably unhappy with how this situation was handled but I accept Julia’s apology and I am glad to see this did come to some sort of resolution. I’m especially glad to see an independent investigation into how this was handled.
I imagine not many people would meet the description of the person , so I think it’s plausible that publicly providing further information of that sort would allow for the person’s identification—despite what I understand to be the harassment survivor’s request that the person not be publicly identified.
I don’t need any description of the person. I just want to know in broad strokes what the risk level is, so I can advise my organization accordingly. Hence the two-part yes/no questions.
I’m saying that Time gave a description that likely narrowed down the list to a few people. Let’s say there were five to ten people it could reasonably apply to. If CH told you the person is no longer in EA, or is in EA but no longer performing that role, you could probably identify the person by looking into what those five to ten were up to nowadays. Even if there were more candidates, presumably you could significantly narrow the list with those answers.
Thus, if CH doesn’t have permission from the survivor to answer those questions and had agreed to keep the person’s identity confidential, answering them could breach that promise. They would need to go back to the survivor and ask permission to make additional disclosures.
I know I’m probably being dense here, but would it be possible for you to share what the other possibilities are?
Edit: I guess there’s “The person doesn’t have the role, but we are bound by some kind of confidentiality we agreed when removing them from post”
No, it’s a reasonable question. I hope to be able to answer these questions better next week. I’m really sorry, I know that’s not very helpful.
I don’t see how confidentiality would prevent anyone from literally saying “The person doesn’t have the role, but we are bound by some kind of confidentiality we agreed when removing them from post”, which would actually be a reassuring thing to hear.
Hi Simon -
Two posts (from Owen and from the UK boards) + comments from me and Julia on the latter have just gone up that might have the updates you’re looking for.
Thanks—I’ve already commented. I’m pretty disappointed that Owen resigned 3 days before my comment and I was filibustered. (I’ve already commented there about the timeline, very curious to know what can possibly have been going on during that period other than getting together a PR strategy).
Agreed. There’s a lot of harrowing claims in the piece, but this one had me go “What the fuck” out loud.
Hi Marzhin -
Two posts (from Owen and from the UK boards) + comments from me and Julia on the latter have just gone up that might have the information and comments you’re looking for.
From the article:
This rang a bell for me, and I was able to find an old Twitter thread (link removed on David’s request) naming the man in question. At least, all the details seem to match.
I’m pretty sure that the man in question (name removed on David’s request) has been banned from official EA events for many years. I remember an anecdote about him showing up without a ticket at EAG in the past and being asked to leave. As far as I know, the ban is because he has a long history of harassment with at least some assault mixed in.
I don’t know who introduced him to Sonia Joseph, but if she’d mentioned him to the people I know in EA, I think the average reaction would have been “oh god, don’t”. I guess there are still bubbles I’m not a part of where he’s seen as a “prominent man in the field”, though I haven’t heard anything about actual work from him in many years.
Anyway, while it sounds like many people mentioned in this article behaved very badly, it also seems possible that the incidents CEA knew about led to reasonable action from CEA.
I don’t remember a single mention in the article of someone being banned from official events, even though CEA has presumably done this for quite a few people (given that Wise “fielded roughly 20 complaints per year” for seven years). It’s surprising to me that the author wouldn’t have discovered this practice after talking to Wise.
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Anyway, it sounds like many people mentioned in this article did terrible things. I really hope that whatever “influential figure” had an interviewee stay at his home is no longer in a position of responsibility — or that, if the incident was never reported, they can be found and disciplined. And I hope that Aurora Quinn-Elmore, if this depiction of her is accurate, sees her mediation work dry up.
But I sympathize with CEA if the best tools they have, a central database of accusations and control over who gets to attend official events, were left out of the article despite getting regular use.
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I’ve hung around EA for many years, I’m not very active in any in-person EA social scene, but my impression is that the environment has a lot of similarities to the college I attended:
Most people there are smart and reasonably kind — at least no worse than people in other places (in EA, I see more people who are conspicuously morally excellent, but it’s not clear how much higher the “average” is).
There are thousands of people there, which means that some of them do terrible things, anywhere on the spectrum from “creepy conversation” to “assault”.
Some types of bad actors are more common at the college than in other spaces — like the ones who try to philosophize their way into someone’s pants. Others seem to be less common — like violent rapists or misogynists who claim that their god gave them authority over women.
Some of the bad actors stick around because no one reports them. Others are reported and face various consequences. Some of those consequences are mild enough not to remove them from the space (temporary suspension, forced sensitivity training). Others are as severe as the college can pull off (expulsion, firing).
But even the severe consequences can’t solve the problem if the bad actor is sufficiently determined. Someone can be expelled from college but rent a house on campus. A professor can leave the city but invite former students to sleep with them elsewhere with promises of knowledge or networking.
My college didn’t handle every situation well, and a few were handled quite badly.* But it would seem weird to describe the college as having a “toxic culture of sexual harassment and abuse”. In the end, it was a space like other spaces, trying to manage bad actors despite limited power to punish them or to manage the surrounding social dynamics (people will gossip and take sides anywhere you go).
I wouldn’t tell someone to stay away from my college because of the bad actors there, and I wouldn’t tell someone to avoid EA. There’s a huge amount of good in both places.
* The comparison falters here. I can’t say for sure that CEA handled any specific situation badly, because I know less about EA stuff than I did the stuff at my college.
They are also is not a fan of EA,[1] which would make them an even odder example for this article, if that is indeed who they are referring to.
(Previous version cited evidence; removing as per David’s suggestion)
I’ve removed the name of the alleged person and the Twitter link as a result of David’s comment. I’d recommend you do the same here.
For what it’s worth, prior to reading this article, I knew Aurora by reputation as someone who was aggressively feminist. I remember having a conversation with a [edit: conservative-leaning] woman at a party who told me something like: “I tried to have a discussion with Aurora about consent, and I wasn’t able to get through to her. You might want to avoid kissing her or anything like that, to stay on the safe side.”
Needless to say, this leaves me feeling fairly confused about what’s actually going on.
I guess I don’t even really understand her relevance. Fully a third of the TIME article is about her mediation in an EA house, and makes her bad behaviour out to be emblematic of problems at the core of EA, but she’s… just some random person, right?
From some online digging: she’s listed as an attendee at EA Global 2016. She appeared on the Clearer Thinking podcast in 2021. She’s never posted on the EA Forum or LessWrong, at least not under her own name that I can find. Her relationship with EA seems at the most to be very, very slight. Am I missing something about her relevance in this whole thing?
I have had a terrible mediation experience with her where she was friends with the other party and not friends with me. This tracks with the Time Mag reporting where she did a mediation while dating one of the parties. Do not let her mediate anything. I saw once that she specializes in or was looking to help survivors of sexual assault. Stay away from this person.
Maybe? The article has ” Quinn-Elmore told TIME, adding that although she spoke to both parties and recommended a path forward, she didnt consider this to be an official mediation.”
This comment is currently at −6 agreement votes. Does anyone want to explain to me why this is so?
I think that sometimes when someone has a good experience with a mediator they doubt that it’s possible for other people to have bad experiences. Also Aurora is actually on this forum and messaged me to ask if I wanted to do a session so she can listen to the impact she’s had on me and I absolutely do not. If you mention that you had a negative experience with her, she might message you too, so watch out.
I suppose “low ability to empathize with the perspectives of others” could be a unifying thread here.
[edit: or maybe annoying everyone equally shows you’re doing a good job?]
Yup, and specifically in Aurora’s case, low ability to empathize with others who aren’t her friends, and low ability to recognize that she should not be mediating a situation where she’s friends or dating one of the parties and not close with the other.
Good point. Removed, as requested.
Per David’s comment, I recommend removing this name and the linked spreadsheet.
Why was this comment downvoted?
The document literally says:
Being able to see the document is useful to people because it proves that the perpetrator was not actually an EA.
I interpret that as a request to share privately within friend groups, not publicly in a community like this?
Well if everyone who receives it shares it with their friends (as instructed), and those friends share it with their friends (as instructed), and those friends… it will become a fully public document before long.
I do not think that bans on a person attending EA events or conferences necessarily should be interpreted as proof that that person was attending them before the ban.
I would expect that in some cases, a person reports “hey, this person acted violently towards me; I have no idea whether they might apply to attend this event, but I want the community health team to know about this so that, should they ever apply, they would be refused.”
Furthermore, lots of people might attend a professional conference who don’t identify with an associated movement or community, and CEA hosts lots of professional events many of which specifically try to attract non-EAs with relevant expertise; it’s not only environmentalists who attend climate change conferences, or only animal rights activists who attend events on the future of agriculture and food! It would be bizarre to me to claim it was proof someone was an environmentalist that they’d been banned from a conference on climate change.
More generally, it seems like a situation where there are bad actors who have been systematically banned from all EA events but who are still harming people at other, non-EA events is very different (in terms of what women should do for our safety) than a situation where bad actors are attending EA events, so I think it’s important for our safety to be clear about which of those situations is what’s happening.
writing “please do not post this in a public place” on the document seems like a good way to idiotproof this sort of thing? although I suppose it makes it slightly harder to tell whether it has been compromised
ok as long as some as there is some story behind this, it’d be a little silly if I were the first person to point out the obvious :P
I think the article was fairly clear: “TIME is not naming the man, like others in this story, due to the request of one or more women who made accusations against them, and who wanted to shield themselves from possible retaliation”.
Please respect the wishes of women who face serious threats of professional and personal harm and have chosen to take steps to protect their identities.
The accusations are public and have already received substantial exposure. TIME itself seems to be leveraging this request for confidentiality in order to paint an inaccurate picture of what is actually going on and also making it substantially harder for people to orient towards the actual potential sources of risk in the surrounding community.
I don’t currently see a strong argument for not linking to evidence that I was easily able to piece together publicly, and also like, probably the accused can also figure out. The cost here is really only born by the people who lack context who I feel like are being substantially mislead by the absence of information here.
I’ll by-default repost the links and guess at identity of the person in-question in 24 hours unless some forum admin objects or someone makes a decent counterargument.
I personally found seeing a copy of the name and information (e.g., tweet) prior to its removal very clarifying for this particular instance (though other alarming instances still remain unresolved to me, and I hope they are similar). I suppose having the details without the name is still helpful, but I’m unsure. I find myself very conflicted when thinking through the request not to share this information—I want to be respectful, I don’t want to harm any victims, and I don’t want to be a unilateralist.
Reposting the concrete accusations: One of the accusations here seems very likely to be about Michael Vassar and one of his previous partners, who accused Michael publicly a few years ago about “[putting] his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping”.
Michael used to be somewhat central in the EA/Rationality community, but has not been for around 5-6 years, and also has been banned from the vast majority of large EA and Rationality-adjacent events and gathering spaces. He also very explicitly does not identify as “an EA” and indeed would consider himself more as an active enemy of the movement.
(Note: This comment is not an endorsement of the accusation representing the situation accurately. I haven’t looked into this, and I don’t really have much of any additional evidence on what happened here.)
Vassar was pretty central in the rationality community (president of MIRI, co-founder of Metamed, active LessWrong contributor, etc.), but not in the EA community. I don’t think he ever considered himself an EA, and was an early vocal critic of the movement.
Yes, Vassar was more than “somewhat central” in the rationality community. When I first visited SF in 2013 or so, he was one of the main figures in the rationalist tradition, especially as transmitted face-to-face. About as many people would recommend that you hear Michael talk as any other individual. Only 1 or 2 people were more notable. I remember hearing that in the earlier days, it was even more so, and that he was involved in travelling around to recruit the major early figures in the rationalist community from different parts of the US.
Although I can’t say for sure, I would also bet that there’s dozens of unofficial rationalist events (and a few unofficial EA events) that he attended in the last five years, given that he was literally hanging out in the miri/cfar reception area for hours per week, right until the time he was officially banned.
Whereas he was orders of magnitude less present in EA world (although his presence at all is still bad).
Whoever disagreed-voted my comment, could you explain why (feel free to PM)? I never ask for downvote or disagree-vote explanations, but I think I know the history of EA pretty well and I’m fairly confident that what I say above is accurate, so your explanation will either reveal that you are mistaken or cause a significant and valuable update for me.
ETA: Noe that the above was written when the disagree-vote count was negative.
Update: Someone on community health asked me to wait at least until Monday since they are trying to think it through and are somewhat under water right now. Seems reasonable to me, so I’ll wait.
Mod here.
It’s fine to link to information which is already easily publicly available. (I.e. don’t link to a Facebook post from seven years ago that they accidentally set to be public, but it’s okay to link to a very public Twitter thread.)
We may ask you to rot13 encrypt names so that your comment is not discoverable via search engine while still being useful to people reading this post
Don’t share addresses, contact info, or other information that could be used to harass someone, and don’t incite harassment
See more on our norms here.
Note: this is a statement about what violates Forum norms, not what is ethical. There might be compelling reasons not to post this even if it doesn’t technically violate our rules.
Community health request, different from the moderation decision on whether this is allowed:
The person whose Twitter thread has indicated elsewhere that she doesn’t think the accused should be identified, because that could reveal information about other women in the piece. The community health team is requesting that people not link to her Twitter thread.
If people are going to be allowed to use names in a post or comment pertaining to someone’s private life, there should be at least a norm/rule of rot13′ing those names upfront rather than having them up in cleartext unless and until a mod notices it.
Good thought, I very much prefer norms that don’t require moderators to notice things.
It’s hard to make a “bright line” rule here though. Maybe something like:
?
(This is offhand and coming just from me, I suspect other moderators might have different opinions.)
Maybe the bright line rule is that if another Forum user asks you to rot13 a name in a discussion that even arguably implicates the principle of respect for the named person’s private life, you are expected to do so and can appeal to the mods if you think that request was inappropriate.
I think it’s hard to avoid a unilateralist problem either way on this one until mods can weigh in. Since I think the harm of erroneous rot13 is low, I would prefer to give a temporary veto to a single user who thinks rot13 is necessary than allowing a single user to decide that cleartext is appropriate.
I expect there would be few if any unreasonable rot13 requests, and thus very few appeals.
I would personally prefer for you/us not to publicly write the name, to set a very clear precedent that we respect these kinds of requests (unless there is a very strong reason not to), and because the relevant information (i.e. the individual has been banned from EA events for years, and is not currently a fan of EA) has been written in other comments.
Written in a personal capacity, not as a mod
I have seen confidentiality requests weaponized many time (indeed, it is one of the most common ways I’ve seen people end up in abusive situations), and as such I desperately don’t want us to have a norm of always erring on the side of confidentiality and heavily punishing people who didn’t even receive a direct request for confidentiality but are just sharing information they could figure out from publicly available information.
I think the best counterargument would probably be something like: posting links and guessing the identity would deter other survivors from coming forwards. I feel like my model of what deters survivors from coming forwards is pretty bad, and I would want to read the literature on this (hopefully there is a high-quality literature?)
I’m pretty confused about what’s going on here. The person who made this accusation made it on Twitter under their real name using an unlocked account, and the accusation remains public to date. Is the concern here that the accused did not previously know of the accusation against them, but would be made aware of it by this discussion?
(I’m not sure whether I’d want them named in absence of a request to the contrary, but I don’t understand the implied threat model and think other explanations for the request are plausible, given the whole “public tweet” thing.)
If a journalist says that one or more of their sources asked that a name be removed to prevent possible retaliation, they mean exactly what they said: one or more of their sources asked that the name be removed to prevent possible retaliation.
I will not speculate as to who made this request or why. Revealing the identities of vulnerable people who directly asked not to be named is wrong. It is a major reason why women are hesitant to speak publicly about harassment and abuse. And one or more of the women involved has directly requested that their identity not be revealed.
I don’t need you to understand why revealing the identities of sources is wrong. Just don’t do it.
I’m not discussing naming the accuser, but the accused.
I do not think we have an obligation to avoid discussing object-level details of sexual assault claims when those claims have already been made publicly, if it seems like discussing them would otherwise be useful.
One of more of the article’s sources specifically requested that this name not be given. Take it down.
I haven’t included any names in any of my comments.
[EDIT: the article says more than this; see David’s response]
The article has “many of them asked that their alleged abusers not be named”. The article doesn’t name any of the alleged abusers, though, which makes me think the author decided to apply this even in cases where they weren’t asked to do so by the interviewees?
I’m this case we have someone who explicitly made the situation public on Twitter, including the name of their abuser. That seems like much stronger information about what they’re ok being public than what we have from the article?
No, the article has, directly after the passage in question, “TIME is not naming the man, like others in this story, due to the request of one or more women who made accusations against them, and who wanted to shield themselves from possible retaliation.”.
You cannot know why that line was written, and you will not know why until you have done more harm than you ever intended to. If the women in question want their words to be shared on this forum, they will share them. That is not a decision for you to make.
Thanks for pointing out that parenthetical; I’d forgotten that it was repeated and should have checked before writing above.
I’m still very confused on how to go from “doesn’t want the name included in Time” and “does want the name included in Twitter” to whether we should include the name in discussions on the EA Forum.
(Ex: I think it’s ok that I linked to the non-Forum original of a post that someone had deleted from the Forum, but I think maybe your argument here would say that I should be respecting their desire not to have it discussed on the Forum?)
I think it is much safer to mention someone who was named in the article than someone who wasn’t. Putting your name in TIME magazine isn’t a blanket invitation to discuss everything you have ever said or done, but redacting a name from TIME magazine is a strong request not to discuss the name or related details.
Let’s start with the basics and respect the request of women who asked that they and others not be named.
That’s a fair point — I’ve removed the name and Twitter link.
Thank you! :).
The alleged perpetrator seems to be at least tolerated by some influential people. About Two years ago Anna Salomon wrote:
One year ago she wrote:
While I don’t really disagree, I think it’s worth pointing out that Anna here is talking about pretty different behaviors (precipitating psychotic episodes, approaching advocating physical violence, misleading reasoning, yelling) than we’re talking about here (sexual abuse).
Would be extremely surprising if she didn’t know about the sexual abuse allegations. They are very well known among her social circle. Despite this she has chosen to defend the fellow.
My interpretation of Anna was that if she thought there were credible allegations she would have included them in her long list of potentially undesirable actions?
I doubt she agrees with the accusations but I assume she knows they exist.
Probably important nitpick: The last bit of your first quoted paragraph misses a redaction.
Given what I’ve heard of this person, I’m really surprised and dismayed by the tolerance of this person by some, and wish they wouldn’t do that.
Pm’d you
The comments in question seem to be
1) [redacted]
2) [redacted]
X is [redacted]
(I am posting this because I agree with the reasoning here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=tQfPCeSGrhonCtJ4g )
I have redacted this comment based on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=9hdQzfxNZ9K4cBCGG , please lets give the teams a few days
Having read the full TIME article, what struck me was if I replaced each mention of ‘EA’ with ‘the Classical Music industry’ it would still read just as well, and just as accurately (minus some polyamory).
I worked in the Arts for a decade, and witnessed some appalling behaviour and actions as a young woman. It makes me incredibly sad to learn that people have had similar experiences within the EA community. While it is something that should be challenged by us all, it is with regret that I say it is by no means unique to the EA community.
I admire the people who have spoken out, it’s an incredibly hard thing to do, I hope that they are receiving all the care and support that they need. But, I also know this community is full of people trying really hard, and actually doing good.
I have been saddened to learn of similarly bad behaviour in other communities I have been involved in. However it’s important not to let the commonness of abuse and harassment in broader society as an excuse not to improve. (I’m 100% not accusing you of this by the way, it’s just a behavior I’ve seen in other places).
EA should not be aiming for a passing grade when it comes to sexual harassment. The question is not “is EA better than average”, but “is EA as good as it could be”. And the answer to that question is no. I deeply hope that the concerns of the women in the article will be listened to.
I agree that EA should aim to be as good as it could be, but comparisons to other communities are still helpful. If the EA community is worse than others at this kind of thing then maybe:
Someone considering joining should seek out other communities of people trying to do good. (Ex: animal-focused work in EA spaces vs the broader animal advocacy world.)
We should start an unaffiliated group (“Impact Maximizers”) that tries to avoid these problems. (Somewhat like the “Atheism Plus” split.)
We should be figuring what we’re doing differently from most other communities and do more normal things instead. (Ex: this post)
[EDIT: this also feeds into how ashamed people should feel about their association with EA given what’s described here.]
I am pretty certain it wasn’t intended that way but:
Set off minor alarm bells when reading it, more so than the other bullet points, so I tried to put some thought into why that is (and why I didn’t get the same alarm bells for the other two points).
I think it’s because it (most likely inadvertently) implies “If people already in the movement do not like these power dynamics (around making women feel uncomfortable, up to sexual harrassment etc) then they should leave and start their own movement.”(I am aware this asks for some people, not necessarily women/the specific person concerned by this, to start the group, but this still does not address the potentially lower resources, career and networking opportunities). This can almost be used as an excuse not to fix things, as if people don’t like it they can leave. But, leaving means potentially sacrificing close relationships and career and funding opportunities, at least to some degree. Taken together, this could be taken to mean:
If you are a woman uncomfortable about the current norms on dealing with sexual harrassment, consider leaving/starting your own movement, taking potential career and funding hits to do so.
I fully don’t think you intended this, but please take this as my attempt to put words to why this set off minor alarm bells on first reading, and I would be interested to hear the thoughts of others. (It is also possible that that bullet point was in response to a previous comment, which I may not have read in enough depth).
The first and third bullet point do not have this same issue, as the first one does not explicitly reduce existing opportunities for people (i.e. someone considering joining EA does not have as much if anything already invested in it, although may reduce future opportunities if they would benefit a lot from getting more involved in EA), and the third bullet point speaks about making improvements.
I think you’re just playing in to a broader cultural problem here. Too many younger EAs are too invested in getting a job at an EA organization, and/or in having the movement as a part of their identity (as distinct from the underlying ideal). If you think the movement has serious flaws that make it not a good means for doing the most good, then you should not be trying to work for an EA org in the first place, and the access to those opportunities is irrelevant.
People should not be using the movement for career advancement independent of the goal of doing the most good they can do with their careers (and in most cases, can’t do that even if they intend to, because EA org jobs that are high-status within the movement are not similarly high-status outside of it).
I find the EA movement a useful source of ideas and a useful place to find potential collaborators for some of my projects, but I have no interest in working for an EA org because that’s not where I expect I’d have the biggest impact. I think the movement as a whole would be more successful, and a lot of younger EAs would be a lot happier, if they approached the movement with this level of detachment.
I believe you are conflating several things here. But first, a little tip on phrasing responses: putting the word ‘just’ in front of a critical response makes it more dismissive than you might have intended.
Agreed to that as stated, but I think this is a straw man. Things can both be bad in some ways, and better than some other options, but that doesn’t mean any flaws should be dismissed. This could even go to the extreme of (hypothetically) ‘I know I can have the highest impact if I work here, so I will bear the inappropriate attention of my colleagues/will leave and not have the highest impact I can’.
Some people may think that working at an EA org is the highest impact thing they could be doing (even if just for the short term), and career paths are very dependent on the individual. EA basically brands itself as the way to do the most good, so it should not be surprising if people hold this view. I was writing up my first comment it was with the broad assumption of ‘connections/opportunities within EA = connections/opportunities that help you do the most good’ (given the EA forum audience), not as a judgement of ‘EA is the only way of having a high impact’ (which is a different conversation).
I also have thoughts on this one, but this again is a different conversation. EA is not the only way to have a very high impact, but this should not be used as an excuse for avoiding improvements.
Hmm, yes, that’s not what I was trying to say. Edited to change “Some EAs” to “We”, to make it clearer that this is not addressed specifically to people who have experienced harassment.
I think this is probably not true: there are probably people considering joining EA who would find EA a much easier place to get funding than their other best opportunities for trying to do the kind of good they think most needs doing.
(Overall, what I was trying to communicate with my comment is that how EA compares to other communities is something that would be relevant to decisions many people might be making.)
Thanks for your response!
I don’t think changing “some EAs” to “we” necessarily changes my point of ‘people concerned should not have to move to a different community which may have fewer resources/opportunities’, independent of who actually creates that different community.
Note that my bigger point overall was why the second bullet point set off alarm bells, rather than specific points on the others (mostly included as a reference, and less thought put into the wording). That said:
I agree with this. I added “although may reduce future opportunities if they would benefit a lot from getting more involved in EA” after “i.e. someone considering joining EA does not have as much if anything already invested in it” a couple of minutes after originally posting my comment to reflect a very similar sentiment (however likely after you had already seen and started writing your response).
However, there is very much a difference between losing something that you have, and not gaining something that you could potentially have. When talking about personal cost, one is significantly higher than the other (agreed that both are bad), as is the toll of potentially broken trust and losing close relationships. It could potentially also have an impact cost ignoring social factors,e.g. if people have built up career/social capital that is very useful within EA, but not ranked as highly outside of EA/is not linked with the relevant people outside of EA, rather e.g. than building up non-EA networks.
That bullet point is also written as ‘someone considering joining’ rather than ‘we should’. ‘Someone considering joining’ may or may not join for a variety of reasons, and is a potential consequence to the community but not an action point. It is the action points/how action is approached that seem more relevant here.
To be clear, I’m very much in favor of efforts to make EA better here. I think the CEA Community Health Team’s (disclosure: my wife is on that team) work is important, that many EAs need to be more aware of how power dynamics impact relationships (disclosure again), and that fixing this should not primarily fall on the people impacted.
That’s right, sorry!
I also think the second bullet point is probably not a good idea even if we did know that EA has higher rates of this sort of issues than you’d expect: Atheism Plus didn’t go very well! I’m not saying that any of the three points are things that would definitely be worth doing in that world, but they’re an illustration about how the information of whether EA does have higher rates would be relevant to decisions people might make.
That’s good to hear re in favour of efforts to make EA better (edited for clarity). Thanks for your engagement on this.
Agreed with the necessity for awareness around power dynamics with the nuance of fixing this not having to fall on the people impacted by it. I found it good to see that post when it came out as it points out things people may not have been aware of.
I strongly agree here. As far as I know (but I have limited experience), EA does better than all other social movements I have been a part of (animal advocacy, new atheism) on the question of sexual harassment. But I still think we have much room to improve—we should.
Funnily enough, I think EA does worse than other communities / movements I’m involved with (grassroots animal advocacy & environmentalism). My partner and other friends (women) have often complained about various sexist issues when attending EA events e.g. men talking over them, borderline aggressive physical closeness, dismissing their ideas, etc., to the point that they doesn’t want to engage with the community. Experiences like this rarely, if ever, happen in other communities we hang out in. I think there are a few reasons for why EA has been worse than other communities in my cases:
I think our experiences differ on animal issues as when groups /movements professionalise, as has been happening over the past decade for animal welfare, the likelihood that men will abuse their positions of power increases dramatically. At the more grassroots level, power imbalances often aren’t stark enough to lead the types of issues that came out in the animal movement a few years back. EA has also been undergoing this professionalisation and consolidation of power, and seems like the article above highlights the negative consequences of that.
As has been noted many times, EA is currently about 70% male, whilst environmentalism/animal advocacy is majority women. I would be fairly confident that a more balanced gender ratio would mean less misogyny towards women.
Some EAs have a kind of “anti-woke” sentiment to the point where I actually think it could be fairly damaging e.g. it causes people to think issues related to race, gender, nationality etc aren’t important at all. I think it would be pretty valuable if everyone read a few core texts on things like racism, sexism, ableism, etc. to actually understand the every-day experiences of people facing various forms of discrimination and bigotry.
Pointing out the %70 male number seems very relevant since issues like this may contribute to that number and will likely push other women (such as myself) away from the movement.
While I haven’t experienced men in EA being dismissive of my ideas (though that’s only my personal experience in a very small EA community) I have found that the people I have met in EA are much more open to talking about sex and sexual experiences than I am comfortable with in a professional environment. I have personally had a colleague in EA ask me to go to a sex party to try BDSM sex toys. This was very strange for me. I have worked as a teacher, as a health care professional, and have spent a lot of time in academic settings, and I have never had an experience like that elsewhere. I also felt that it was being asked because they were sussing out whether or not I was part of the “cool crowd” who was open about my sex life and willing to be experimental.
I found this especially strange because there seem to be a lot of norms around conversation in EA (the same person who asked me to go to that party has strong feelings about up-keeping these norms) but they for some reason don’t have norms around speaking about sexual relationships, which is taboo in every other professional setting I have been a part of. I think having stronger “norms” or whatever you want to call it, or making discussions like this more taboo in EA, would be a good start. This will make it less likely that people in EA will feel comfortable doing the things discussed in this article.
I would guess this is a mixture of
Founder effects: Sexuality being a topic of discussion in communities which were precursors to EA. EA didn’t originate as a professional community.
Openness to weird ideas: The idea that buying a $40K car instead of a $30K car means you gave up an opportunity to save a life is pretty weird. The idea that vast numbers of people could exist in the future and our overwhelming moral priority should be to ensure that they’re living happy lives is pretty weird. The idea that shrimp welfare is super important is pretty weird. These are all intense, extraordinary conversation topics. Polls show most people masturbate. Most of us don’t talk about it. But if anyone talks about it, I imagine it’s a person who is comfortable with (or even delights in) intense, extraordinary conversations more generally.
fwiw, I haven’t personally experienced this much in EA; my guess is that individual variation in local groups explains more of the difference than any EA-wide thing.
EA may not have originated as a professional community, but it is one now. And that means raising the standards and changing the norms to exclude behavior such as the ones described above.
Agreed.
Didn’t EA originate as a professional community though specifically in the context of finding effective charities and 80k?
I have a hard time picturing an early EA community that isn’t professionally focused. Though maybe I didn’t get into EA early enough to know.
Strongly agree with your second point regarding openness to weird ideas.
Not in the Bay Area. Polyamory was a big discussion topic on LessWrong as far back as 2011: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking
Thanks for sharing your experience and that of your partner. I agree that experiences here can differ dramatically. And I admit I in particular have very limited experience with discrimination by nature of being a white man in a position of power in my community.
I definitely have seen men talking over women and dismissing their ideas within EA and this does bother me and I do try to point it out when I see it (e.g, “Hey I think Sarah wanted to make a point here”).
I do personally think a more balanced gender ratio would be helpful for improving EA culture and would love to do what I can to recruit and retain women into EA.
While I do agree that “woke” and “cancel culture” can have some excesses, I am incredibly disappointed to see these excesses used to dismiss any possibility of a legitimate point about a particular axis of race/gender/nationality/language/etc. disparities, and I currently see this as the bigger problem in EA right now.
While I think these behaviours are antisocial, it seems preemptive to label them as sexist without looking at whether they’re unique to women. As a man, I’ve had many men and some (though a smaller proportion of) women talk over me or dismiss my ideas. I consider it jerkish behaviour—and quite possibly more common among EAs than the population at large—and I try to discourage it when I see it done to others (I usually don’t it mind too much in a 1-on-1) but it doesn’t seem obviously mysogynistic.
(Borderline aggressive physical closeness sounds more likely to be gender specific)
I’m not super familiar with the idea, but I think the idea here is that many people (unconsciously or otherwise) think that women are easier to interrupt, dismiss, or talk over. It’s the bias that’s sexist, not the act itself.
You could make that claim, but then it should be evidenced. Personally I have noticed my tendency (which I try to suppress!) is more readily to interrupt/dismiss people who are shorter than me, which seems to accord with the data.
I think the evidence is there to the same extent as your height evidence:
It also matches my personal experience.
I think there’s a natural reason to feel defensive when faced with this since it carries the label “sexist” which kinda takes a wide range of badness of behavior under one label, but I think this is frequently an unconscious bias people have so I don’t mean it to suggest you or others are bad people, but just that we can do better.
That evidence wouldn’t explain why (or show that) EAs would be more sexist. The behaviour James Ozden describes sounds consistent with, for example, EA containing a higher proportion of aspy types who, generally lacking some awareness of social norms, are more inclined to talk over everyone.
You seem to be really hung up on the term “sexist” and I think I get that. I think it’s very clear there is unintentional and unconscious sexism in the EA movement, like there is everywhere else. I’m not calling anyone bad. But I am going to throw a “Isolated Demand For Rigor, Five Yard Penalty” at your argument here.
Of course there’s sexism (unconscious and otherwise) in the EA movement.
But with the very strong caveat that I believe citing logical fallacies can lead to nothing more productive than arguments over whether the fallacy was correctly cited, I submit that this whole thread is a discussion about whether sexism is more than averagely prevalent in EA (for healthy reference classes), and, therefore whether EAs should put more resources into the problem.
In that context, I would argue the latter is the isolated demand for rigour, for which I’m making an in-context demand for justification.
[ETA: for the record I weakly agree that we should put more resources into the problem. I just don’t want us to sabotage our epistemics while making that determination]
I’m sorry I’m very confused what we are supposed to be discussing. I thought earlier you were arguing that there’s no sexism in EA because people who are interrupting women could just be interrupting people with lower height or just interrupting everyone equally. I was arguing against that.
I’m personally not saying “EA is more sexist than relevant reference classes”. I don’t think I believe that, or it would depend a lot on the reference class… and there appears to be notable within-EA variation.
I probably am saying “we should put more resources into figuring out sexism in EA”, but that’s not what I thought we were talking about, and of course I’d want to think a lot more about what that’s supposed to look like, what “more” means, what “resources” means, what “figuring out sexism” means, etc.
I certainly didn’t mean to claim that. I’ve known of multiple examples of sexism in EA. I think the comment to which I originally replied might not have been another such example, and wanted to guard against assuming it was.
Lol, and now I’m wondering how much I do of that as someone over six foot/ 185cm
I don’t think the 70⁄30 gender ratio causes misogyny. I think it amplifies experiences of it among women because they are the minority here. Imagine a group of 100 EAs, 70 men and 30 women, and a group of 100 environmentalists, 30 men and 70 women. Suppose 10% of all men do something misogynistic towards a random woman in their group. Then 23% of EA women experience misogyny compared to only 4% of environmentalist women, even though each individual man in each group is equally likely to have behaved misogynistically.
(Prior to seeing this post, I’d have conjectured that men in EA are less likely than men elsewhere to behave misogynistically, and maybe that’s still true, but these reports are really alarming.)
This idea has been called the Petrie multiplier. I agree that this probably makes things worse for women in EA.
If instead you model it as X% of all men do something misogynistic toward women they encounter instead of as toward a random woman in the group you end up with something much less skewed.
I think that both modeling choices would make sense depending on which specific type of misogyny is the concern. For example, interruptions would seem likely to fit your model better, while asking a woman out in an inappropriate manner might be fit by the random group member model better.
Although I think that the group size is realistically going to be smaller than 100 in almost all cases, often far smaller, which would also lead to less skew.
Edit: although if instead of considering how many women experience >0 instances of (significant) misogyny, and instead consider how much misogyny on average each woman experiences, then it would go back to being heavily skewed by the proportion of genders in each group.
Ozden comment contains great (but predictable) points.
He also packs in his self-interested argument, into this extremely important/sensitive heated discussion:
Don’t have a lot of time to explain, but this isn’t true, it’s almost the opposite.
The power structures in distributed movements exist and are controlled in different ways, sometimes producing pretty bad behavior but with more dubious leadership/management.
DxE, for example, had an almost existential problem with sexual misconduct/abuse. This was probably connected to second-tier leaders and the distributed, chapter-like system, as opposed to Wayne actively courting it.
When I spoke to Wayne (and the subsequent leadership), they pointed to reforms such as central sexual harassment policies and enforcing a better culture. While I don’t know how substantive these reforms were, something like this would be probably involved in a true solution. Being “top down” helps a lot, as well as having a professionalized staff/leadership to execute this.
Don’t have time to put in an essay, but there’s a much longer thread here about distributed movement and power, and also a separate thread here about sexual harassment and animal advocacy. On the latter point, we got multiple layers of a nightmarish “motte and bailey” that is ongoing—we’re approaching the point of non-viability in attaching EA to us.
Incredibly, these articles aren’t in the top 5 things I would need to communicate to EAs right now.
On the plus side, Ozden’s comment did produce a great thread by Lauren Maria, who is a thoughtful and brilliant leader.
Just wanted to point out that Peter and you seem to mention two different classes of behaviors. While the behaviors you mention certainly create a more unwelcoming environment to women and shouldn’t be welcome in EA environmens, I don’t think they would meet the (legal ?) definition of sexual harassment and may not be the types of actions Peter had in mind.
My guess is that EA is currently male because aggressively quantifying and measuring charitable giving is an activity that appeals primarily to men. As long as that remains true, and Effective Altruism remains Effective Altruism in that way, my prediction is that the gender ratio will remain the same, just as most hobbies and social groups maintain similar gender ratios over time even when people work really hard to change them. If this form of harassment is inherent to male-dominated activities then that would be pretty sad.
I’m pretty sure the standard left-American take on everyday harrassment is straightforwardly compatible with believing it’s not very important in a world with existential risk and malaria and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and that this is a sensible position for EAs to hold even when they’re not explicitly “anti-woke”.
I strong disagreed (but did not downvote) this comment for a few reasons:
(1) I don’t think there’s any evidence that EA is an inherently and immutably male activity, and we shouldn’t assume such. EA is currently male-skewed, yes, but I was involved in a college “venture philanthropy” group that involved explicit rankings of non-profit organizations (quite similar to EA in many ways) and it was female-skewed, and I’ve observed this in my broader experiences with venture philanthropy (though don’t have statistics to confirm). There’s a lot of ways EA can end up male-skewed (or venture philanthropy can end up female-skewed) without it being an inherently and immutably male or an inherently and immutably female activity.
(2) Even if EA is an inherently and immutably male-leaning activity in general (which I don’t necessarily agree with per above), there’s a lot of value in finding ways to involve the remaining ~50% of the population, so surely we’d want to find ways to make it less male-leaning on the margin. Thus writing off the idea of being more inclusive to men seems needlessly dismissive and reductive and leaves a lot of impact and opportunity on the table.
(3) If you care about achieving impact on existential risk, malaria, and even the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, it would be very helpful to have a healthy, robust, and impactful community to work on these problems. Being more inclusive to non-men would improve EA on all three of these axes and thus paying attention to at least some claims currently referred to as “woke” or “leftist” would improve on all three axes. (To be clear, I don’t consider myself “leftist” but I still take many of these kinds of concern very seriously.)
There’s at least some evidence, in that it’s a tradition that is currently mostly participated in by men. I don’t know exactly what you mean by “inherently” or what brand of evidence you’re looking for, but it’s not really relevant to the discussion that the cause for the difference in interest be biological or social or whatever. These sorts of gender ratios seem hard to “correct” when it comes to C.S. departments and Magic the Gathering tournaments, and my guess is that with EA it will be similar. If someone wants to prove me wrong then I’d welcome the attempt.
Well, that depends, doesn’t it? If “making EA less male-leaning on the margin” means coming up with fewer WELLBYs, then plausibly “making EA less male” means making EA less able to accomplish its goals.
Often what I’ve seen academic departments do to attract women into STEM is to exaggerate the interpersonal aspects of a given profession and downplay the nerdy stuff. This ends up being only moderately harmful because the women take the intro classes, decide they’re not interested for reasons completely divorced from social expectations, and then choose something different. But when it comes to a charitable organization, downplaying the male-coded activities can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: You succeed in attracting women (and men) who think weaponizing autism into producing good animal suffering metrics is a waste of time, and soon “Effective Altruists” stop thinking animal suffering metrics are worth funding. That sounds pretty bad to me.
I certainly didn’t write off the idea of being more inclusive. There are obviously more ways to reduce the incidence of sexual harassment besides modifying the gender ratios of an org. But if gender ratios were a significant part of why the person I replied to saw more sexual harassment that would be discouraging for all of the reasons I have outlined thus far.
Again I agree.
I agree with this (what Peter said) and also have a couple stuff to add:
Just so you know, in the Philippines, generally women are considered more charitable, and this somewhat manifests in EA Philippines, where we are mostly women. This might not account for the quality of who is more likely to “quantify charity” but definitely gender is not binary, and I think it’s limiting to say “men more likely; that’s why this community is made up like this.”
Maybe what you say is because there are more men in the movement, but I don’t think it’s simply because men “quantify charity more;” I think that statement is very limiting. There are a ton of factors as to why predominantly white men are those who are into EA, and I think even just the idea that they generally can afford to be philanthropic is one of them (not that this is negative since it’s good they help and presumably wanna help effectively).
I think saying sexual harrassment doesn’t matter if there XYZ other stuff happening might be in utilitarian cases kinda true, but this belief gives leeway to damaging the movement longer-term. Let’s say 1000 years from now we theoretically obliterated x-risk but knowingly or unknowingly allowed sexual harrassment to occur in the manner stated in the article… I think we can do better than that. And I don’t think it’s right to sacrifice good values and good community dynamics if we’re fighting for a future where this community exists; I’d be very sad to see lots of discrimination/harassment continue to occur 5000 years from now.
I agree wholeheartedly with the two comments above.
Agreed… I think similar stuff happen in many communities and social groups, and I think maybe EA gets tricky ’cause it’s like, hey, aren’t we generally good people? So shouldn’t we like… be outliers and like… be people who are sensitive and stuff and by a given, never sexually harrass? So not that it’s any less important, but EA ends up sticking out because of that.
To me, EAs being nice is usually the case, as per the usual impression of non-EAs who see EA conferences (“wow, this was the nicest crowd I’ve ever seen!) but we are not infallible, and should never justify bad behavior and keep improving especially given who we are (i.e., EAs; like what you said, “is EA as good as it could be”). And I think we should keep assessing how norms/spaces enable/allow upsetting behavior like those in the article to happen
My intuition would be that a community of altruists that care so deeply about the suffering of all beings should be much much better than average when it comes to sexual assault/sexual harassment both in terms of prevalence and handling of incidents?
Which means that even if we find we are average, it is shocking because it suggests that there are certain aspects of this community’s culture that are negative enough to drag us back to being average from much much better?
Interestingly, a friend in academia claims the norms are much much better there. I certainly would guess there’s just more general acceptance of hooking up with people in your community in EA versus professional communities, though I suspect that in e.g. queer or feminist communities there’s tons of dating and hookups.
I can think of problems like this with non-EA academics too. There was a a famous medic who taught at my undergrad degree and iirc gave weird physical compliments to female students during his lectures, and I can think of at least one non-EA prof who made multiple female students uncomfortable.
Having said that, my personal hunch would be that things are worse in EA. Some of the reasons are unpopular to talk about, but they include it being quite male, young (including minors), poly, aspie, less professional and due to what we are discovering can be quite a fine line between consequentialism and amorality. In some of these respects, it resembles the chess community and the atheism community, which have had significant problems.
I can understand some of these even where I disagree, but could you elaborate on why a group being more “aspie” contributes to sexual harassment (disclosure I am an aspie, but in fairness I’m also male and feel that I understand that one much more).
The cases I know of come disproportionately from more aspie people, and I can think of at least one case where the person didn’t think that they had done anything wrong. This would make sense, because aspie people are on average less competent at judging the lines of socially acceptable behaviour
Yeah, let’s be careful not to stigmatize aspies here.
I disagree. IMO, many of the issues that EA faces when it comes to sexual harassment/abuse stem from aspects that are particular to the community itself. I did research for a book on this topic, and sexual misconduct and abuse thrive in contexts where power is more concentrated and there is less accountability; basically, the harder it is to speak up about someone, the more likely that their bad behavior will go unchecked and they will continue hurting people.
EA (particularly Bay Area EA?) tends to concentration of power among particular figures. And concentration of many kinds of power, including control over funding and job opportunities as well as things like social status. EA can also be pretty insular. If speaking up about someone means endangering your job and your friends, it’s harder to speak up. That’s not even getting to the fact that you might be endangering your housing situation, or might be worried about how it might affect your impact on the world.
These factors are not totally unique to EA—I spent a long time in the classical music world as well, and concentrations of power let countless bad actors off the hook. But I would say that they’re particularly severe within EA, and understanding the particular factors that worsen things allows for more targeted solutions.
This feels complicated to say, because it’s going to make me seem like I don’t care about abuse and harassment described in the article. I do. It’s really bad and I wish it hadn’t happened, and I’m particularly sad that it’s happened within my community, and (more) that people in my community seemed often to not support the victims.
But I honestly feel very upset about the anti-polyamory vibe of all this. Polyamory is a morally neutral relationship structure that’s practiced happily by lots of people. It doesn’t make you an abuser, or not-an-abuser. It’s not accepted in the wider community, so I value its acceptance in EA. I’d be sad if there was a community backlash against it because of stuff like this, because that would hurt a lot of people and I don’t think it would solve the problem.
I think the anti-poly vibe also makes it kind of...harder to work out what’s happening, and what exactly is bad, or something? Like, the article describes lots of stuff that’s unambiguously bad, like grooming and assault. But it says stuff like ‘Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college’. Like, what does it mean to ‘recruit someone to join your polyamorous relationship’? You mean he asked her out, when he was much older and she was in college, and he happened to be poly? Yet it’s sandwiched between descriptions of two unambiguously awful incidents of sexual harassment and grooming.
There was also a quote from someone who complained about her poly partner being a fuckboy. Which like… maybe this guy was not a good partner, but that’s kind of unrelated to whether he had multiple partners. And ‘this guy I dated was kind of a fuckboy and I wasn’t happy in the relationship’ isn’t in the same ballpark as abuse and harassment!
The inclusion of less-bad things doesn’t negate the broad point of the article, but if we want to actually tackle sexual harassment, it helps to know what exactly the problem is, rather than gesturing at ‘these people have Unconventional Ways and that’s Suspicious’.
I agree that the article moves between several situations of issues of hugely varying severity without acknowledging that, and this isn’t very helpful. And I like that EA is able to be a welcoming place for people who enjoy relationship structures that are discriminated against in the wider world. But I did want to push back against one particular piece:
In figuring out how we should view polyamory a key question to me is what it’s effects are. Imagine we could somehow run an experiment where we went back to having a taboo on non-monogamy regardless of partner consent: how would we expect the world to be different? Some predictions I’d make:
People who enjoy polyamorous relationships would be worse off.
Some people would be more productive because they’re less distracted by partner competition.
Other people would be less productive because getting a lot done was part of their approach to partner competition.
Some people would have kids who otherwise wouldn’t, or have kids earlier in life.
...
There would be less of the kind of power abuse described in the article because most high-status men would be married and this would be riskier for them (argued above).
Imagine a similar article talking about how it’s common for people on college campuses to drink and then assault people. While I would agree that drinking alcohol is morally neutral on its own, if it predictably leads to people assaulting each other more than they would in its absence that is one consideration among many for whether to discourage it.
[EDIT: see my response to Kelsey, below—I’m not advocating EAs avoid polyamory]
[this is partly also responding to your response to Kelsey below]
I think I view this differently because I prize personal freedom (for everyone) really highly, and I also think that the damage of community disapproval/the norms being ‘against’ you is pretty high, so I would be hesitant to argue strongly against any consensual and in-principle-not-harmful relationship style, even if there was evidence that it led to worse outcomes. In that situation, I’d try to mitigate the bad outcomes rather than discouraging the style.
To get a sense of why poly people are upset about this, imagine if someone was like ‘there are better outcomes if people are celibate—you save so much time and emotional energy that can be spent on research! So you should break up with your partner’. You’d probably have a strong ‘uh, no, wtf, I’m not doing that’ reaction. And maybe you’d say ‘oh I would never say anyone would break up with their partners’, but depriving someone of future potential positive relationships is also bad, and… like… maybe I’m just neurotic or not assertive enough or something, but if someone says ‘X is bad’, and I do X, I am inclined to take that seriously.
I also think advocating against polyamory wouldn’t be very effective at curbing abuses that stem from abusers being exposed to less risk, because I think if you’re brazen and sociopathic enough to do some of the things described in the article, and also high status, you’re not really going to care about whether your relationship style is vaguely discouraged. Like, stuff like grooming and hitting on young people you have power over and assault is already more-than-vaguely discouraged, and that didn’t help!
I’m confused by your analogy to celibacy because the analogous statements seem really different from anything I’ve said or think? I don’t think there are better outcomes if people refrain from polyamory, haven’t told anyone they should break up, and don’t think polyamory is bad.
This is getting deeper into a hypothetical (“what I think I would do in an alternative world where I had strong evidence that polyamory was harmful”) that I don’t think is very helpful? If you really want to know what I would do in this situation I’m willing to continue, but I’m nervous about people misinterpreting and thinking that I’m talking about a non-hypothetical.
I’m sorry to have misinterpreted you. I guess I’m confused by what your broad point is now—where do we disagree? I think I don’t understand why you disagree with my comment that ‘Polyamory is a morally neutral relationship structure that’s practiced happily by lots of people. It doesn’t make you an abuser, or not-an-abuser.’
I’m not sure we disagree all that much, and I’m sorry for giving the impression otherwise!
Where I think we disagree is that I don’t think we can just take neutrality as an assumption? Instead, it matters what the effects are.
Please mentally reimagine this comment for some other ‘chosen’-stigma subgroup—being gay, trans or whatever.
You’re not wrong that in some abstract sense there’s a fact of the matter about having more people be that way makes the world better or worse, but that doesn’t mean it’s +EV to do armchair speculation about. And raising such speculation in response to someone saying they feel targeted by prejudice seems like particularly unempathic timing.
I am only tangentially involved in EA, but have been actively polyamorous for around ten years, so I hope it’s not too callous for me specifically to say that that was the most striking part of the article. The article includes a lot of sensationalizing and othering language around polyamory, including the repeated use of “join a polyamorous relationship” to mean dating someone who’s polyamorous, and the ‘so-called “polycules.”’ line.
I agree that it’s bad behavior for polyamorous people to pressure mono people to be poly, talk about monogamy as “less enlightened”, and such (and agree with quinn that it would reduce avenues for attacks on our community to actively discourage this behavior); but I think it’s kind of dishonest to discuss this without mentioning that mono people can be overly quick to categorize positive discussion of polyamory as “pressuring people to be mono”, due to the marginalized position of polyamory in society and the biases that creates.
The article itself is an example:
If you click through to the interview, though, what he argues is that 1) monogamy is partially rooted in men’s desire to know if children they’re fathering are biologically theirs and women’s desire to know if they can rely on their partner to stick around to help provide for a child 2) these worries might be lessened in the age of birth control, though he “would be surprised if [polyamory] is adopted by more than, say, 25 percent of the population.”
I don’t want to detract from the very real concerns about sexual abuse and assault, but I would be sad (and more importantly, I don’t think it would do anything to alleviate sexual abuse and assault) if getting media attention from an article writer who isn’t too concerned with distinguishing between polyamory and abuse pushed EA in the direction of replicating these biases.
I cosign this comment completely.
I have a cheap thing polyam folks can start doing today that would make a decent amount of progress over time.
more downvotes and social sanctions for the “monog is unenlightened” meme.
I know when people get excited about an awesome new social technology they want to scream it from the rooftops, and they think “why didn’t I try this sooner was I some kind of primitive?” But when you say that out loud, others hear “so you’re saying I’m a primitive”.
I’ve seen numerous comments and anecdotes of meatspace conversations that go further than that! “letting jealousy run your life means you need therapy” or “you’ve been brainwashed by the conformist masses of romcoms”, when they happen in our community they’re not downvoted into oblivion (yet, growth mindset)!
I don’t think it’s a referendum on community engagement in polyamory for us to listen to the complaints of people who are either obligate monog and had an experiment in polyam go south or monog and not interested in experimenting or questioning it.
(Keep in mind, many queer people go through the stage of skepticism that there exist any properly truly straight people at all. I sure did. This is seen as something to grow out of in the queer community. Let’s assert that assuming everyone would be polyam if they just tried harder to be civilized is something to grow out of, too).
Pollyamory is not necessarily a bad thing in all contexts and all implementations, and I’m not claiming that everyone who practices is an abuser—but on its face it seems intuitive that the prevalance of polly in a community would interact with frequency of sexual harrasment/assult (especially when layered on top of other things like high prevalance of aspergers+mood dissorders+professional relationships between members of the community).
I’m not advocating this entirely, but just to illustrate the point—imagine if most people in EA had cultural attitudes such that:
- It’s taboo to have sex or cuddle with somebody who you’re not in a serious committed relationship with
- Propositioning someone who already has a partner was considered a vile thing to do, and could lead to serious humiliation for the proposer
- Being in a long term, stable, exclusive partnership was seen as a very high-status signal, and having many sexual partners was considered low-status
If the culture in EA was more like this, (for better or worse), the frequency of unwanted physical advances would certianly be lower, right?
I agree that the article had an anti-polyamory vibe and that doesn’t seem helpful in it of itself and damaging to some who are not doing anything wrong. But I do think some discussion is warranted, not to be against polyamory, but for how our community treats it in such a way that it affects some dynamics (’cause it can be tricky!)
For me, the broader picture is,
The blurry professional/personal line EA generally has + a polyamory subculture used negatively + powerful men who are more likely to harass gives a complex equation that can lead to behavior like that discussed in this article. The article could’ve been more explicit about this. In sum for me, what seems damaging is qualities of the community that encourage/enable people to cross lines in such a way that allows some minorities to get harassed in this way.
Also just to add, most poly people I know in EA are respectful and the explicit culture I’ve been exposed to doesn’t encourage crossing lines; perhaps the implicit culture is a bit more sensitive.
Morally neutral doesn’t mean risk neutral. Also, as others have pointed out, if you have a community where norms around dating are clearly problematic, then increase the amount of people dating, things are likely to get messy.
I do think that this is a unique EA/rationalist polyamory issue though. I’m friends with quite a few polyamorous people in other scenes like partner dance, and things are handled much better there. Personally it seems the lack of understanding or care about social cues and the ‘holier than thou’ attitude in the Bay Area EA polycules is what is driving most of this bad behavior.
People have some strong opinions about things like polyamory, but I figured I’d still voice my concern as someone who has been in EA since 2015, but has mostly only interacted with the community online (aside from 2 months in the Bay and 2 in London):
I have nothing against polyamory, but polyamory within the community gives me bad vibes. And the mixing of work and fun seems to go much further than I think it should. It feels like there’s an aspect of “free love” and I am a little concerned about doing cuddle puddles with career colleagues. I feel like all these dynamics lead to weird behaviour people do not want to acknowledge.
I repeat, I am not against polyamory, but I personally do not expect some of this bad behaviour would happen as much if in a monogamous setting since I expect there would be less sliding into sexual actions.
I’ve avoided saying this because I did not want to criticize people for being polyamorous and expected a lot would disagree with me and it not leading to anything. But I do think the “free love” nature of polyamory with career colleagues opens the door for things we might not want.
Whatever it is (poly within the community might not be part of the issue at all!), I feel like there needs to be a conversation about work and play (that people seem to be avoiding).
I would just like to note that the phrase, ‘I have nothing against <minority group>, but...’ should ring alarm bells for anyone who’s ever been concerned about casual racism, sexism, ageism or any other socially-acceptable-at-the-time prejudice.
I wanted to downvote this comment. I think discussion on the topic and the dynamics it raises are very much worth discussing without being branded a bigot.
But then I did the exercise of replacing “polyamory” with “gay men” and “monogamous” with “straight” in the comment you responded to and was pretty horrified with the result.
It totally reads like a comment then that would have been socially acceptable not too many years ago, but that we strongly condemn now as homophobia.
I’m kinda just sitting with this info processing it, not entirely sure what conclusion to draw just yet.
I agree with both points—I don’t think it’s productive to call people names, but I do want to draw attention to the parallel you make in this and many of the other comments on this page.
[ETA Maybe bisexuality would be a better metaphor, just for the practical reason that it matches better with the concern people are voicing that ‘this sort of behaviour’ naturally implies a larger number of sexual/romantic dynamics]
I honestly didn’t know how to talk about it either, but wanted to point at general vibes I was getting. While I’m still confused about what‘s the issue exactly, contrary to my initial comment, I don’t really think polyamory within the community is a problem anymore. Not because of Arepo’s comment specifically, but because there are healthy ways to do polyamory just like other forms of relationships. It’s something that I thought was true before writing the comment, but was a bit confused about the whole mixing of career and “free love” with everyone in the community.
Maybe only talking about “free love” mixed with power dynamics and whatever else would have been better. I don’t know really know. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything as someone confused about all this, but still wanting to help. I felt it was the kind of thing that a lot of people were thinking, but not saying it out loud.
That said, I think Sonia’s video cleared up some things a bit for me. It points to the larger amounts of “hacker houses”, networking, sex, and money in the Bay Area. She also points to polyamory not being the problem. However, she says while those things shape the structure of the problem, it’s power dynamicsthat ends up being the main root issue. It sounds to me like she is pointing to people will sometimes try to become polyamorous with others by abusing power dynamics (even though this is not inherent to most polyamorous relationships at all). Are power dynamics the whole story? I don’t know.
Note that a lot of people seemed to agree with my initial comment. I’m not sure what to make of that.
No judgement from me. You’re talking to someone who used to be quite homophobic and polyphobic and having a caring community where I could be accepted for where I was and work through my thoughts without being labelled an insta-bigot was precisely what I needed.
A friend of mine recently pointed out that polyamory during the 80′s free love era still only made up like 0.8% of relationships in Canada. Today, even without a mass social movement, in Canada that figure sits around 5% - there has been such an increase that the Canadian government is actually examining the situation to try and figure out if laws should be changed (given the entire system pre-supposes monogamy).
What this suggests to me is that polyamory is orders of magnitude more visible now to EAs that wouldn’t even have known much about it before (other than maybe in the abstract). Novelty of this sort can be uncomfortable (it was for me at first), hence your post getting so many upvotes. Many new to actually seeing polyamory in the real world feel uncomfortable too, even if they cant quite put a reason on why.
I strongly urge anyone reading this sentence to watch Sonia’s video. Given we haven’t heard the same kind of scandals (I don’t think?) outside of the bay (and there are many non-Bay Area poly EAs in the world) and women are reporting it is indeed worse in The Bay, I think looking at the entire situation through the lens of what is different in the Bay Area (i.e. Power Dynamics) is much more fruitful.
nit: a lot of monogamous people engage in cuddle puddles. Problem here is, like you said, the career colleagues part leading to potential abuses of power dynamics.
I would say the relationship of a person is private, and it seems arrogant for us (Effective Altruists) to decide what relationship styles society at large should accept—specially considering that we want to be welcome to all different cultures, from East and West, including indigenous cultures.
What should not be acceptable is any form of harassment, and it seems like a pretty good universal norm that Effective Altruism community gatherings and workplaces should be focused on that mission—EA. That’s not to say relationships are completely banned and shunned, but it should be common knowledge that this is not what EA is for (finding partners) - and advice that it should be strongly avoided. It should be clear what EA spaces are for (not purely for socialization, for finding partners, etc., but for helping others effectively and discussing how to achieve that!)
Note: unless there is clear consensual will from all parties and it happens outside EA of course—I don’t think banning consensual relationships outright is wise or necessary. Note2: I read a comment somewhere recently that ‘You are allowed to ask people out at essentially all places, as long as there is immediate acceptance/consensus; however many places rightfully ban non-consensual approaches, i.e. rejected approaches. This may seem unfair, but it isn’t since there are really many other places that allow people to meet each other and where the norms allow asking people out’.
We should promote a spirit of inclusiveness of all cultures and persons, and this probably requires establishing some norms around avoiding some kinds of behavior.
Edit: There seems to be strong disagreement about this comment, I’d appreciate clarifications. I might retract some things.
Directly funding advocacy against particular relationship styles is something that we take seriously as a possible cause area: the numbers don’t currently seem to check out compared to alternatives, but a strong stance against child marriage seems like a very reasonable position for EA to take.
“community gatherings” is an incredibly vague category that stretches from “socializing over a meal at an EAG” to “dinner at someone’s house that they invited their friends, all of whom are EAs, to”. I don’t think it’s useful to try to identify events that way, and saying that people can’t have the latter because those events are not for helping others effectively is clearly too far. Personally, I think EAs are pretty good about not branding informal social events as EA Events TM, but that distinction in branding doesn’t necessarily mean that much to anyone.
There seems to be strong disagreement about my comment, so I’ll explain why I believe it’s somewhat arrogant for Effective Altruists to take a definite position in some relationship styles (certainly not all!):
(0) Like I said, this is a deep cultural issue, which evades many of the conventional tools of Effective Altruism. It doesn’t mean we cannot discuss it, or even have personal opinions, but it seems that we should avoid taking position on it (as a movement), without consensus of society, given we probably lack the expertise and tools to make such judgement.
(1) Some relationship styles probably have conventional (contemporary) wisdom to cause harm to people. That includes abuse, or things that form consensus in social sciences to be harmful. I don’t know much about customs around child marriage, but it seems like something that can be discussed, in light of cultural literature as well.
(2) It seems that polyamory is very much a cultural gray area, and I don’t think there’s any kind of consensus on whether it could be harmful and in what ways, or whether it could be good for individuals
(reminder: things like this need to be seen from many points of views, not only through studies, but also from personal experiences that are very complicated—think trying to justify numerically your favorite food. It’s very difficult, it tends to evade conclusive and analytic evidence, instead appealing to intuition and maybe long discussions on taste and other factors that elude this kind of argument)
(3) This sort of evades from the core of Effective Altruism, that is to address most urgent and effectively actionable causes. I don’t think policing relationship styles, around the community or not, or even minor cultural norms, is something we should focus on: again, unless we can back it from a social science consensus (and straightforward quality of life impacts), specifically because I don’t think this will prevent suffering one way or another as much as focusing on our mission.
I’d appreciate further feedback on those points or other points of disagreement.
Thank you for the response. I discarded my point by point response, because I think I have a more elegant explanation: I parse your argument as saying that because there is and should be a high degree of uncertainty around the net harm/benefit of polyamory, we should avoid taking a position on it.
I think that is a fine position to have. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant, because my parse of Keerthana Gopalakrishnan’s perspective is that she thinks polyamory is harmful and there is strong evidence for this.[1] And certainly critics of polyamory can point to a long anthropological tradition and a great number of studies, and advocates can note that those studies are for a wildly different context from modern international elites.
If polyamory is maybe slightly bad, then I think it’s reasonable for EA social consensus, let alone institutionalized EA, to favor letting people make their own choices. We don’t demand that every member eat an optimally healthy diet or practice gratitude journaling, in part because there are substantial differences between people and in part because people get to live their own lives.
If polyamory is very harmful and the evidence for this is very clear, and those harms can’t be pattern-matched exactly to an American gay man in 1970[2], then I would face a much more difficult set of questions. For some people polyamory seems to be intrinsic, and the bar for asking them to suppress that should be very high. I think that EAs should have a social consensus against relationships that we think are very likely to be harmful.
For example, many bright young people think that visa-motivated marriages are an obviously great idea. Having seen that obviously great idea crash and burn multiple times, with relatively few successes, and relatively causal explanations observed in the failures, I am now against it. I would advise a friend against it if they asked my opinion, and for a good friend perhaps even if they didn’t. And many EAs have EA friends.
That point is not made explicitly, but it is hard to parse her as having any other stance based on her writing and the tone of the Time piece.
I have recently seen someone try to claim that harms of polyamory are different because it’s not just social stigma: more people are affected because of multiple partners and STI risks are higher. Some people clearly don’t know queer history. Much of the “harms” of polyamory that critics raise in this piece seem to be exactly analogous to straight men being deeply offended at being propositioned by queer men.
In 2018, I collected data about several types of sexual harassment on the SSC survey, which I will report here to help inform the discussion. I’m going to simplify by assuming that only cis women are victims and only cis men are perpetrators, even though that’s bad and wrong.
Women who identified as EA were less likely report lifetime sexual harassed at work than other women, 18% vs. 20%. They were also less likely to report being sexually harassed outside of work, 57% vs. 61%.
Men who identified as EA were less likely to admit to sexually harassing people at work (2.1% vs. 2.9%) or outside of work (16.2% vs. 16.5%)
The sample was 270 non-EA women, 99 EA women, 4940 non-EA men, and 683 EA men. None of these results were statistically significant, although all of them trended in the direction of EAs experiencing less sexual harassment.
This doesn’t prove that EA environments have less harassment than the average environment, since it could be that EAs are biased to have less sexual harassment for other reasons, and whatever additional harassment they get in EA isn’t enough to make up for it; the vast majority of EAs have the vast majority of interactions in non-EA environments. I tried to sort of get around this by limiting my analysis to people living in California, on the grounds that they were more likely to be plugged into EA communities and jobs. Conditional on being a woman in California, being EA did make someone more likely to experience sexual harassment, consistently, as measured in many different ways. But Californian EAs were also younger, much more bisexual, and much more polyamorous than Californian non-EAs; adjusting for sexuality and polyamory didn’t remove the gap, but age was harder to adjust for and I didn’t try. EAs who said they were working at charitable jobs that they explicitly calculated were effective had lower harassment rates than the average person, but those working at charitable jobs that they didn’t expliclitly calculate were higher. All of these subgroup analyses were very small sample size.
Overall I am not sure that anything can be concluded from these results either way.
I would urge everyone thinking about this question to read my original discussion of the sexual harassment survey results. It mostly focuses on professions but I think the overall conclusion is extremely relevant here too. You can also find the link to the data there in case you want to double-check my results.
Could you share (maybe approximate) numbers and percentages, like you did for the full stats?
These are anonymous quotes from two people I know and vouch for about the TIME piece on gender-based harassment in the EA community:
Anon 1: I think it’s unfortunate that the women weren’t comfortable with the names of the responsible parties being shared in the article. My understanding is that they were not people strongly associated with EA, some of them had spoken out against EA and had never identified as an EA or had any role in EA, and an article with their names would have given people a very different impression of what happened. I guess I think someone should just spell out who the accused parties are (available from public evidence).
Anon 2: I want EAs to not be fucking stupid 😭
“Oh geez this Times reporter says we’re doing really bad things, we must be doing really bad things A LOT, that’s so upsetting!”
yet somehow “This New York Times reporter says Scott Alexander is racist and bad, but he’s actually not, ugh I hate how the press is awful and lies & spins stuff in this way just to get clicks”
And yes, this included reports of people, but like I’ve met the first person interviewed in the article and she is hella scary and not someone I would trust to report accurately on this. And I know one of the people being talked about is [redacted] & some of the circumstance beyond that, which is like a known thing that people have considered and taken action on, and like.......… why the fuck are EAs just like “damn this is so sad, we really fucked up guys” without being AT ALL skeptical about the reporting or sources??????
A section of this comment was reported as unnecessarily rude and offensive, and on a second read, I agree.
Claiming that someone is “hella scary” is needlessly inflammatory. If the quoted comment was posted directly on the forum, it would have gotten a warning. Quoting a message should not be a way to get around that.
Let’s also keep in mind that this is a particularly sensitive topic, so we should be even more careful about living up to our very high discussion standards.
Please don’t do this again
Why did you remove both quotes then?
I don’t understand, what did I remove?
I meant to only temporarily redact a name from your comment. Did I accidentally make more changes? I absent-mindedly didn’t make a copy, sorry
Edit: community health and mod teams have replied here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=7vGd37wuAA4wo9t2P feel free to add the name back after reading those comments
I feel uncomfortable with this kind of public character judgement of an alleged victim. Especially when it’s presented without a source or evidence backing up the claim she’s ‘hella scary’
“And yes, this included reports of people, but like I’ve met the first person interviewed in the article and she is hella scary and not someone I would trust to report accurately on this.”
Adorable attempt at character assassination. See rhetorical technique here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
Not that it matters but the person you are describing as “hella scary” and unreliable is a very decorated robotics researcher whose career has made incredible intellectual contributions in her field. I would like to counter and ask what makes you so keen to exclude her narrative?
EDIT: To anyone who is good faith skeptical of the above claim of deflection, let me point out how absurd it would be to counter any other claim (ie, “The sky is blue” or “Capitalism is the best form of economic organization ever”) with “well I can’t engage with the argument because this person is hella scary”
I really don’t know how to handle sharing takes like this in-public, especially from an anonymous source, but I do feel like “very decorated robotics researcher” does not feel super related to how much I would trust someone to accurately report things in an article here.
For the record, I know approximately nothing about the person in-question, I just felt like this argument felt weird and kind of like a non-sequitur.
(Edit: I guess you do say “not that it matters”, so I might just be misreading the tone here, so feel free to ignore this)
I’m vouching for this anonymous person’s judgment although I can’t personally verify their assessment of that person’s character.
I think the second comment here almost crosses the line into outright conspiracism. For example, the article on Scott alexander may have been framed in a negative way, but you can read through the article yourself: nothing in there is a lie. Similarly, Time may have a skewed perspective and negative framing, but they still have journalistic standards and were reporting on real allegations.
It also falls on the trap of debating whether EA is as bad as “average” or not, rather than whether there is room for improvement, which there very clearly and obviously is.
I am terrified that you were so thoroughly downvoted… “EA only wants to hear shallow critiques, not deep ones” seems to be happening vigorously, still.
I have redacted from this comment the name of a person accused, based on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=9hdQzfxNZ9K4cBCGG
Edit: community health and mod teams have replied here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=7vGd37wuAA4wo9t2P feel free to add it back after reading those recommendations
Hey everyone, the moderators want to point out that this topic is heated for several reasons:
Lots of relevant information comes from people’s personal experiences, which will vary a lot.
Harassment and power dynamics are often emotionally loaded and can be difficult to discuss objectively.
Polyamory is something that a lot of the world stigmatizes, so some people will be defensive (whether merited or not), and some will be subconsciously biased against it. This makes it hard to discuss without assuming that some people are hostile.
The facts mentioned in the article are very serious and disturbing, and some readers have experienced similarly appalling episodes
So we want to ask everyone to be especially understanding and generous when discussing topics this sensitive.
And as a reminder, harassment is unacceptable. One resource that exists for this is the Community Health Team at CEA. You can get in touch with the team here. If you ever experience harassment of any kind on the Forum, please reach out to the moderation team.
Edit: added the last bullet point after a useful comment
This comment not acknowledging that it might be difficult for some people to discuss or engage with because they’ve gone through harrowing experiences seems like a big oversight. Very much feels like you’re trying to “both sides” this.
Hi Joshua, thank you so much for the feedback.
I agree: the main reason why these topics are hard to discuss, and we should be especially sensitive, is that many people have gone through horrifying experiences, and I should have mentioned this in the comment.
I’m thinking of adding a bullet point “The facts mentioned in the article are very serious and disturbing, and some readers have experienced similarly appalling episodes”, do you think that would make it clear?
In hindsight, this comment was posted too quickly after reading the post, and I should have worded it better. I’ll make sure to mention your point explicitly on the next similar thread.
This comment was adapted from a comment mods made on a similar thread, that sadly had devolved into arguments that I think didn’t fully live up to our (very high) discussion standards. I erred on the side of posting early hoping it would lead to more compassionate discussions, but I think I overcorrected and made a mistake.
Edit: added the bullet point
+1 for both sides
A lot of people are discussing why the community health team isn’t doing more or why more people don’t go to them, but it seems to me that it is (mostly?) because their powers are extremely limited. They can ban people from events that they sponsor or they can inform others about situations. Both of these options might be desired by some victims of harassment or assault but those actions are also extremely limited in scope. They can’t ban people from conferences they don’t sponsor, they can’t fire people who they do not directly employ, they can’t ban people from private events, and they obviously can’t take any legal action outside of saying “hey, have you thought about going to the police about this?” The majority of EA-related activity is outside the direct jurisdiction of CEA. So it seems to me very expected that most victims will not find it worthwhile to go to them for reasons that are completely unrelated to how competently they handle these situations.
I directionally agree with you. However, they do have a few other levers. For example, local EA groups can ban people based on information from CH. Grantmakers can also ask CH for consultation about people they hear concerning grapevine rumors about and outsource this side of investigations to them.
Some of this refers to what I refer to as “mandate” in my earlier shortform that I linked.
I agree that they can’t make many decisions about private events, take legal action, or fire people they do not directly employ.
And I think even that has to be done carefully to manage legal risk—EVF has significant assets in a notoriously pro-plaintiff jurisdiction for libel/slander suits. (I’m naming the legal entity as CEA has no legal existence.)
I wonder if it would be worth spinning off Community Health into its own org, to decouple it from those assets and put it in a more favorable legal jurisdiction?
Could also help it be more of a trusted neutral party.
Possibly. You can sue anyone anywhere—the question is whether a court that can actually do anything to you will enforce the foreign judgment. US courts are very skeptical toward UK libel/slander judgments in general because the UK courts do not apply standards required by the US Constitution. However, one would have to look at whether they would be more willing to enforce where the plaintiff actually lives in the UK and is not a “limited-purpose public figure” and/or where the judgment was for something like tortious interference with business relations. Dealing with foreign lawsuits can be dicey—often you are faced with the choice of defaulting and defending against enforcement in your home jurisdiction, or defending in the foreign country and accepting the court’s jurisdiction.
So the upshot is that an independent Community Health would probably still have to consider the jurisdiction in which the person being reported lives.
If they moved from the UK to the US, would that help defend against libel/slander lawsuits from Americans?
Likely so, although I am not a UK lawyer.
As someone who is prone to think in the abstract I’m probably gonna leave it a week before trying to have a standard discussion of this.
That’s not to say there can’t be on depth discussion, but I sense a lot of hurt here and it feels like it might be better to wait.
So I think in hindsight a week is too long and probably there can be more analytical discussion from about now.
Nor do I think that I want to chill more rat-style discussion, but I think sometimes some people in the community want to be upset before moving to classical discourse and (currently) I think it’s good to wait a couple of days to let that happen.
What do you think of the idea to do a broad anonymous survey of women in EA regarding their experiences related to romantic and sexual behaviour in EA settings?
I imagine it could provide some useful information like
In what EA sub-communities it’s more or less prevalent (which would help with prioritizing interventions and potentially learning from sub-communities that might do a good job preventing issues)
If women have more or fewer bad experiences related to sexual and romantic advances in EA settings compared to similar non-EA settings
If women know who they can reach out to, and feel comfortable reaching out to those places
Potential difficulties
Identifying and reaching all women with relevant experiences might be difficult?
I assume there are some online groups for women in EA, and maybe orgs like Magnify Mentoring have a good network to share something like this?
Maybe one could ask respondents to share the survey with other women who they think have had relevant experiences?
[EDIT: This project has been passed on to the CEA Community Heath Team, and folded in to a much larger investigation which will gather and analyze data from many other sources in addition to a survey. Thank you to all who messaged me questions and thoughts. All of this (plus all I have done and thoughts I have) have been passed on to Catherine Low who is orchestrating the project. You can read her announcement, posted Feb 14th, here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mEkRrDweNSdNdrmvx/plans-for-investigating-and-improving-the-experience-of ]
FYI for anyone reading this and thinking about taking on this project, I’m moving forward with a similar survey idea today.
It’s been percolating in my mind since November, so I think it might take me less time than many others. But please DM me if you want to help or have ideas you think I may miss!
To add to MaxRa’s ‘wishlist’, I would add questions about location and other demographic, to see if the patterns we’ve been discussing elsewhere in this thread (eg the Bay area being particularly problematic) are real.
Yup that’s in there!
Thanks for doing this Ivy!
I imagine many people would be very interested in the results of this survey. As probably not many people saw your comment here, I could imagine it being worth to share your plans as a stand-alone post and to wait with sharing it widely until maybe end of week, as I imagine many people have good ideas to share here and would be excited about helping make the survey as informative as possible.
[Edit: The list of stakeholders/beta-testers has grown quite a lot so it might take over a week from today (Tuesday Feb 6) to get it out and finish all the review I want. I’m likely to make a forum post on this survey in a day or two, to set expectations on timing and let the community know things are being done. The remainder of this comment has been updated for what’s true today]
Thanks! Well I’d rather not use the forum front-page to promote a work-in-progress. The survey is already looking pretty long, and the survey is for all EAs of all genders so it will be quite a community-wide effort already.
I don’t want to use people’s potentially limited energy for this topic by making them read a pre-post.FWIW I also posted in the Women and Non-Binary EA Facebook group, which has been getting some good responses and DMs. I’ve also had a deep discussion with Catherine Low of the Community Health Team and she’ll be as involved at all the key junctions.
I also hope to specifically get feedback from at least a couple of the women in the TIME piece, the leaders of the EA Diversity Group (who messaged me), GSand, J_J, and ~5 people who do survey design professionally (the Rethink Priorities Survey Team, Spencer Greenberg of Guided Track, and an Austin EA I know). I have only messaged maybe 20% of these people so far and I’d rather not make a public post til I’ve messaged all of them.
From there it will be shared to other beta-testers’ (like my friends and EAs who messaged me wishing to beta-test).
And then it will done and be shared with the community broadly.
I think this is enough that I don’t need to make a standalone post to request feedback (though good to share to set people’s minds at ease). It’s also already a lot of things for me to track tbh. But if anyone is reading this here, you can still DM me or comment your thoughts or ask to get involved!
Thanks for the response, yeah I agree that this does sound like you’re reaching out to sufficiently many people with good ideas to make this survey particularly informative.
FWIW, if I understand your reservations correctly, I personally wouldn’t worry
a) that sharing your work-in-progress plans comes across as a promotion of your work. I think it’s a project that is meant to help the broader EA community and requesting feedback for a survey / offering to adapt a survey based on requests from others is reasonable, collaborative and useful.
b) about taking up people’s time, as I feel like people can decide for themselves what they want to spend their limited time on and I’d then make that decision for them.
Looking forward to read the results, thanks again for doing this!
[I edited my comment above to more accurately reflect the state and timeline of project, and this comment is my way of pinging you that. I’m likely to make a pre-post sometime after all, just cuz of setting people’s minds at ease that things are being tried and projects are in the pipeline re: EA gender/sex stuff]
Ivy has personally been involved in a cover up of more than one assault perpetrated by EA members. I would highly recommend for someone impartial to be responsible for this piece of work.
Some concerns and critiques are understandable, because a complex situation occurred in a local EA group under my leadership. But these characterizations and conclusions are untrue:
that I was “involved in a cover up”
that the EA member did “assault”
that I am not “impartial”[1]
(accidental?) that there are multiple noteworthy “EA members”. I think catan just spoke hastily here.
There is one, and only one, sex-related or gender-related case of an EA member that I handled in any notable way. It is true that this EA man had “more than one” incident, but those were not assaults, never within EA or rationalist spaces or professional spaces, and not ongoing, they were in his past. I simply became privy to some of his private history, and, in this case, due to particular features of the case I explain below, I chose to balance safety with discretion (not secrecy or coverup).
I did not defer any report or delay in handling any current sex-related incident. Again, there were no incident reports made against him nor any request that he be removed from the group or anything like that. I’ll also note that, in EA or my own life, when I have come across a man doing a troubling thing to a woman or when a woman has reported a particular incident to me she was involved in, I have always reported the incident straight to others who can take better action than me.
The rest of this comment will explain that one unusual case and address claims 1-3:
Case Summary:
The case I believe catan is referring to involves an EA man who was in recovery from and was (by his own voluntary efforts) receiving ongoing treatment for some troubling behaviors, which he had done outside the EA/rationality communities, and which he had voluntarily stopped over a year prior. His past acts (only one behavior, but done repeatedly) legally falls among a category called “non-contact sex offenses”. The act is NOT classed as assault.[2]
So what happened? A man was a member of both a local EA group (which I led) and a local LW group. I became aware of some non-contact sex offenses he had done in his past outside of either community or any professional spaces, and I handled his case for the EA group myself, via intense investigation of him[3] and enacting a supervisory safety plan (just in case I was wrong). I was told by some people in the local LW community who had been keeping an eye on him and doing a sort of whisper network about him. (myself, not being one for speculation, then did an investigation of him and determine he was safe with very high confidence, but implemented a safety plan for the EA group in case I was wrong). Unfortunately, his past did escalate to some visibility in the local LW group, because he told friends, some misunderstandings occurred, and the situation ended up extremely labor-intensive for both local EA leadership (me) and the local LW leadership:
It appears that a small number of people in that local LW community shared misunderstandings and speculation about the man in question in their spaces, which grew into some negative sentiment against him and false rumors. It also appears (I have since found out) that a small number of those members also shared misunderstandings and speculations about how the local EA leadership (me) had handled his case prior, without asking me about what really happened first. These people were under false impressions that the man was more dangerous, manipulative, or dishonest than he actually was. In reality he was extremely deferential when I had done the investigation of him. Anyway, some LW members, hearing of his past (or what they thought they knew of his past) requested a ban of him, and so the local LW group started their own deeper investigation of him to determine if they should ban him, when they had previously only been keeping an eye on him. I told them I’d respect any decision they made, and I helped their elected leadership by sharing my documents covering my own investigationband answering their questions. The leadership decided to ban him, and I think they made the right decision for them. A lot of trust had been destroyed between him and the group members in that process. Notably, those local community leaders were diligent in trying to correct false rumors about him after-the-fact, and wished the man (and me as a group organizer) well despite the conclusion and knowing that we in the EA group had made a different decision. After that, I and the man (each) offered and shared our own primary documents with over 100 people for the sake of full transparency, which by then he had grown to be comfortable with and not as embarrassed and fearful about reception to his past. While I made some mistakes (which I go over here and in linked documents, and I did so in even greater detail to CEA) I did my best to behave ethically and put women’s safety first always in a very complex situation. I am still not happy with some of the mistakes I made to this day (not with safety or mishandling non-existent complaints, but with PR and asking CEA for advice sooner). But I don’t think my mistakes are worthy of a warning given about me, and neither do others: some people closely involved (including some EA higher-ups) told me that they thought I handled the situation approximately-okay as a community manager could be expected to (I took this to mean that falling short of perfection should maybe not be surprising in complex cases), or even handled it well. But unfortunately falsehoods and exaggerations have a life of their own, and are hard to address until they pop up and are suddenly visible. I especially simply wasn’t privy to rumors about me (people wouldn’t say such things to me or my friends I suppose). My guess is that catan is not an EA (because I have made so much transparent to so many EAs[4]), and that their comment is well-meaning but stems from some (months-old) misunderstandings. [Edit: although actually I have a new concerning guess in an edit below]. So I will use this space to address their three concerns:
(Document 1: If you want more details, Click here to see a timeline, how I handled it throughout, the EA community’s response, and how his case is being handled moving forward.)
Returning to the 3 Claims in Catan’s Comment:
On “Cover Up”: I did make some some information-related mistakes. The major one was not volunteering the man’s past to the Community Health Team in September when I first learned of it (although that was not a final decision). But I wouldn’t describe anything I did as a cover up:
I never hid information or lied. I also told some people voluntarily early on: When I took action to protect women in the community, just in case, I admit I did so without all women members’ input. I did tell some key members (including women) and those who helped supervise (again just in case!). To be honest this is hard to talk about because if I admit I out a safety plan in place some people would say “so you admit he wasn’t safe!”. But, no, I truly believe and still believe he is safe. If I thought he was at all risky, even a little bit, I simple would have banned him. I simply was ethically unwilling to make the decision to include him without a safety plan in place, without the consent of every woman member, present and future. But that was practically impossible as well as likely to make people uncomfortable for little to no reason when I could just make the situation 100% safe. I definitely did prefer to respect his privacy, given his recovery focus, but there was also not really a “coverup” to be done: The man had voluntarily sought treatment, and had shared his past with key people in his social circle (hence how rumors of him later grew in the other community). Also, in a world where no one else knew of his past, I would have gladly told women and other leadership in that other local LW community, but they already knew and had told me they were handling details of his past in their own way, which I tried to respect and stay out of even if I thought the way they were handling things (whisper network) was likely to cause undue problems down the line. For my part, I was open about his past whenever anyone asked me, but almost no one did.
I think people might claim that I had tried to suppress his past for my personal gain, but this doesn’t make sense either. I also had nothing to gain from doing a coverup: I must admit that he helped me with some operations tasks, which was sort of useful to me (moreso to the EA community), but accepting his help didn’t require a coverup because I did not feel ashamed or guilty to accept his help knowing the facts of his case. While I had felt stressed about accepting any help from him before investigating him, I simply didn’t feel that way after doing the investigation. Some people who told me of his past before I investigated him, witnessed my initial shock and might have thought I changed my tune because I realized that the EA group or me benefited from his work. That is not the case. I changed my tune because after I investigated him, rather than going by hearsay, I believed him to be safe. And I stand firm that his presence was not a meaningful safety or privacy risk to the group.
I did feel worried for his future if people started shaming him given he had voluntarily had a self-improvement focus well-prior (I don’t have this extent of concern for just any man’s privacy who did bad things in their past, I know how that routinely leads to reluctance to convict that messes with the justice system, and I know it’s a cliche to worry about a man’s “future” but to me it is very different when a person makes the voluntary choice to change rather than have to have a case brought against them), so I tried to simply be discrete about his history (again I was still considering disclosing to CH Team later). And I did feel nervous about the possibility of games of telephone going wrong due to less-careful actors, as I knew others knew his past. But, from a moral point-of-view, I didn’t see worries about what other people might do (or mess up), as a valid reason for me to gatekeep a well-meaning, self-improving person (I’m less sure of this now given the odds and degree of chaos were higher than put decent probability on, but that’s what I believed then, and I still believe it on general principle). So, to try to address my concerns of telephone without being discriminatory to him or controlling of others, I actively tried (although I failed) to cultivate an understanding among everyone who knew his past (including him) akin to: “secrets do not exist”, “this is information that is validly concerning so you shouldn’t ask people to keep it to themselves, that isn’t right”, “(to anyone who learned): I am here if you or anyone else has any questions”, “if you want to tell anyone about his past, that’s up to you, but I strongly recommend you speak to him so facts can be confirmed correct, or I am happy to help if you prefer”. I fear that the last sentiment in particular got misconstrued as trying to control the narrative, but I hope here it is obvious that I merely had concerns about people’s ability to convey the truth, and that this would lead to unjust treatment and chaos. In any case, nobody took me up on that offer to help figure out the facts of his past til much later. And while I wish I had said things in a different way, my concerns about “telephone” and truthful narrative were later proven correct, so honestly if I had to redo it I would change my language a lot but I would still say something to try to get people to consider careful speech.
Despite my concerns, I prioritized respecting people’s freedom to handle his info how they wished, and I deferred to people’s freedom to talk even when that eventually began to look like gossip. In fact, if I had wished to cover up the man’s past, I would have at least been proactive in dispelling false rumors about him among those local LW community members in early December (which blew up later). Instead, I mostly viewed what went wrong outside of the local EA group as “his social life” and “due to his poor communications with his friend group” which he could learn from and handle himself. Persons I made a mistake here from a an EA group leader perspective I should have taken the lead. But I did not view falsehoods circulating in a non-EA community with their own totally capable leadership to be my responsibility, nor did I view it as morally okay to suppress discussion, nor did I want to be seen as possibly doing that. So I corrected no rumors circulating in the LW group until the LW leadership requested I answer some questions to help them. Only *then* I did my job and shared info, extensively. By then I had a lot to say in one fell swoop: about 7 pages-worth of documents and emails that gave them key insights and also disproved multiple rumors. I worry that my sudden infodump here looked like a coverup campaign to people who experienced this and struggled to update that many rumors they themselves had been sharing had truly been false and he truly was quite a safe actor to have around (everyone in our local EA group has agreed with this point including all women). But if I wanted to cover things up, wouldn’t I have proactively messaged people to correct misconceptions?
Basically, once people in the other community (never the EA group) were talking about his past, I stayed out of rumors and other people’s narratives to a literal fault. My intentional non-involvement might sound cruel, but I’m not in favor of norms where women clean up the sexual messes of men or related communication messes of those men. So multiple times in the process I deliberately chose to not do that. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about that, but thankfully, I think he (and I!) did learn a lot through the process.
Ongoing transparency: Since his ban from that community, I have shared or offered to share my internal documents with over 100 people, including our entire local EA Slack, the EA Community health team, my at-the-time employer, his at-the-time employer, the local LW ban committee, and other members of the local LW group. The man shared similar: all details (in-depth) of his past and recovery plan with everyone, and also his family.
I have some big regrets about the case, but involvement in a coverup is not one of them.
On “Impartiality”: Nor do I believe I am biased toward men or away from women or their safety. I believe this is evident because I clearly put women’s safety far above inclusivity to him, and I did a very intense investigation of him over two weeks with openness to the idea of taking much more drastic measures, like banning him from the local EA group or even informing police. Unlike the typical behavior evidenced by others, I went straight to multiple sources on his behavior and tried to determine facts, going well out of my way to avoid bias which could be present in secondary tellings. I also believe I am evidently not biased (any more than anyone else) because others have supported the main ways I handled the case and his information. I have made mistakes and others have noted those but still anyone who has bothered to find out the details of the case does not feel I was biased, though definitely lacking foresight at times. And no one has registered complaints to the EA CH Team despite my internally promoting that as an option. I’ve also reported and been involved in reporting other incidents over the years, so I’d say I don’t generally lean away from reporting sex-related issues. It just so happens that this is one case I thought I could handle myself as a community organizer. If someone else were the community organizer I’d have reported to them. But I felt that the buck stopped with me and not the CH team, although I was going to revisit disclosure to the EA CH Team should I stop organizing. I have also been on the receiving end of plenty of sex offenses and gendered injustice in my own life (rape and more), so if anything the normal assumption should be that I am biased against men who have done related acts. Also, while it’s a bit weird to add, sexual abuse of women (by men) was my primary activist cause for years (before finding veganism), and basically every social sciences project I did in college was somehow related to sexual assault by men against women. I truly do take such issues very seriously.
I don’t think anything I did in this case or elsewhere in my history implies I am less impartial than any other EA woman on sex offenses and gender-related injustices.
On “Assaults”: I also want to reiterate that while the man in question did troubling sex/gender-related offenses, they are not classed as assault and they were never done in EA or LW communities. While I am not sharing full details here, I can say that the type and details of his behaviors mattered because it made it easier to decide that he was likely not a safety or privacy risk to members. Particularly with the just-in-case-I’m-wrong safety plan in place and accounting for all I’d learned about his tranformed beliefs and behaviors (so much!), he became, in my opinion, safer than the average unsupervised man can be expected to be in community, from behind the veil of ignorance.
Still want to know more?
You should read Document 1 (same one I linked above) which goes over all my handling of the case from September ’22-January ’23. If you still have concerns after reading that, there are options at the bottom of that document. And you are always welcome to message me!
[NEXT-DAY ADDITION:
The more I reflect on this, the more unhappy I feel that catan decided to handle their concern in this way. They could have messaged me to ask why I think I’m a strong or weak candidate for this (volunteer) role given whatever appears to them like a coverup, or messaged the Community Health Team (who know about this) or Forum Mods. I’m at least confident claiming that catan does not know full details of what they are talking about, and has not confirmed their information as forum mods recommend. Instead they made their anonymous account solely to dash off this one comment about me. In fact, what took catan a few seconds to write took me hours spread across multiple days to respond such that, if I were a third party stumbling upon this thread, I’d feel properly informed of what the misunderstandings in catan’s comment are. This pulled me from the project for the good of women in the community that I was meant to be working on. Catan’s comment was likely net-negative for EA women, and I am extremely unhappy about this.
Part of this later unhappiness and intense response is because I suspect I know who catan is, and I now suspect this is not a simple misunderstanding: To my knowledge, the only person who believes I was involved in any intentional “cover up”, is someone adjacent to my community (not an EA) who was one of the gossip-spreaders in the case, and very opinionated. Perhaps they feel self conscious that they might come out looking bad, and have been lashing out because of that. IDK. Whatever the reason, this actor (maybe sockpuppeting as catan) elected to not have a conversation with me or read my transparency documents when I offered to them over DM (twice now). Instead they responded aggressively and shut me down at my first attempt at transparency and conversation, and blocked me after my second attempt. I have, since the close of the case, heard from others that this actor made claims of my cover up or self-interest in this case. These were well after they knew that informed others did not agree with their characterizations (such people actually tried to speak to them and get them to see some sense), and after willfully refusing my actual primary information in form of google docs. If catan is that bad actor, I could easily claim the above comment amounts to libel because of the willfullness and recklessness with which that person has repeatedly refused to learn the actual facts of the case. If catan is not that particular bad actor, but a different simply-negligent actor, it still might be possible that I could seek damages if I lose opportunities based on false claims, because it does appear that catan wants me to lose opportunities wrongly (even volunteer ones). I’ll add that if a crime is being charged, forum anonymity and pseudonyms won’t matter. Forum moderators will be (at least morally but I think also legally) obligated to give up IP address and other account details. This is one reason why even bad and lazy actors should be careful what they say, and look into things closely as forum mods recommend: out of pure self preservation. I hate to speak this forcefully, because most forum readers who are conscientious enough to have read this far probably find mention of libel revolting, and maybe catan did have a misunderstanding without negligence, or maybe even a bad actor lied to catan. But I believe that people should play defensively when needed and that includes me. And frankly I have been so transparent it is hard for me to imagine anyone having a misunderstanding about my actions and intentions in this case without being willfully ignorant.
FWIW I do not mind at all (really!) if people discuss my information and past, including my mistakes or poor actions, to the extent what anyone says is potentially-relevant and true. (Catan’s comment would be potentially-relevant, except that it is blatantly false, on four counts in 2 sentences!). Community discussion and transparency is very important.
TBH I would have liked to address the concerns more loosely if they could be known to be in good faith. But I felt my hand forced to respond at length, and share the whole story with precision (and even more details in the google docs) because:
Catan’s comment might be malicious libel. If so, it takes care and precision to disincentivize any future libel attempts.
Given recent EA controversies, even if catan’s claim is well-meaning, it could be dug up by someone else with malicious intent.
Critiques are fine, but when informing new people I’d rather they decide for themselves, what they think. Any mistakes I’ve made should be named as the actual actions I’ve done on the world, not one-word summaries like “cover up” or “biased” which just express how someone else evaluated the situation, especially without proof that catan has any reason to know what they are talking about. As the saying goes, “I’ll sleep in the bed I’ve made for myself”… But I fear bad or hasty actors making me sleep in a bed I haven’t made.
I realized a question or comment might come up again, so I may as well document thoroughly in a way that’s transparent to someone who isn’t at all involved, for future use. To the extent it’s possible, I’d rather handle grievances ahead of time.
If my response still seems out of scale to you, consider that I am myself a survivor of extensive sexual mistreatment and gender-related injustice, who finds it so important of a topic that I was trying to lead a project centered on it, so I am personally offended at the implication that I would intentionally cover up sexual predation or any misbehavior toward women.
I’ve not decided yet if I want to ask Forum mods to remove or encrypt catan’s comment. It puts both me and CEA in an awkward position. Deletions may look like suppressing concerns, but maybe some concerns and critiques are fair, because I did make mistakes (see Document 1). The actual intent in removing catan’s comment would be to delete false or libel-as-written statements. I will keep considering asking the forum mods to delete or encrypt catan’s comment, and I have flagged catan’s comment to the EA Community Health Team, who already knew all details of the case I discussed above.]
which I will treat as claiming that I am less impartial than the average woman in the EA community, because complete impartiality is impossible
where he or I live, or anywhere else I’m aware of
Which took 2 weeks, and which he passed. See Document 2 for details
My initial investigation doc as well as the man’s apology doc (with full details of his past) have already been shared or offered to be shared with over 100 people with his name attached.
A broad survey seems good but it might also help to specifically survey conference attendees, since it might help eliminate some sample biases and since the in-person nature of conferences seems to facilitate some of the harassment.
Actually, if someone is doing a survey, what I am now very interested in is knowing what value different groups in the community get from various kinds of experiences in EA spaces.
For example, I’m curious how most women would weigh being in an EA space (including EAGs, local EA events, EA houses, etc) that lets them access healthy professional networks free from the tensions of inappropriate* sexual/romantic advances against being in an EA space where they are able to find find EA partners. (I am implying that there is a tradeoff here.)
I am also curious if the men in the community have an opposing view—if so, it might be important to think about how the existing state of the community (that may have been shaped by the views of the majority gender) may make it less attractive to women currently in or considering joining the community.
*example of inappropriate—young EA job seekers being propositioned by potential bosses/seniors in their field after making it clear to them that they were looking for job opportunities/contacts/mentoring in that field.
I am a person who lived in the house mentioned in the article. I witnessed firsthand everything as it
happened.
FIRST. You should know that journalist DECLINED to investigate this story. She reached out to the
accused person asking for a comment and, when faced with evidence that went against her narrative,
said “Clearly, everything is more complicated than I thought. But I am on a deadline—will be
publishing this tomorrow”.
SECOND. You should know that anyone who lived in the house will tell you that the house co-lead used the sexual misconduct accusations for blackmail. She went on to accuse of sexual misconduct multiple people who didn’t side with her (INCLUDING ACCUSING ONE GAY PERSON OF ASSAULTING A FEMALE. WHICH FEMALE SAID HE DIDN’T DO). Was she terrified of her male co-lead? Apparently not, because in the months that followed this story (and before the article got published), she would constantly ask the accused person for “favors”, including throwing her birthday in his house. There are at least 3 people that have heard her say: “Get me the lease by Friday at Midnight or I will go to the press, lawyers, and the police with these accusations.” HER BLACKMAIL HAS BEEN RECORDED TOO (can be shared here upon request).
As for the ex, they clearly had a messy breakup. I took these accusations seriously at first, especially given tnat initial allegations involved an underage girl. When the underage female got contacted to confirm this, SHE WAS OUTRAGED BECAUSE THEY NEVER HAD ANY INTERCOURSE AND THE EX OF the ACCUSED GUY USED HER NAME IN A STORY AGAINST HER WILL.
Mod here. It seems like this thread has devolved into a debate about what a non-EA house leader did at a non-EA house. I’m locking the thread.
I was also involved in the situation.
Please do not doxx other victims, ESPECIALLY when they are underage.
Rochelle Shen was the only person to step into the situation. The rest of the housemates showed an extremely poor understanding of sexual violence and rationalized away serious acts of abuse and rape. The perpetrator used “messy breakup” as a way to rationalize away acts of domestic abuse. The perpetrator called his other victims to blackmail them into silence. The housemates ignored many other warning signs and red flags from this guy, including assaults and gropings of multiple unrelated women.
Without Rochelle Shen, there would still be a serial predator owning the lease of a group house full of young and underage women. She is a hero.
Rochelle spent the first few months of allegations saying that her house co-founder ex is a pathological liar. She only changed this narrative after an argument with people in the house, completely manipulating the narrative and saying that people turned on her because she is a victim of sexual misconduct. When [redacted], founder of Neighborhood, tried to coordinate this situation, she threatened him with allegations too.
To be clear—another woman already mentioned in the article has been lied to by Rochelle too.
I am in contact with the victims. They report Rochelle as consistently supporting them and calling out rapists and rape apologists at the house. She was the only person who actively got the perpetrator off the lease and out of the house—not naval-gazing into a Google doc of expected value calculations and asking the victims to be quieter about speaking out.
Done! Their name was already shared on spreadsheet shared here
Rochelle Shen brought this person into the thread and should remove them from the thread.
Witch-hunting RS was precisely why the perpetrator was able to continue (and is still continuing) predating on young women in the Bay Area.
Then why did she continue organizing events with him in the months after the story? It is not just the house that can confirm it.
Comments like gated’s are precisely why Silicon Valley is such a misogynistic place: why women are afraid to speak up and why women cannot defend other woman without getting reputationally slaughtered.
gated’s comment is precisely the rape apologism that makes it very hard to hold predators accountable for sexual violence.
You also notice the conflation of rape/sexual assault with a bunch of random made-up infractions to distract from the issue.
I am not apologetic of sexual misconduct. I also have been supporting a number of victims through similar situations. Which is why I can not take it when people use sexual allegations for their own gain.
How then should RS have handled the issue? Do enlighten me.
At the time the situation was happening, the house formed a council that asked both Rochelle and her male co-lead to step down ( she mishandled the coordination of the allegations). The male co-lead stepped down in favor of the council. Rochelle refused to step down. Instead, she launched a campaign of threats against people in the house, reminding everyone she had “political connections”.
Would any of these females be willing publicly say so?
Also, what was communication in this group house / social group like; when the co-head accused people of sexual assault, is it safe for me to assume that there’s a record of that accusation?
By blackmail, do you mean saying “Get me the lease by Friday at Midnight or I will go to the press, lawyers, and the police with these accusations.” or something else?
(If people aren’t willing to talk about this publicly, but anyone who knows me can confirm or disconfirm any of this, please reach out to me!)
I will reach out to them to ask. For the underaged girl—she understandably asked everyone to leave her out of this situation, but there are screenshots from communication with her and her brother which can be shared privately (if they agree to this)
Mods, please delete this comment. It is doxxing one of the victims and her privacy.
These are double-standard all the way. She was doxed by [name removed by moderator]. Now that everyone knows she is not a victim and can say as much, you want to silence this?
Mod here. Please don’t share any conversations without consent from all parties involved. It’s fine to share if you get consent but please censor the names.
Yes, did not plan to share without consent
I removed a name from this comment after a request to the mod team
There is a blacklist that will list anybody who tells the truth about this as being “complicit in attacks”. The house co-lead credibly threatens anybody who tells the truth about this with being added to the blacklist, for which there is no due process. Anybody can be marred, without recourse, potentially forever. The blacklist is not robust to bad actors.
What happens to people on this blacklist?
One of them recently failed to get investors because those saw them on the list.
Many women are also saved because this is actually the only way we can identify rapists and avoid them.
Sexual misconduct shouldn’t be treated lightly. As we shouldn’t treat lightly people who blackmail others for personal gain. I think EA community should consider creating a list of people who use social movements for their own gain—in this case Rochelle Shen.
Rochelle Shen is thankfully harsh on sexual misconduct. The other residents of the house did not investigate the issue, showed a poor understanding of sexual violence, and gave the perpetrator a free pass.
Why did she laugh the victims off until it was convenient for her?
I seriously doubt that you were someone who lived in the house.
Would love for you to hear any more rumors you might have “heard” about me.
EDIT:
I find it interesting that the mods chose to lock this thread after deleting J_J’s reply addressing and invalidating most of the above accusations, but kept the accusations themselves up. It introduces doubt in the readers about my credibility, but silenced the response reinforcing my credibility.
These points that u/gated brought up just further prove the Time article’s point about reputational retaliation. First, none of those accusations about my likeability as a female leader have anything to do with the initial issue of dealing with a potential serial predator in the house. Secondly, they’re also just wrong, and hint at the much deeper issue of victim intimidation tactics that these particular EAs’ were so eager to pursue against me. Third, don’t randomly name drop community leaders as siding with the accused—that person is supportive of healthy community sexual assault policies and I can’t imagine they’d be happy to be associated with your response.
This all merits a deeper discussion about EA culture. I’m currently thinking about how best to open this conversation.
I just double-checked, we didn’t delete any comment in this thread, all deleted comments were deleted by their author.
Apologies, I should have checked in with her
Significantly worse than what I expecting, so sorry to hear.
(I was expecting “Breaking: awkward nerds don’t know how to flirt”, not “One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational”
Is that what you expected after accounting for a Chinese Robber effect, and that the journalist is actively looking for the worst stories they could find, and then framing them in the worst way they can manage?
Speaking on behalf of my own personal interactions with the reporter, the described events in the article are far much milder than what I really experienced. I did not want to tell the full severity of the story because I genuinely care about the Effective Altruism movement, and though numerous individual actors behaved in a coordinated and awful way, I still see the promise in having a positive conversation about how the movement can change.
That being said, if people try the same intimidation tactics on myself and my peers again, I will probably share more of the evidence I’ve gathered over the past year to give a clearer picture on what actually happened.
Can you be more specific here; were you declining to tell the full severity of the story in order to protect the reputation of the EA movement? I would prefer you didn’t do that (but by the same logic, if you did, I very much appreciate you [EDIT: saying] so!). We can have a discussion about the relative merits of reputation vs integrity (as in https://sideways-view.com/2016/11/14/integrity-for-consequentialists/ ; I don’t endorse all the reasoning in that post) but I don’t really know where to start.
Separately, I would prefer if you share more of the evidence regardless of your reasons against doing so. Please let me know if I can do anything to make you or others more comfortable doing so!
What sort of institutional safeguards would enable you to share the full extent of what occurred assuming you wanted to share and it would help your healing (beyond what you’ve already written)?
Me too. Very distressing and sad.
Without further context, I have no reason to think the latter doesn’t mean the former. People spin things.
I’d need a lot more context to form a judgment about that case. One person’s “grooming” is another person’s “hitting on,” and one person’s “pedophilia advocacy ” is another’s “high decoupling cognitive style.” And one person’s “twice the age” is another’s “I never got any memo that i can’t hit on adults half my age.”
I got the memo
I’m young enough that no adults are half my age, so this is just about my knowledge of Anglo culture. Is there some rule about age gaps between adults? I’ve seen some online snark about Leo DiCaprio but no claims that he and people like him are violating cultural norms by dating adults who are much younger than them.
Fwiw I wasn’t particularly surprised.
I don’t know what the expected level should be, but I’ve heard stories a bit like this.
It’s surprising to me that polyamory continues to be such a sacred cow of EA. It’s been highly negative for EA’s public image, and now it seems to be connected to a substantial amount of abuse. There’s a number of reasons our priors should suggest that non-monogomous relationships in high trust, insular communities can easily lead to abuse. It’s always seemed overly optimistic to think EA could avoid these problems. Of course, there have been similar ongoing discussions in the Berkeley Rationalist community for a number of years now.
This seems like one of the most important community issues to reflect on.
I voted disagree & want to explain why:
I don’t think it’s a “sacred cow” in EA and I don’t think there are a number of reasons our priors should be that way. I very strongly don’t think it can be generalised to that extent. (Background: I’ve been on the receiving end of some bad social dynamics in which polyamory kind of played a role. Think unwanted attention of a person with more social power, not knowing what to do about it, etc. So I think I know what I’m talking about, at least to a small extent.)
I think the main negative prior should be “is there a distinction between professional and romantic/sexual relationships and do people feel pressured/unsafe”.
In the Time piece, in every instance, this has been problematic. I think once social groups remove too many barriers between “professional” and “romantic/sexual”, you can run into problems (i.e. become more “cult-like”). Unhealthy interplay between romantic and professional connections is exactly one of the big things what the community team and people like Julia Wise are concerned with (and what they are for), and I personally think they’re doing a good job.
I think it’s perfectly okay (and extremely possible) to be in polyamorous relationships while not violating those boundaries. I think most people do this! (This also shouldn’t matter, but I’m not polyamorous myself.)
I think one can make an argument that goes like “but polyamorous relationships make it more likely for these borders to fade away”. I think that’s not a terrible argument. But again, the job of the people in polyamorous relationships is to not make people uncomfortable and violate their boundaries, especially in professional settings, irrespective of the relationship style they choose! Polyamory itself does not mean “violating people’s boundaries is okay”. So it’s up to the individual people to not behave unethically.
I think if we were to somehow try to intervene in people’s personal lives (i.e. try to discourage or ban polyamorous relationships or try to “inform” people how bad they are), it would go terribly. It’s exactly the kind of lack of separation of professional and romantic spaces that usually leads to problems.
We should let people live their personal lives as they wish, as long as they don’t harm anyone. And an insufficient lack of separation between professional and personal spaces (power dynamics making people feel romantically/sexually pressured) counts as harm.
(Edit: While trying to steelman your argument, I came up with this:
I think one can make a very good case for why social groups (like EA) should be really cautious about “are we encouraging people to become poly even if they might not want to”. I think this could be quite bad, and I think it can happen quite easily, even without it being intended. (E.g. most people in one social bubble being poly, it seeming “cool” because it’s modern and open, etc.).
I think that is a dynamic we/EA should be cautious with, and I think it does sometimes play a role in interactions like the ones described in the Time piece, although I absolutely have no idea how often. I’ve also felt small amounts of pressure in that direction myself. But I also see that almost nobody actually intends for that pressure to happen. It’s just a really tricky subject to navigate! But I think “being conscious of that dynamic” is highly likely to be a good thing. And I think your comment is making that argument in a way, which I agree with.)
I’m not sure what you mean by this?
Something that is above question or criticism or question (see here), in this case because discourse is often cast as intolerant or phobic
Jeff was probably not asking what “sacred cow” means; more likely the question was asking in what way polyamory is a sacred cow of EA. I will grant that EA is more tolerant of most personal traits than society typically is, and therefore is more supportive of polyamory than other groups just by not being against it, but it’s not anywhere in any canonical EA materials, and certainly not a sacred cow. Plenty of EAs are criticizing it in this very thread.
This seems a bit obtuse. In any local EA community I’ve been a part of, poly plays a big part in the culture.
This is sort of true, but most of them are receiving a lot of downvotes. And this is the first time I’ve seen a proper discussion about it.
It literally is intolerant. Like if you are saying “we shouldn’t tolerate this in the community”, that just is intolerant.
Ok, fortunately that is not what I am saying.
Could you clarify what concretely you do want to happen, then, if not less tolerance of polyamory? What would be different, if polyamory was not a sacred cow? What are the possible conclusions we could come to after reflecting on this?
I don’t have a particular agenda about “what should happen” here. I’ve said we should scrutinize the ways that polyamorous norms could be abused in high trust communities. I’m not sure what the outcome would be, but I would certainly hope it’s not intolerance of poly communities.
I would readily agree that some—perhaps most—of these problems could also be solved by ensuring EA spaces are purely professional, but it does seem a bit obtuse to not understand that someone could feel more uncomfortable when asked to join a polycule at an EA meet up than simply being asked on a date.
I think an ideal outcome would to reduce the association between EA and poly—such that poly is not a major cultural touchstone within EA—while keeping EA a welcoming and respectful place for poly people.
I don’t see why priors should make us suspect non-monogamous relationships would lead to more abuse than monogamous ones.
I’m very surprised by this. There are number of anthropological findings which connect monogamous norms to greater gender equality and other positive social outcomes. Recently arguments along these lines have been advanced by Joseph Henrich, one of the most prominent evolutionary biologists.
Isn’t the research on this almost all comparing monogamy to polygyny? But polyamory, especially as practiced among EAs and adjacent groups doesn’t seem very similar to polygyny to me?
I certainly don’t think it’s conclusive, or even strong evidence. As I said, I think it’s one thing among many that should inform our priors here. There’s also a different vein of anthropological research that looks at non-monogamy and abuse in cults and other religious contexts, but I’m less familiar with it.
The alternative—accepting norms of sexual minorities without scrutiny—seems perfectly reasonable in many cases, but because of those reasons I don’t think it should be abided by here, especially in light of these women’s accounts.
I emphasize there shouldn’t be any hostility or intolerance to polyamorous people, just the way polyamorous norms might create the potential for abuse in EA spaces (or generally in high trust, insular environments).
What’s the mechanism whereby it leads to greater gender equality?
The article burner linked has:
This doesn’t seem very relevant to the kind of issues discussed in the Time article, though?
I think polyamory as it is described in the articles mixes complex webs of personal relationships with professional ones. Romantic connections within polyamorous communities can be complicated even without entanglement with professional concerns. When you bring in layers of professional connections on top of that, I can see why there might be an extra dimension of vulnerability to coercion and exploitation.
Totally agree that mixing romantic relationships with professional ones can in certain contexts create conflicts of interest, but I really fail to see how this is unique to polyamory. Plenty of monogamous people develop romantic relationships with their supervisors, plenty of monogamous people unfairly favor their partners (or more often, their partner’s sibling or other close connection), and plenty of monogamous people have wide webs of deep platonic friendships that introduce complications that are completely analogous to polyamorous relationships. This attitude seems a bit dismissive of the reality of deep platonic friendships, which for many people are more committed and loving than the average romantic relationship.
The difference, from my perspective, is that the mixing of romantic and work relationships in a poly context has much more widespread damage. In monogamous relationships, the worst that can happened is that there is one incident involving 2 or so people, which can be dealt with in a contained way. In poly relationships, when you have a relationship web spanning a large part of an organization, this can cause very large harm to the company and to potential future employees. I, frankly, would feel very uncomfortable if I was at an organization where most of my coworkers were in a polyamorous relationship.
I agree with you that mixing romantic relationships with professional ones occurs among people who are monogamous or don’t identify as polyamorous.
I personally wouldn’t like to see EAs discouraged from being polyamorous. I’m not actively polyamorous myself, but I wouldn’t want to see people restricted to more traditional romantic styles, like monogamous marriage, because I think many of those relationship styles developed in a very different social and technological context than the context we have now. Our culture at large probably benefits from people pioneering and exploring relationship styles that are more suited to our current sociotechnological context. In addition, I think it would be somewhat of a human rights issue for, say, employers in the movement to be telling people how to order their romantic lives.
That said, what I mean to say was that if your romantic life involves more people—which I think it can in polyamory (that is the aim for many, perhaps!), you’ll have a larger and more complex web of romantic connections. If those people are also those you have professional connections with, then there is the potential for your professional and romantic webs to overlap. While this can also happen to people in monogamous relationships, to the extent they are romantically involved with fewer people, and their romantic networks are smaller, there’s less potential for an overlap of their professional and romantic lives.
And while I think an interaction of professional and romantic lives isn’t inherently wrong, it facilitates conflicts of interests, and even more importantly, power dynamics that can facilitate abuse or coercion.
I don’t want to dismiss deep platonic friendships, but I’d ask to agree to disagree on the relevance of those, perhaps, because just about by definition, they will not involve physical or sexual abuse, and so those aren’t consequences of coercive power dynamics that might arise in platonic friendships.
Okay, I think I misunderstood your previous comment to be relating more to conflicts of interest—I agree it’s important to be mindful of overlap between romantic connections and professional life for these reasons, and that it is especially important for people with many partners in the same field to be mindful of this (whether they have many partners because they are a serial monogamist, have a lot of casual sex, or practice a particular style of polyamory)
Another important difference with monogomy is that it’s taboo to make a proposition to somebody who’s already married or already in a serious relationship, so people don’t make them as often.
Is there perhaps too much emphasis on punishment and not enough on prevention? Skimming through comments there is a lot of talk about reporting and dealing with situations. But I have a feeling there are too many of these situations occurring in EA. I feel like there is a lot of work to do in terms of culture and here I think CEA cannot be expected to do this alone. I think the onus is on us males to e.g. really make it clear whenever we overhear conversations that are inappropriate to make this clear, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us feel or if the person making the inappropriate comments has power. I am happy to work with people if there is a group of males that want to get together e.g. a pledge and collect signatures or some other initiative that could give people more comfort in combating bad culture (just DM me).
Also, I think there is a distinction to make between EA in general and people employed by EA orgs. For the former, as we are a big tent, I do not expect us to be able to have as low “case numbers” as e.g. McKinsey. But for employees in EA orgs I expect us to be best in class. We are after all altruists and should take this part of our identity seriously.
Lastly, and as others have pointed out, there seems to be unnecessary reputational risks from associating with EA. While I feel most strongly about the suffering of survivors, I am also concerned that high caliber people in EA are afraid to associate with a brand that has a reputation for sexual misconduct. It might also make it harder for all of us needing to reach out beyond EA to make people trust us.
At a time when the community has gone through so much, it’s hard to hear this.
I confess there’s a part of me which wants to disengage from this. I’m tired of worrying about whether EA culture has a problem with fraud, racism, or other things that I find offensive.
But I shouldn’t disengage.
Just because my emotional energies have been zapped by previous dramas, it doesn’t reduce the suffering experienced by victims of sexual abuse.
So first I’m going to say something which I think is obvious and uncontroversial to everyone:
Sexual abuse and harassment are wrong, and should not happen.
Secondly, I hereby take this pledge:
---
A pledge of solidarity to those who have suffered from sexual harassment or abuse
If you are upset or suffering because you have been abused or harassed, and you disclose this to me, I pledge to do the following:
I will listen and provide you with emotional support—if you’re upset, your distress will be my first priority at the outset.
I will not ask you questions to try to work out whether you are telling the truth. I would much rather trust and provide emotional support to someone who later turns out to have been lying than to question—even subtly—the legitimacy of someone who has suffered sexual abuse.
I will support you to work out the most appropriate next steps. I recognise that choices about your next steps may be complex, and I will not try to rob you of agency as you work out the best way forward.
---
In the spirit of the second bullet point of my pledge, I haven’t done any work to assess the truth or otherwise of the claims in this article. And I didn’t need to in order to feel disturbed by it.
I also don’t claim to be the best standard-bearer of opposing sexual abuse and harrassment—I don’t consider myself one of the top EA leaders, and I have no direct experience of having been a victim of sexual abuse. I’m simply one person (out of many, I believe) who think that EA should be deeply opposed to sexual abuse and harassment.
I’m honestly baffled by all the downvotes & disagreevotes this is getting. I’m really struggling to see anything objectionable in Sanjay’s comment; indeed, it seems like a clearly positive and valuable contribution. Our community would be a better place if more people made (& meant) clear statements in this vein.
I didn’t vote on this either way, but I think the response was probably negative because:
People are wary of the effects of a general “assume the accuser is right” approach. I’m completely on board with the approach in the pledge if a friend comes to me, but with community-level accusations this can turn into “whoever says something first wins”.
Skepticism over this kind of pledge as a mechanism for making things better.
I think there are different interpretations that people can take of what it implies. One reading is that the pledge specifies how the pledger responds in the moment, with the person in pain. Another reading would talk about how they reacted through the entire resulting community process. I parsed it as the former, but what you’re describing seems to be closer to the second.
I am glad you posted this and it got so many agree votes.
It is concerning if people do not understand how this kind of pledge makes things better by:
1. Making people more likely to report incidents of harassment or abuse
2. Reinforcing that this community is a space that wants to be safe and welcoming to women.
This makes me feel like EAs may need much more sensitivity/harassment/discrimination/etc. training than non-EAs do. And highlights the need for stricter workplace dating and sexual harassment policies in EA orgs.
I mostly disagreed based on “I would much rather trust and provide emotional support to someone who later turns out to have been lying than to question—even subtly—the legitimacy of someone who has suffered sexual abuse.”, which feels dangerous to me personally if it were adopted as a community norm. do appreciate the general spirit of attempting to help though.
I did not see how this in any way implies “I do not support the appropriate authorities from investigating whether the report is a lie” which is the only problematic scenario here.
Not immediately grilling the victim on the legitimacy of their claim when they are opening up to you about a traumatic event and instead providing emotional support makes a lot of sense to me. The cost to me of providing emotional support to a non-victim is low and the cost of immediately being challenged on truthfulness to a real victim is very high.
Epistemic status: somewhat angry
Preliminary notes: To control length, I’m going to refer generically to misconduct and survivors, although I recognize that there is a wide range of problematic sexual/relational behavior and that the appropriate responses will vary based on the specific behavior in question. Also, this is a EA Forum comment, not a concrete proposal, so should be taken at a fairly high level of generality. I haven’t done any real legal vetting on any of these thoughts, and some do carry a degree of legal risk.
I’m more focused on senior EAs here, not because I have any reason to think there is more misconduct among that group, but because I’m particularly upset about the abuse-of-power angle, and some of my comments are directed specifically toward that angle. For more junior EAs, the decentralized elements of the EA movement create somewhat different challenges. My comments about senior EAs are not intended to imply a position either way on how possible misconduct by non-senior EAs should be addressed. I haven’t attempted to define “senior EA,” and consider the possibility that some people might be “limited-purpose senior EAs”—for instance, someone might be a “senior EA” in regard to people in the AI security community but not those in the animal-advocacy community.
1. I’d be interested in hearing more about what has been done and could be done to address this problem proactively, in addition to reactively. Should grants include a requirement that an organization have an acceptable anti-misconduct policy and provide approved anti-misconduct training to employees at certain intervals? Should there be a pot of money designated for organizations, community groups, and individuals to apply for grants to combat misconduct? Do senior EAs receive training that is targeted to their role (with a special focus on questions of power dynamics associated with that role?) I’m sure other people have better ideas than I do on this one.
2. (ready for the downvotes on this one) There are certain roles in society that come with restrictions on one’s sexual and relational liberties, like being a judge, a professor/teacher, or a psychiatrist. These roles create a power dynamic with a particular class of people (lawyers/litigants in the judge’s court, students, patients) that make it wildly inappropriate to be romantically or sexually involved. Sometimes there are ways to address a power imbalance and ensure the less-powerful person does not feel pressured . . . but sometimes there are not.
I submit that being a senior EA may create a power dynamic that justifies bright-line restrictions on sex or romantic relationships with EA/EA-adjacent students and junior staff. I don’t know to what extent those rules should include categorical prohibitions, but there should be very clear rules of some sort rather than just assuming everyone will conduct themselves in an appropriate manner. It’s clear from the comments in this thread that trusting people to have good judgment isn’t working that great. To take one example, it looks like there needs to be a rule that senior EAs (like the “influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs” in the article) should not be doing things like hosting students in their homes overnight!
3. At least for complaints against senior EAs, a pathway independent of CEA community health (and staffed by non-EAs) should exist for EA and EA-adjacent survivors who would prefer that route. I am not entirely sure what that should look like, and don’t mean any disrespect to the community health team. But if a survivor would prefer an external pathway, their preference should be honored.
4. Financial and legal support should be available for those against whom a senior EA has committed misconduct, where the senior EA implicitly used their power and influence to commit the misconduct and/or used their power and influence to retaliate in any way.[1]
5. I don’t know the literature about restorative justice approaches in cases of misconduct, so I won’t say anything about whether this is a good idea or not. But conditional on it being appropriate in some cases, the provider needs to be both appropriately trained (with credentials recognized outside of EA) and from outside the EA community.
6. I expect the decentralized aspects of EA make it difficult to take certain stronger actions against perpetrators. At least at the senior level, if there is sufficiently proven misconduct as determined by an independent process which provides appropriate due process (cf. point 3), and the organization refuses to take appropriate action, then at that point it is on the funders to decide whether they want to support an organization that enables misconduct. To be clear, in some cases the only appropriate action may be the EA Death Penalty (i.e., refusal to fund any organization that knowingly chooses to be affiliated with the perpetrator).
In most cases, I would presume that the power-and-influence criterion was met if the misconduct was against an EA or EA-adjacent person. In these cases, the misconduct was committed by an individual, and that individual was presumably acting outside the scope of their employment. But when the misconduct was enabled by significant influence or power granted by an EA organization, I think that organization bears some degree of moral responsibility for supporting the survivor—even if the misconduct was committed at an off-work party against a non-employee, and not under circumstances where the organization has liability under anti-discrimination laws.
Re 2: You named a bunch of cases where a professional relationship comes with restrictions on sex or romance. (An example you could given, which I think is almost universally followed in EA, is “people shouldn’t date anyone in their chain of management”; IMO this is a good rule.) I think it makes sense to have those relationships be paired with those restrictions. But it’s not clear to me that the situation in EA is more like those situations than like these other situations:
Professors dating grad students who work at other universities
Well-respected artists dating people in their art communities
High-income people dating people they know from college who aren’t wealthy
I think it’s really not obvious that those relationships should be banned (though I don’t feel hugely confident, and I understand that some people think that they should be).
I’m interested in more specific proposals for what rules along these lines you might support.
So, I think the first question is something like: “Could a reasonable person in the shoes of the lower-status person conclude that rebuffing the overtures of the higher-status person [1] could result in a meaningfully adverse impact on their career due to the higher-status person taking improper action?”[2]
I think in the vast majority of cases following your three hypotheticals would result in a “no” answer to this question. For instance, most professors have relatively little influence on the operations of other universities, or on the national job market for PhDs. The non-wealthy party in the third hypothetical has no right to the wealthy party’s money, so the fact that the wealthy person responds to rejection by not sharing their wealth is not improper action. In contrast,junior EAs do have a right to a meritocratic hiring process in which their decision not to have sex with someone is not a liability.
In answering question one, I would not assess the moral compass of the higher-status person, but would answer the question based on their role, power, and influence. Way too many organizations have gotten themselves into trouble with “We trust X executive to do the right thing.” The reasonable person knows that some people do not respond well to sexual or romantic rejection, and that vindictive responses are not rare. Source: ask any family/divorce lawyer.[3] The reasonable person also knows that senior EAs have a lot of discretionary power, and thus there is a significant chance retailatory action would not be detected absent special safeguards.
In answering question one, I would heavily weight the opinion of EA students and junior EAs. I would be inclined to generally set the bar at whatever level of role, power, and influence makes a significant number of them feel they would risk a meaningfully adverse impact on their careers from rebuffing a hypothetical higher-status person with those characteristics. We have people in the Time article saying they would fear retailiation if they accused a senior EA of misconduct, and people have said similar things in this thread. And it seems clear that the survivors in the article did not feel the freedom to respond to overtures in the same way they would have responded absent the power differential.
I think the key difference is that power in EA is more interconnected and concentrated than in many similar communities (e.g., the classical music world which has dozens of independent symphonies and AFAIK no powerful central organization or dominant funder). Thus, at the higher levels, I am treating EA somewhat like a single corporation for purposes of question one.
Although the answer to question one vary, I suspect that at least the top few people at Open Phil, the top few public intellectuals, and the top few meta people (e.g., the head of CEA) would likely have to answer question one in the affirmative as to almost everyone in EA. By analogy, if you’re a three-star or four-star general/admiral, you would be forbidden from dating almost anyone in the military due to your rank and position (even if they were in another military service entirely). [4] If you’re a grantmaker in a specific cause area (e.g., biosecurity), I think you would have to answer yes as to anyone in that cause area.
Now we go to step two: Is there a remedy short of a categorical bar that would allow the lower-status person to confidently rebuff the overtures of the higher-status person without fear that this could result in a meaningfully adverse impact on their career due to the higher-status person taking improper action? If the power and influence of the higher-status person is predominately through organizational lines (e.g., a grantmaker at Open Phil), a permanent commitment to recuse will often work if it is made to organizational leadership prior to making any overtures to—or accepting any overtures from—the lower-status person. Of course, the lower-status person would need to be told about the recusal. However, if the person’s power is “soft” and does not run through organizational lines (e.g., the person is a leading public intellectual), there is likely no practical way to hold that person accountable to a recusal commitment.
I would probably consider the experience level of the lower-status person to some extent in deciding whether an alternative remedy existed. It may not be reasonable to expect an undergraduate, or someone who graduated from undergrad a few years ago, to trust that most recusal processes would be effective. Moreover, persons with at least a moderate amount of status may be more likely to detect if someone is breaking a recusal commitment.
I haven’t thought through whether there should be some sort of exceptions process—particularly if someone could show that the policy had a particularly harsh impact on their ability to have a sexual or romantic life for some reason. It wouldn’t be feasible to grant a lot of exceptions to the same person due to the monitoring burden they would entail, and it would be extremely rare to justify an exception relating to a senior EA and a student, or a very senior EA and a junior EA.
(edit: typo)
This includes other relationships about sex and relationships (e.g., breaking up with the person).
“Taking improper action” includes refusing to take action of a quasi-”official” nature that the higher-status person would have taken in the absence of an overture and rejection.
I would grandfather in any pre-existing relationships, and would evaluate new relationships based on the status of the parties when the relationship began. It’s not reasonable to expect people to break off a relationship because someone’s position changed, although the status change may require recusal or other protective measures.
The restrictions on “fratnerization” are much more restrictive than a ban on dating and sexual relationships. But this isn’t the military, and I am not proposing a military-style fratnerization rule.
I appreciate the amount of detail you go into in your comments.
As a woman / “junior EA” / recent “EA student”, I do feel some amount of wariness around my dating choices being policed/restricted out of a desire to protect me and think there has to be a bar for when that seems appropriate—having rules against bosses/professors starting romantic relationships with current employees/students is above that bar but I currently think many potential situations of senior EAs dating more junior people in their field they interact with in social contexts (or students who are not much younger) would not be above that bar.
It feels like there are two problems here (which overlap):
EAs who have some type of influence using that in bad ways to harm the careers / social reputation of people who have rejected them. To the extent that this is a problem, I think more explicitness helps, both in stating conflicts of interest and in propositioning people
More junior EAs feeling pressured into saying yes or not calling out bad behaviour because they think the above could happen, regardless of whether it actually could. This is affected by junior EAs feeling uncertain about what kinds of influence people have within EA and what conflict of interest policies are like
I have encountered abuses of power in romantic relationships outside of EA settings that seemed to me to be exacerbated by things feeling shady such that people felt like they couldn’t be explicit enough and had to navigate plausible deniability. I am much more comfortable in situations where people can express their interest in someone openly if they do intend to start a romantic/sexual relationship and can be clear about their past relationships, as this makes it easier to detect potential abuses of power. I think power abuses happen more in situations where there’s lots of fuzziness.
Thanks for sharing this. To begin with, if most “juniors” or students don’t support any specific proposed rule along these lines, then the idea is bad and it should not be enacted. I do not have any clear idea of where the “bar” should be.
I certainly agree that imposing a prohibition on certain seniors, as well as lesser restrictions, would be paternalistic (as are prohibitions/restrictions in other professions, such as the rule of professional conduct that bans me from starting a sexual relationship with a client). Identifying circumstances that justify a prohibition or restriction would certainly be a difficult line-drawing exercise, which is one of the reasons I left “senior EA” undefined and included a step two at which the policymaker examined whether alternatives to prohibition would be sufficient. I should have been clearer that evaluating at step two also includes consideration of background issues like whether there is a solid process in place to detect potential retailatory behavior, whether there is an independent third-party adjudication process for those who believe they have experienced retailiation, etc.
Thanks for the specific proposals.
FWIW, I think you’re probably overstating the amount of discretionary power that senior EAs could use for retaliatory action.
IMO, if you proposition someone, you’re obligated to mention this to other involved parties in situations where you’re wielding discretionary power related to them. I would think it was wildly inappropriate for a grantmaker to evaluate a grant without disclosing this COI (and probably I’d think they shouldn’t evaluate the grant at all), or for someone to weigh in on a hiring decision without disclosing it. If I heard of someone not disclosing the COI in such a situation, I’d update strongly against them, and I’d move maybe halfway towards thinking that they should have their discretionary power removed.
If some senior person decided that they personally hated someone who had rejected them and wanted to wreck their career, I think they could maybe do it, but it would be hard for them to do it in a way that didn’t pose a big risk to their own career.
I think you’re overestimating the extent to which being a leading public intellectual makes it possible to engage in discretionary vengeance, because again, I’d think it was very inappropriate for such a person to comment substantially on someone without disclosing the COI.
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On a totally different tack, I think it’s interesting that your suggestions are mostly about problems resulting from more senior EAs propositioning junior EAs. To what extent would you be okay with norms that it’s bad for more senior EAs to proposition junior EAs, but it’s okay for the senior EAs to date junior EAs if the junior EAs do the propositioning?
A lot of the motivation behind the dating website reciprocity.io (which I maintain) is that it’s good for EAs to avoid propositioning each other if their interest isn’t reciprocated.
For what it’s worth, my current vote is for immediate suspension in situations if there is credible allegations for anyone in a grantmaking etc capacity where they used such powers in a retaliatory action for rejected romantic or sexual advances. In addition to being illegal, such actions are just so obviously evidence of bad judgement and/or poor self-control that I’d hesitate to consider anyone who acted in such ways a good fit for any significant positions of power. I have not thought the specific question much, but it’s very hard for me to imagine any realistic situation where someone with such traits is a good fit for grantmaking.
Thanks, Buck. It is good to hear about those norms, practices, and limitations among senior EAs, but the standard for what constitutes harassment has to be what a reasonable person in other person’s shoes would think. The student or junior EA experiences harm if they believe a refusal will have an adverse effect on their careers, even if the senior EA actually lacks the practical ability to create such an effect.[1]
The reasonable student or junior EA doesn’t know about undocumented (or thinly documented) norms, practices, and limitations among senior EAs. I would give those more weight in the analysis if they were published, reasonably specific, and contained explicit enforcement mechanisms. As it is, I think the reasonable student/junior would rely on broader social understandings—in which rebuffing sexual advances from more powerful people can seriously harm one’s career.
In my view an effective COI mechanism requires someone other than the conflicted individual to have (a) knowledge of the conflict; (b) a reasonable ability to detect conflicted behavior (or behavior inconsistent with a recusal); (c) the power to deal with the conflicted individual and the conflicted behavior; (d) the willingness to deal with the same. It’s possible for these four needs to be split up such that one actor has (a) and (b) while another has (c) and (d).
I perceive some issues in the COI-disclosure practice you describe. The first is that it is dependent on self-disclosure by the senior EA in a way that is difficult to audit. Maybe I am unusually private, but if I received unwelcome sexual attention from a much-more-senior person in my field, I wouldn’t talk about it in a way that I’d expect people of much greater seniority to hear about it. In contrast, if the senior EA has to disclose to their organization ahead of time, there is a record that the junior/student could ask the organization about to verify that the recusal occured. The base rate of harassment is not low, and it is well-documented that harassers and abusers take irrational/unreasonable risks (yet avoid detection for years to decades, if not permanently). So I am less confident that people will disclose their COI because of the potential consequences of getting caught not disclosing it.
I know there’s value in keeping EA “high trust” in many ways, but I don’t think that is an appropriate guide here. The advantages of a “high trust” harassment policy in this particular scenario accrue largely to the senior party, while the costs accrue predominately to the student or junior EA.
The second issue is that, while most disqualifications due to personal interests can be waived, I don’t think other senior EAs can waive this type of disqualification. In my view, the disqualification exists primarily to protect the student or junior EA, and other senior EAs are not in a position to decide whether to waive that person’s protection. Of course, if you think disclosure of the COI is sufficient to protect the student or junior EA, you don’t have this problem.
There’s a wide variety of conduct that could be potentially covered by a policy—I thought propositioning by the senior EA was a fair example case. For instance, if the junior EA propositions but then decides they do not want to continue after one encounter, will they feel free to decide against future encounters without adverse career consequences?
I think there are a number of mitigations, including the use of a site like reciprocity.io, that could be considered at step two of my proposed test. There would need to be rules—for instance, telling a specific junior EA that one uses reciprocity.io may come across awfully similar to a direct propositioning. Other mitigations could include detailed public policies, an independent third-party process for addressing harassment and retailiation complaints, etc.
I wonder how well a website that invited users to specify categories of propositions they were not interested in would work, in combination with a community norm to check the website prior to propositioning. I am wondering if that would be more viable as a community norm (and a requirement for seniors) than something like reciprocity.io. For instance, a user could say “no seniors,” “no one older than X,” “no one in my cause area,” “non-monogamy isn’t for me,” “only through reciprocity.io,” “no propositions at all,” etc. I am wondering if some people might feel more comfortable declining a broad group of people in whom they aren’t interested in advance, rather than non-listing specific persons in that class who they knew were interested in them. I don’t claim to speak for anyone but myself, but I would use such a website if I were in a social community where I was concerned about being propositioned (I’m in a monogamous marriage, so it would be “no propositions at all”). It would, of course, be important for people to understand that the absence of a statement of non-interest on the website does not imply interest.
Indeed, the harm still exists if the individual student or junior EA perceives such a risk, even though a hypothetical reasonable student or junior EA would not. The reason question one is objective is that mindreading is impossible, and thus defining harassment with a subjective standard isn’t workable.
Fwiw, someone was just observing on a different thread how many ‘burner’ or similar accounts have recently been showing up on the forum. So it seems like many junior EAs do in fact believe that being negatively identified by senior EAs could be harmful to their prospects.
I like the idea of providing free independently source legal, psychosocial and financial support to victims who might want it. This might be practically difficult for conflict of interest reasons among others, but I think it would show good faith and lower barriers for victims to pursue justice if they wanted to take that path.
There are some functions that should be housed in an organization with significant financial, operational, and legal independence from the main EA organizations. That would require either community funding, or a long-term grant. I was envisioning that such an organization should be available to coordinate the investigation of alleged misconduct by senior EAs, and I think having certain survivor-support functions housed outside of CEA would serve the interests of both survivors and CEA (which then wouldn’t have to worry about managing potentially serious conflicts of interest).
I don’t have a clear opinion on whether / to what extent most of EA’s response to misconduct more generally should be housed in an independent organization.
With the utmost respect to the CEA community health team, I think that they are, in their current form, largely unable to sufficiently manage significant parts of their community health, especially issues around sexual harassment.
From what I can see from the CEA website, other than Julia Wise, nobody in the team has been trained and worked in mental health, psychology or social work. Moreover, it is not clear that anyone in the team has worked in, or has experience in, managing sexual harrassment or trauma-based counselling. Given that the movement is relatively large and growing, and given that concerns in this area were known before, why has this not been prioritised?
Even having a trained professional as a contractor would be a relatively low-cost way to appropriately support community health, especially pertaining to sexual harassment.
I would be very interested to hear a breakdown of how much these issues are reported in EA circles by geography. Notwithstanding this comment, it sounds from the anecdotes in this thread like it very much is concentrated in the Bay area. I was moderately involved in the London EA scene for several years, and while I obviously can’t rule out that this happens there, my general impression was that that community would have looked extremely dimly on anything like the abuses of power described in the OP (I found out retrospectively about one or two such incidents over the course of several years, and my understanding was they were dealt with firmly, and the main offender has not been welcome in EA circles since).
If it turns out it is concentrated in the Bay area, that point seems worth acknowledging openly, doing some serious investigation into, and asking whoever the community leaders are there to take responsibility for whatever is causing the problem—including, possibly, resigning, even if they had no direct responsibility for it.
I’m not in the Bay or London, but I would expect the abuses of power describing the OP to be looked at extremely dimly anywhere? Is there something in the article or about your impression of the situation that leads you to think they were viewed differently in the Bay than they would have been in London?
If it does in fact happen substantially more often there, I would take that in itself as pretty strong Bayesian evidence that something about the culture there makes would-be abusers more confident that they can get away with harassment.
What evidence is provided that polyamory itself played a role? Can you name a single instance that could not be replaced by, say, a single man (or for that matter, married and monogamous man who is willing to cheat) sexually pressuring or harassing women? What is the relevance of polyamory?
One of the differences is that if someone is doing something they know is illicit they’re likely to be a lot more careful about it because they’re taking a larger risk. If you’re monogamously married and proposition someone you don’t really know at a conference it might get back to your partner.
I wish people would be more careful around relationships in general, and aware of the effects of power dynamics and how their decisions might impact others, but I do expect for many people “your partner might find out, so don’t hit on someone who might not be into it because they might tell” would be a big consideration.
It’s rare for the high-status men to be single, including in communities where polyamory is not practiced.
So in an alternative version of the EA community which was much more similar to the rest of the world in having very low rates of consensual non-monogamy (plus the level of scrupulosity EAs would bring to opposing cheating) I’d expect many fewer cases where someone was using their institutional power for sexual ends. I don’t think this would do much, though, to handle this kind of issue among, say, EA college students.
(Not advocating we prohibit EA leaders from being consensually non-monogamous or otherwise discourage polyamory, but trying to answer “What is the relevance of polyamory?”)
I strongly disagree with both these points. Look at some of the famous recent cases of high profile sexual predators, and many if not most were married—Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Andrew Windsor, etc. are all married. Some of these people divorced and remarried later and I don’t know if all of their accusations were all during marriages (though many clearly were), but if not, then that just undermines your second point, which also strikes me as not an especially strong correlation. Also, look at the very high rates of sexual harassment in communities (economics, philosophy academia, Hollywood, many religious communities) where most people are married.
Suppose your second point about high-status men being disproportionately married was true though. Suppose further that for whatever reason, it seemed slightly less true in EA, with lower overall marriage rates than the general population. What would you think about a post that ended with “Standard disclaimers apply about ‘not all ’ - there are plenty of perfectly healthy single men out there—but its implementation in EA seems to play a significant role in many of the examples cited.”?
I’m confused by this—do you mean that you would expect people involved in EA to be more opposed to cheating than others or that this is what you would hope for in your idealized alternate version of EA? If it is the former, why would you not expect them to be more opposed to sexual harassment in any context?
I think this is only disagreement with my first point? My second point was that in the broader world it’s rare for high-status men to be single, and giving several examples of married high-status men seems to go in that direction?
On the first point, my claim isn’t “monogamously married men don’t hit on people they shouldn’t or otherwise harass people because of the risk of it getting back to their partner”—that is clearly not true. Instead, I’m saying I’d predict that they’re less likely to, and they’re likely to try to be more attentive to whether their interaction seems to be wanted because of the higher risk to their reputation.
I think this is currently true: EA has a lot of people who care a lot about strictly following rules and sticking with commitments, and I think EAs would on average judge someone harshly for cheating than non-EAs.
But I do think EAs are generally more opposed to sexual harassment than non-EAs?
Which again isn’t to say it doesn’t happen or even that it necessarily happens less here than elsewhere—as described in the article and in various metoo posts it does happen, and it happens more than we should accept.
So it seems you think being single is just as likely to result in a high propensity to commit sexual assault as being polyamorous, but it just happens to be the case that most high status men are not single? Is that a fair description of your views?
If so, would you equally supportive of posts about how marriage rates in EA are too low relative (assuming this was true) to the general population and how this is somehow a problem and potentially dangerous for women?
Not exactly, but close enough.
As I wrote in my response to Kelsey I don’t think we should be discouraging polyamory. I was trying to answer your “What is the relevance of polyamory?” question, and talk about how this effect on interpersonal harm is one of the considerations in trying to figure out whether discouraging polyamory is a good idea.
Your question also conflates “single” as in “non-married” and as in “non-partnered” in a confusing way.
Agreed, my bad, I meant non-partnered.
I guess my point was that if the community had lower rates of romantic relationships than the rest of society, it would be a very non-remarkable thing and it would be very odd to bring up people who chose to be single or norms that are very accepting of choosing to be single on rates of sexual assault or harassment. It would also feel very offensive to me if I were a single person and there was open discussion of whether my choice to be single was somehow increasing sexual assaults either directly because I was more likely to commit assault or indirectly by promoting it as a norm. I’m all for saying offensive things that need to be said, but in this case there seems to be almost no evidence to back it up.
I get the sense that even though the arguments around polyamory and sexual assault are almost identical to the arguments around singleness by choice and sexual assault, one is treated very differently because it is perceived as weird and deviant.
If our community had elevated levels of people being single by choice, where this was of the “lots of romantic interactions, but no commitment” and not the “few romantic interactions” variety, I absolutely expect people would be pointing to it as a potential contributor to higher rates of unwanted romantic or sexual interactions.
This does not mean I would be trying to discourage people from being single by choice, but I could see us having the same conversation we are now where I talk about how I think it probably leads to a higher level of issues and that is one thing to consider in deciding whether one should discourage it.
This seems like an extremely speculative way of justifying what does indeed sound to me like prejudice. You could just as easily opine that ‘if someone is doing something they know is illicit they’re likely to be a lot more aggressive about it’ or similar.
It did make me wince to see the comment ‘Gopalakrishnan was alarmed at some of the responses. One commenter wrote that her post was “bigoted” against polyamorous people’ unironically in the same article as ‘EA’s polyamorous subculture was a key reason why the community had become a hostile environment for women’.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the full article but I think a common position one could take here is the following:
Polyamory makes sexually promiscuous behavior permissible and some might argue „virtuous“ in a way that it encourages conflicts with conventional understanding of love and sexual relationships. Polyamory might not be „bad“ in principle but could be a contributing factor to people feeling emboldened and morally justified in making sexual advances even when they are not appropriate. So the claim here is not that non-polyamorous people could not have behaved similarly but that the rate of non-polyamorous behaving in such ways is lower because of more „guilt“ and „shame“ associated with sexually promiscuous behaviors.
EDIT: After some rethinking of the formulation of the sentence above, I would change it to: So the claim here is that polyamory might attract some people prone to predatory behaviors who feel like they can justify their own attitudes and behaviors this way. It could be easier to tell yourself that what you are doing is polyamorous and that’s why other people are freaked out by what you do rather than deal with the fact that your behavior may be over-the-line.
I think this line of thinking should not be dismissed outright as I don’t have any data that could back either side on this one. My gut says there could be something to the argument but mostly in the sense that I think that polyamory could cover a heterogeneous group of people who may express more extreme positions on a spectrum here. Some or most polyamorous people may be more sensitive to such issues but a few people may really feel emboldened and justified to behave in predatory ways.
If you downvote or disagree it’s quite helpful to explain why. I think this is a reasonable comment that provides a possible answer to the question that was posed. I would argue it makes a contribution to the discourse here and deserves to be engaged with.
For me it seems really difficult to disentangle whether downvotes are just „soldier mindset“ or actually grounded in deliberate reasoning. Just downvoting without any kind of explanation seems like it should be reserved for clear cut cases of „no contribution“.
I didn’t downvote, but but found your comment (and many like it on this page) uncomfortable to read, because it strongly echoes historical negative attitudes towards other minority subgroups. One could almost rewrite it word for word about, say, gay culture:
I suspect we both find the edited paragraphs a pretty unpleasant lens to look through, even though it doesn’t say anything that is technically false.
Thanks for the response. I agree that this might not be „pleasant“ to read but I tried to make a somewhat plausible argument that illustrate some of the tensions that might be at play here. And I think this is what the comment that I replied to asked for.
Also I would argue that the comment „holding up“ when we are switching to related phenomena (at least sex positive gay culture) could actually be an indicator of it pointing to some general underlying dynamics regarding „weirdness“ in relation to orthodoxy. Weirdness tends to leave more room for deviance from established norms which may attract people with tendencies toward rule breaking. And since being gay has become much more accepted by the mainstream and less „weird“, so has the potential for misuse by bad faith actors.
All of this should not be interpreted as me having anything against polyamory or other practices currently perceived to be weird per se, actually, I find there are very interesting arguments in favor of polyamory and I am many regards holding weird positions myself (e.g., vegan, etc.). I have friends who have polyamorous relationships. But given it’s status in the current environment, it still might be an attraction point for nefarious people simply by virtue of being „weird“ and, thus, more open for misuse.
Hi There! I’m using a pseudonym here because I, too, fear retaliation for speaking about my experience, as my abuser is still involved in the EA movement and is friends with at least one staff member involved in investigating these claims.
This abuser is fairly well known in other communities for his behavior and has been ejected from many of them. Below are some things he has done, which I have either experienced first hand or been party to via his own admissions or those of his victims. (CW: Rape, abuse)
I can confirm that some subset of the below claims were made known to EA staff in the past, and that I haven’t seen any evidence of anything having been done about it, aside from one of the victims being ostracized by EA staff. This unfortunately leads me to believe that this problem is in fact systemic within the EA community.
Problematic behaviors by the perpetrator:
Doxxing a rape victim
Posting a rape victim’s restraining order online, falsely claiming that she was lying.
Encouraging online harassment of said rape victim in a manner that reached her professional colleagues.
Sexually assaulting multiple women
Drugging multiple women in a manner that caused at least one to black out
Spreading false information about his victims online and in person (smear campaigns), and pretending to be the victim himself (DARVO tactics)
Digitally falsifying evidence involved in smearing victims
Accessing victim(s) personal electronic devices to search for negative or incriminating information
Engaging in blackmail and intimidation
Swatting victim(s) (at home and at work)
Attempting to frame at least one of his victims for attempted murder
Obtaining assistance from other people in silencing and harming victims, using DARVO tactics (triangulation)
Attempting to convince victim(s) that they are crazy or have a personality disorder that makes them irrational (gaslighting)
Attempting to use autism as a cover for lack of empathy, blunted emotional responses regarding his behavior, and rages, and possibly to avoid suspicion regarding social manipulation tactics (Some communities suspect possible ASPD. Note: These traits are related to stereotypes some people have about autism, and they are harmful to people with autism.)
Generally, employing emotional and psychological abuse, threats, and other coercive tactics to control victims and prevent them from speaking out
For those who are reading this, thank you for your support on behalf of myself and others. It is important to address serious behaviors like these. In the absence of systemic organizational action to address such matters, it is especially important to for individuals to take action to ensure people who behave in such a manner are not involved in EA communities or allowed to use EA-related philosophies as a cover, and that their victims are made to feel welcome, safe, and empowered to speak about their experiences.
This sounds really horrifying Maddie. I’m so so sorry you (and other victims) have had to go through this. I’ll send you a direct message to work out if and how I might be able to help you and prevent future harm from this person.
(BTW I’m Catherine from CEA’s Community Health team).
Hi Catherine, that is very kind of you; thank you so much! I wanted to let you know that I really appreciate your support and also that I might be a little slow to reply occasionally due to the number of things I have going on right now, but that I’ll be sure to check back and keep on it.
Hi, thank you for sharing your experiences. Can you please share who the perpetrator is? If you don’t want to post online, would it be possible to DM it? Based off of what you shared here, it is important for other women in EA to not be around this person.
Hi Lauren, thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. I’m going to think a bit more about whether I can share his name without compromising myself or other people he has impacted. This will probably mean mostly going through official channels, but I may also be able to DM you after checking in with some people about whether it feels safe and appropriate to them. Thank you again for your kind and thoughtful reply. It means a lot.
Thanks for your reply. I definitely understand that it may cause more harm to share that information, so please don’t feel pressured. Take care.
It’s terrible to see how people have suffered due to harassment and abuse in the community. I think this is an important time for us to reflect as a community on what we need to be doing differently.
Some aspects of the problem are more easily tractable (clearer policies on reporting misconduct at orgs; better systems for responding to misconduct), while others stem from aspects of EA that are pretty deeply-rooted (centralization of power; blurry work/life boundaries and a high level of romantic/professional entanglements). Many people seem to be pretty bought into the more entrenched aspects I mentioned, but I feel that their downsides haven’t been sufficiently accounted for. At the very least, I think we need to more robustly account for their risks, and factor them into community norms and behaviors.
If you’re harassed by someone who controls your funding, and they’re also a beloved community member with high status, it’s going to be inherently so much harder to speak up. Yet many EA orgs have harassment policies that are poor or non-existent. Multiple people have told me that they feel such policies aren’t necessary in EA because this is a high-trust community with well-intentioned people. I’d argue that when personal and professional lives are so entangled, strong policies are more, rather than less important.
I’d be eager to hear what other actionable changes people feel would be valuable.
This is very alarming and should be corrected immediately.
Non-EA organizations don’t have sexual harassment policies because they suspect all their employees/members to be predators! It is so that the minority of people who engage in bad behavior don’t slip through (or in case of the incidents in this article, keep slipping through) the cracks and feel emboldened by the lack of such policies.
I think the community being mostly very young, male, low EQ and most importantly inexperienced leads to biases that make EAs think they will be unaffected by (or are brilliant enough to easily overcome) issues that other organizations and communities experience and actively try to avoid.
It would be pretty absurd to people outside of EA that things as basic as having workplace dating policies, harassment policies or trainings is actually something that we need to make an elaborate case for. I feel like it comes to understanding complex interpersonal dynamics and assessing their role in the long term health of a community, EAs are disadvantaged and behind the curve and it wouldn’t be so bad to use the knowledge that other non-EA groups have gained from decades of bad experiences and subsequent hard work to reduce such experiences.
Agreed.
If organizations don’t want to adopt good policies for the right reasons, they may want to meditate on how excited employment-discrimination attorneys will get when it is explained that the defendant organization didn’t have any meaningful harassment policy or training because they were a “high-trust community with well-intentioned people.”
I hesitate to frame it that way, but it may be the only way to get some people’s attention.
This is what happens when you centralize power so much. I’m so sorry for what happened. So many people remaining silent and covering for abusers.
(it shouldn’t matter but for the record I have multiple partners)
While this is a simple comment, I am a little bit surprised by the down votes and strong disagreement signaled. Could people who strongly disagree with this comment point out their reasoning?
Without having thought too much about this, I do think that it seems plausible to consider the effects that centralized decision making has on enabling or at least not discouraging these types of behaviors.
I disagree voted but did not downvote. The reason is that while I find the behavior in this TIME article incredibly alarming and abhorrent, I do not think that centralization of EA contributes to the behavior nor do I find decentralization would help (EDIT: though actually this is oveconfident, see caveat added below). In fact, my rough guess is that centralization is fairly helpful here by allowing harassing behavior to be known and being able to effectively gatekeep events etc. from harassers (EDIT: though actually this is an overgeneralization, see caveat added below).
I do however find it clear this article points to some EAs being incredibly unthoughtful about power dynamics to a dangerous degree. I would like to see that fixed. I recommend reading Julia Wise’s article on the issue. People who abuse power dynamics in this way have no place in the EA movement I want to promote and would have no place at Rethink Priorities.
~
Edited to add some caveats after discussing this with two people independently: I do think that there are both important downsides and upsides to consider for each of more marginal centralization and more marginal decentralization. Most notably hearing about “the fact that the women would only speak under conditions of anonymity due to EA’s centralisation of power over funding and employment in a few (overwhelmingly male) hands” is very alarming and suggests I underrate how bad centralization can be.
I can certainly think of other ways this would be way worse if things were even more centralized (like imagine there was no independent Rethink Priorities or other groups and CEA controlled literally 100% of the jobs… also centralized groups can better protect and shield high-profile abusers) but I can also think of ways decentralization makes things worse (e.g., in my very limited past experience I’ve personally witnessed decentralization make an abuser be able to move easily from small group to small group without people knowing). This makes me think most that broad generalizations about centralization vs. decentralization are not the most productive axis of analysis here for solving the problem.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I think the kind of debate that you indicated to have had is exactly what we need to make sense of such emotionally difficult and complex topics.
Even if you come to the conclusion that other framings seem more useful to you, we can’t have confidence in such conclusions if they are made ex ante without deliberate engagement with the content. So thanks for doing that!
I personally think that we may need to take more time to really try to understand and explore the problem we are facing here, before focusing on solutions. I have the feeling that something broader than „isolated incidents“ of sexual harassment is the right way to frame the problem here. There have been „community-related“ issues after issues popping up over the last few months. We should step back and try to look at the whole picture here and try to understand the mechanisms and drivers that lead to such events. I think this is happening to some degree but it still feels like we could be doing this more explicitly and openly. I really think there’s a lot at stake regarding the future development of the movement.
Sorry, this got meta pretty quickly…
As an example of this, I’m involved in the contra dance community which is almost entirely organized at the level of individual dance groups. I can think of several examples of people who moved on to a different group after getting kicked out of their original group, sometimes multiple times.
Some of this is that the contra dance world doesn’t have any group with the role of CEA’s community health team (disclosure: my wife is on that team), but even if it did have one it would be very hard to coordinate with the hundreds of local groups around the country. In a decentralized system it’s very hard to share information about bad actors to the people who need to know it without making it essentially public, and making things public is often a large escalation that people who report problems to you don’t want.
But those are two very different communities / movements and I don’t think that the situations are similar. As you said, there is something like CEA and the EA movement also has the ambition to act in a somewhat coordinated fashion to solve the world’s biggest problems, whereas dance groups grow like wild flowers wherever and whenever enough people interested in dance come together regularly.
I am not saying that there is nothing to learn by comparing these different situations but this doesn’t seem to be an argument against the theory that centralization of power could have somehow contributed to creating an environment in which people felt badly treated or even harassed. Rather it seems to be more of an illustration that preventing such behaviors is a really difficult problem regardless of concentration of power.
That’s a pretty different claim from the “this is what happens when you centralize power so much” that started this thread!
My point here was that the conclusion that can be drawn from your example is orthogonal to the question of how concentrated power is. Your example did not provide much evidence against the claim that concentration of power may be a contributing factor to the issue here. Feel free to reread my prior comment.
(This might be a rambly comment but these are thoughts that plopped out of me after reading the article, particularly after reading the quote by Julia Wise, “How do you figure out what is a community problem versus what is a Bay Area problem or sex problem or something else?”)
I generally think sexual harassment in EA is just extremely more complicated because of how intertwined we all are, and how much we would be willing to put aside (e.g. bad feelings in interpersonal relationships) for optimizing working for “the greater good” (e.g. let’s not ruin this person’s career)
This “intertwinement” leads to many complicated things. If you report someone, they might be reprimanded in some form, either subtly or in a big way. Then depending on how they were reprimanded, you’d figure out a way how to deal with them in case you see them again since they’re in the EA community, after all. And if they’re banned, but online, you can be emotionally mature, but I don’t think those feelings go away easily for everyone.
And if you choose not to report (e.g. because it was too “small” to be a report, because they’re friends with your friend, because they’re working in an environment near you), they’ll still be there in the community, attend events, etc. and you just have to deal with them. And if you have a hard time “dealing with them” then that burden seems to be on you. Maybe some people say it’s because, “well we’re EAs, this is what we believe in, so be emotionally mature, and put this aside...”
This also applies to not just sexual harassment, but let’s say, negative interactions with someone. If someone is disliked, that can have ramifications depending on who is disliked. E.g. Alice had negative interactions with Bob. Alice is friends with Carol. Carol has to work with Bob. Alice ends up being connected to Bob in that way, Carol can’t do much because she’s working with Bob, bip bam boom, negative feelings for Alice, but for the sake of being emotionally mature, Alice sucks it up.
And this might be true outside of EA too (I think it is) but it gets complicated when putting the issue aside, or letting go, gets mixed with the fundamental philosophy of EA, or even rationality. It’s kinda the Broken Windows Theory to me, subtly ignoring, downsizing, or casting aside these kinds of things… ultimately blowing up in exposés like this one, or to people bitterly/sadly leaving the community… and I do get somewhat sad too when people just go like “okay if they don’t wanna be here then okay, we’re filtering them out.”
I’m quite sad to see “When Gopalakrishnan said she wasn’t interested, she recalls, they would “shame” her or try to pressure her, casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach.” – I’ve only supposed this was possible due to my personal feelings of some dynamics in the community, and I actually feared it (as someone who has had personal issues with polyamory) but am sad to have heard it actually concretely happened in this way; I really hope it doesn’t happen anymore.
This was really upsetting to read. I really feel for the people impacted, and even if it’s not perfect, I’m glad that this piece was published and don’t want to miss any lessons to take from it.
Most sexual harassment is never reported. I wonder if we could reduce any perceived barriers to reporting by creating a wider air gap between CEA (which has, by its nature, conflicts of interest inside the community) and the people tasked with first receiving and responding to reports. Right now, it seems reports are read first by CEA staff, and the confidentiality policies are a bit vague.[1] It could lower the barrier to reporting if the complaint was initially received and handled by a person or organization outside of the EA community (personally and professionally), or at least adjacent to it.
Then, after discussing with the external affiliate and learning more about confidentiality, policies, steps forward, etc., people can decide what they want to do next (be it ending the conversation there, forwarding it to the community health team, forwarding the complaint to other institutions —even straight to law enforcement for severe issues, etc.)
To be clear, I think the community health team has done, and will continue to do, a great job — this would just be about who is the initial point of contact, in case it makes people more comfortable speaking up.
From the google form: “If you have questions about how we’ll handle confidentiality, we’re happy to discuss that at the start of our conversation. Different team members have different policies, because they handle different kinds of cases. If you start talking with a member of our team and they can’t promise the level of confidentiality you want, we can refer you to a different team member who will be able to keep to a stricter confidentiality policy.”
All of this relies on a team member at CEA first reading and responding to the complaint, of course.Thanks for bringing this up; we have talked about approaches like this [having an external affiliate], and have done some early considering of the costs and benefits.
One thing I want to flag is that “All of this relies on a team member at CEA first reading and responding to the complaint, of course” is not quite true, since people can make an appointment to call a contact person and talk at the beginning of the call about level of confidentiality without revealing anything about the concern. (This has happened with me [note: I don’t usually take cases, it was a special situation], and we talked through my confidentiality policy before proceeding).
Appreciate the flag about our confidentiality policies being vague. We have confidentiality policies listed here but had thought talking it through with each person would allow us to convey more nuance and specificity to their situation; I’m going to take another look at the current setup.
Thank you for all the work your team has done, and is doing, on this issue.
And thanks for clarifying the point about reading and responding — I worded it poorly and I’ve retracted it in my comment. But I do think the sort of thing I was gesturing at is just what you mentioned: right now, the structure is intended such that info is given after a conversation with CEA has been started and some level of nuance and specificity to the individual situation has been divulged.
I see the benefit to that — I guess there are tradeoffs in everything — but I also wonder if some people might prefer more info on confidentality and options without having to open dialogue with CEA disclosing any specifics of their situation. I don’t know if that’s true, though. I’m not an expert on this by any means, just trying to contribute to brainstorming a bit. I do think reading the forum post you linked helped me understand a bit more about this.
Yup, your point seems quite reasonable to me. I’ll be thinking about it!
One thing that could help with at least some of the milder cases mentioned in the article would be to have more spaces where EAs can go specifically for dating, so that there would be less flirting and asking people out in the gray zone between personal and professional interactions.
Buck’s reciprocity.io is one example of this, though it could be good to have a more complete EA dating website not tied to Facebook. A Tinder-style website requiring mutually swiping right would help with the problem of some women getting swamped with romantic interest, although many EAs (including me) have fond feelings toward a site more like OkCupid as of 2010 where you could see long profiles and message anyone. EA speed-dating sessions and matchmakers are also options. “Date me” docs are another way to ensure that both parties are interested in dating because the person with the doc waits for other people to reply, rather than asking people proactively.
If we had thriving spaces where EAs went specifically for dating, there would be less need or temptation to ask people out in other contexts, which means people who came to EA without wanting any romantic attention could reduce the amount of it they receive.
An EA dating website like this one where you can list your mono vs poly preference could help people who aren’t interested in poly avoid being asked to join polycules.
If the OCB situation was a case of intentional flirting rather than just different conceptions of how much personal information is ok to share in what contexts, then it could also have potentially been avoided if people mainly did flirting in reserved dating spaces.
If you already have a crush on a particular person and that person isn’t on an EA dating website, there might still be a temptation to ask that person about their feelings, and it seems harsh to forbid that (except in certain cases like boss vs employee, as others have noted). I myself have proactively expressed romantic interest to a few people outside of an explicit dating space (though I try to do it sparingly and tactfully). But at least the frequency of bringing up such topics outside of reserved spaces could decrease a fair amount.
This proposal makes sense to me, but I don’t live near any other EAs in person, so maybe I don’t realize how much easier it is to just ask people out directly rather than having to use online platforms.
I think this is the relevant place to share this community accountability post alleging coverup of rape and anti-transgender behavior patterns at CFAR on the part of Anna Salamon and others: https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/
Just brainstorming some things that could be done about this:
Commission a research report summarizing the best evidence based interventions to prevent harassment and discrimination.
Provide an ombudsman or other contact for victims that is outside the power system of EA. Perhaps a law firm could be retained for this purpose?
Provide anti-harassment, bystander intervention, or manager training at conferences or employers. This should be targeted to those who are perceived as being in a position of power (such as grantmakers or executives).
Conduct ongoing surveys to quantify the problem and see if it is getting better or worse. This could also help with transparency.
I’m skeptical by default of accusations of sexual misconduct that don’t name the perpetrator, even when the source is anonymous, in 2023. That seems to include most of the accusations here.
Which is not to say definitively that the piece is untrue—everything in it could very well be accurate—just that the way the piece is now, it’s essentially set up to do maximum damage to EA while limiting EA leadership’s ability to take productive action against the offenders, and that makes me at least suspicious that events have been distorted.
I do not agree with redacting the identities of the accused. (agree with this comment: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=tQfPCeSGrhonCtJ4g )
If you have information you believe should be public but don’t want to post it yourself, DM me and I’ll post it for you, keeping the source in confidence.
Downvoted for unilateralism. We should talk about whether this information should be listed here, not jump to posting it.
I think polyamory has been a problem in the EA (and rationalist) communities for a long time and led to both some really uncomfortable and concerning community dynamics and also just a lot of drama and problems. Multiple high-profile women have told me that they felt pressured to be polyamorous by men in the community and/or felt that polyamory was bad but they didn’t feel comfortable speaking up against it, and I’ve faced some degree of community social backlash myself for speaking out (even informally!) against polyamory.
In general I think this has been kind of an ongoing issue for quite some time, and I wish we had resolved it “internally” rather than it being something exposed by outside investigators.
I am very bothered specifically by the frame “I wish we had resolved [polyamory] “internally” rather than it being something exposed by outside investigators.”
I am polyamorous; I am in committed long-term relationships (6 years and 9 years) with two women, and occasionally date other people. I do not think there is anything in my relationships for “the community” to “resolve internally”. It would not be appropriate for anyone to tell me to break up with one of my partners. It would not be appropriate for anyone to hold a community discussion about how to ‘resolve’ my relationships, though of course I disclose them when they are relevant to conflict-of-interest considerations, and go out of my way to avoid such conflicts. I would never ask out a woman who might rely on me as a professional mentor, or a woman who is substantially less professionally established.
There are steps that can be taken, absolutely should be taken, and for the most part to my knowledge have been taken to ensure that professional environments aren’t sexualized and that bad actors are unwelcome. Asking people out or flirting with them in professional contexts should be considered unacceptable. People who engage in a pattern of coercive, harassing, and unwelcoming behavior should be unwelcome as a result. People should have trusted avenues to report misconduct. People should not ask out their employees or anyone they have substantial direct power over.
We should talk openly about it when these incidents occur, in order to improve, and we should be fine with those conversations being “external” because the insistence that we resolve things “internally” is to me incredibly inappropriate and associated with handling things badly.
But outside those steps, what would it mean to “handle” my polyamorous relationships? What would “resolving polyamory” look like”? Are we talking about statements from formal organizations about which relationship styles are permissible? Informal social sanction aimed not at misconduct but at anyone in a nontraditional relationship? Why is that something that the ‘community’ should do?
I’m concerned that Davis’ comment was not interpreted in good faith.
I imagine a comment criticising a culture of alcohol consumption in a community, leading to higher rates of violence. I reply stating what will the community do to stop me safely and legally consume alcohol, ban me from drinking it?
This “personalised oppression” framing is seems obviously fallacious if you substitute polyamory for any other behaviour.
Hmm, if Davis had said “I think pressure to be polyamorous has been a problem in the community...” or “I’ve received backlash for speaking out against dynamics surrounding polyamory” then I think I would have reacted differently.
But he said “I think polyamory has been a problem” and “I’ve received backlash for speaking out against polyamory”. He has indeed long been outspoken against polyamory—not against dynamics in polyamory that make the community unwelcoming or unprofessional, against the practice under all circumstances. He has told me at other times that polyamory is inherently immoral and wrong and that no one should ever be polyamorous, which inclined me towards the broader interpretation of what he was trying to say.
I agree many people in the comments do not object to anyone practicing polyamory, but to pressures and dynamics it can create, and those comments did not give me the same reaction. But Davis in particular does think, and has said to me, that my relationships are inherently immoral and that polyamory is never acceptable and I think the wording of his comment reflected that belief of his, and that’s why his framing bothered me when the framing in these other comments (which was focused on specific potential harms) did not bother me.
Thanks for writing this! I think there’s a lot of knee-jerk anti-poly sentiment in the comments and humanizing polyamory is valuable. I agree with you that most of the problems people are ascribing to polyamory are actually not specific to polyamory at all.
Before I continue, I want to be clear that I think your relationships are positive and I’m glad you have them. And I also think this about poly people in general.
Imagine that we had strong evidence that powerful people having multiple simultaneous relationships is more likely to lead to interpersonal harm. The harm would only happen through actions that would still be bad in themselves (coercive propositioning etc), but their being poly could magnify that harm by offering more opportunities and making them generally bolder. Personally, I think this is more likely than not, but also not a large enough effect to outweigh the benefit of they and their partners getting to enjoy their preferred relationship style. And also that the evidence that pushes me in the direction of thinking that it makes interpersonal harm more likely is very weak and speculative. So I don’t think something “should be done”.
But if the evidence were there, the harm was large enough, and I thought this was a serious issue for the EA community, I might try to discourage polyamory. This could look like writing up the evidence, talking privately to high-status poly people that I thought might be on the fence, and encouraging people to talk about their decision to go mono.
That seems basically reasonable to me, though it feels operative that you would be acting in your independent capacity as a person with opinions who tries to convince other people that your opinions are correct. I’d be much more uncomfortable with an EA institution that had a ‘talking people out of polyamorous relationships’ department.
I think there are some forms of social pressure which are fine for individuals to apply but which are damaging and coercive if they have formal institutional weight behind them, so calls for “people who agree with me polyamorous relationships are damaging” to advocate for that stance don’t make me uneasy the way calls for “the community” to “handle” those things make me uneasy.
Yes, I’m not sure this needs to be said but just to be clear—I also don’t think CEA or whatever should have a “talking people out of polyamorous relationships” department, and this would seem like a bizarre overreach to me.
I’m thinking of things much more along the lines of “discourage the idea of polyamory as ‘more rational’ and especially polyamory pressure in particular”, not “make EA institutions formally try to deconvert people from polyamory” or whatever.
To be clear, the thing I was wishing we had resolved internally was much more the widespread pressure to be polyamorous in (at least some parts of?) EA rather than individual people’s relationships; as you say, it would not be appropriate for the EA community to have a discussion about how to “resolve” your personal relationships. What would that even mean?
However, I think that this is far from the first time that major cultural issues with polyamory and unwelcome pressure to be polyamorous have been brought up, and it does seem to me that that’s the kind of thing that could have been handled earlier if we were more on the ball. In the article, Gopalakrishnan mentions having raised her concerns earlier only to be dismissed and attacked, told that she was “bigoted” against polyamorous people, etc. -- and she is not the first one to have raised such issues either!
Ideally, I’d like to see an EA culture that doesn’t promote polyamory over monogamy or use it to pressure people into unwanted romantic or sexual relationships, and I think that can be accomplished without community organizations overstepping their bounds.
The article has “One commenter wrote that her post was ‘bigoted’ against polyamorous people.”
While Gopalakrishnan has deleted the post and the comments are no longer visible, my memory is that the comment describing her as saying something bigoted was reasonable?
While she deleted her cross-post, the original post is still up: Women and Effective Altruism.
The comment calling the post “bigoted” is listed on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/monica if you scroll back to comments from three months ago. It was:
Thank you for adding context, Jeff.
I was the original commenter and will add that I have never suggested that polyamory is for everyone or that it is inherently more rational or superior. I merely ask that people mind their own business.
I stand by my original claim that the post was bigoted.
To clarify, I do not think it is bigoted to think that polyamory is unwise or that it creates unhealthy dynamics (I disagree, but that’s a different matter). I do think it is bigoted to claim without solid evidence that people who practice it are more likely to commit assault. I also think that regardless of what dynamics it creates, it is wildly inappropriate to suggest that the mere prevalence of polyamory should in any way be”addressed by the community” (Kelsey explained this better than I could, so I will leave it at that).
I agree that this would be bigoted. But as far as I can tell, the linked post never claimed this?
All I can see is the OP recounting cases of her own experience with predatory behaviour within the EA community, where several people tried to pressure her into becoming polyamorous.
The post literally states that “this is not a criticism of polyamory itself”. I think the characterization of the post as bigoted is completely out of line.
I too have (consistently) seen this, so I am grateful to hear it being brought up publicly
I think that relevant context for backlash against Davis Kingsley’s anti-polyamory views is that he is an orthodox Catholic. His anti-polyamory views are part of a set of fairly extreme views about sexuality, including being opposed to homosexuality, masturbation, contraception, premarital sex, and any sexual intercourse other than PIV. He has also expressed the viewpoint that polyamory should be socially stigmatized and people should be pressured into monogamy. I believe that much, perhaps most, of the backlash he has faced is due to the overall set of his beliefs and that it was disingenuous for him not to include this context.
Obviously, I am opposed to sexual harassment and to pressuring people towards any relationship style.
[Note: comment edited to use Davis’s preferred terminology for his style of Catholicism. The first sentence originally said “traditional”. I’m sorry for using terms for his beliefs that he doesn’t identify with.]
Yeah, I was surprised to see Davis claiming in this comment section that he merely thinks we should combat inappropriate pressure to be polyamorous (which of course we should do!) and of course I want to create space for his views to evolve if they have evolved, but the views he is expressing here are not the views he has routinely espoused in the past, and “I’ve faced backlash for my views” without explaining what the views were does seem disingenuous to me.
I am a Catholic—though I would not call myself a traditionalist—and I believe what the Church teaches, including on matters of sexuality. Bringing my religion up in this way feels like a character attack that ought to be below the standards of the EA Forum though, and I’m grieved to see it.
My posts here are not saying “Polyamory is a sin, convert to Catholicism.” They are not saying “you should be pressured into monogamy.” Those things seem much more contentious than what I’m going for here. Instead, I am saying that there has long been in fact the exact opposite pressure in at least parts of the EA community, with people being pressured away from monogamy and towards polyamory, and this has had negative consequences.
I don’t think this is an issue that requires people to accept Catholic teaching on sexual morality to see as an issue—and indeed the TIME article critical of EA norms here certainly does not seem to have been written from a traditionalist Catholic perspective!
No, but if you say “polyamory has been a problem in the EA (and rationalist) communities for a long time” and people know that you do in fact believe polyamory to be immoral, it’s completely reasonable for them to respond as Kelsey did?
If you want people only to respond to the more limited “people should not be pressured into polyamory” perhaps you should say that explicitly?
Most people don’t know that and I wasn’t asserting it here—that would be much more controversial and much more of a debate than I wanted to have, and further one that I don’t think is very appropriate for the EA Forum! My hope is (was?) that even people who quite disagree with me—including many polyamorous people—would have common cause in opposing the pressure to be polyamorous that has been prevalent.
Imagine I wrote:
If someone, knowing my views on animals that are probably about as well known as your views on sexual morality, responded as if I was saying animal welfare doesn’t matter, I think that would be pretty reasonable. And if I didn’t want that interpretation I’d need to drop the “veganism has been a problem” bit and just talk about the particular bad dynamics I was opposed to.
It’s also worth noting that I am an adult convert to Catholicism and was involved with the Bay Area rationalist and EA community (and uncomfortable with the “polyamory pressure” in that community) for years before joining the Church, including some time when I didn’t take religion seriously much at all. Claiming or implying that I hold my views (or faced backlash against them) just because I’m Catholic does me a disservice.
I note also that others in the community who are not (as far as I know) Catholic have faced backlash for their views against polyamory or the related pressure, that as I understand it there are several who are afraid to speak up publicly even now, and so on.
As such, ozymandias’s comment feels like a really unfair way to summarize the situation.
I also think it’s quite reasonable for a religious person to give secular arguments for worldviews which also happen to be held in their religion.
For example, if Davis was making a humanistic argument for why people should take Giving What We Can’s 10% pledge, then accusing him of disingenuously trying to sneak in the “Catholic agenda” of giving a tithe to the poor doesn’t seem fair.
Or imagine if a Jain was giving a humanistic argument for why people should be vegetarian, and they were accused of disingenuously trying to sneak in the “Jain agenda” of animal welfare.
Clarifying for forum archeologists: “traditionalist” in Catholicism refers to people who consider the theological claims and organizational changes in Vatican II to be illegitimate, or at minimum taken too far. Catholics who consider the Church to have divinely guided authority over religious and moral truths will sometimes call themselves “orthodox” (lowercase) Catholics, to distinguish themselves from those who don’t accept this & from traditionalists who accept everything up to Vatican II.
So, ozymandias intended to indicate “Davis accepts the Vatican’s teaching on sin, hell, sexual mores, etc”. Davis objected to an adjective that implied he rejects Vatican II.
Minor side point, not to distract from what you’re actually trying to say:
Davis’s views were endorsed by most of the Western world for thousands of years, and continue to be endorsed by billions of people today, including a substantial portion of the Western population. Thus, I don’t think the word “extreme” is an accurate characterization of his views.