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
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)
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)