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
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