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
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 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.
Scott Alexander said “0.3% chance of false accusation”, I calculated 1⁄4000 ( This number is based on the FBI UCR study: 93,000 reported rapes yearly X (.97 X .03 X .2 chance of falsely naming a man) X 75 years / 160000000 men = 0.025% or 1 in 4000 chance of being falsely accused of rape. FBI: UCR. “2015 Crime in the United States.” FBI. Accessed July 23, 2022. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/rape)) Either way, still rare.
… Men have a 1 in 4,000 or 0.025% (or 0.3%, if we use Scott Alexander’s number) chance of being falsely accused.
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:
So greater than 0.3% of men get falsely accused of rape sometime in their lives, and the most likely number is probably around 3%.
This is over 100x higher than your number. And it’s not even his upper bound, which is significantly higher still.
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.
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.