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.”
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.
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.
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 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).
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.)
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).
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.
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?
What should I tell them? “I promise this is not an issue in our local community”?
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.
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 am basically the center of a whisper network, and have a reputation amongst survivors for being “good” at this.
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.
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.
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 think education/training helps in general—eg, I think I’m seeing a lot of fear of false accusations or men’s lives being ruined. Getting real information about the reality of rape, how it effect survivors, how common it is...all helps.
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 :-(
Women don’t want to feel that they were violated, we’re not chomping at the bit to call misunderstandings rape.
This is useful to hear, thanks.
I’m sorry so much of your mental real estate is taken up by what I believe to be an irrational fear, but given how much I personally suffered...it’s hard for me to be sympathetic.
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.
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.
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.