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.
“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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.