I think the article was fairly clear: “TIME is not naming the man, like others in this story, due to the request of one or more women who made accusations against them, and who wanted to shield themselves from possible retaliation”.
Please respect the wishes of women who face serious threats of professional and personal harm and have chosen to take steps to protect their identities.
The accusations are public and have already received substantial exposure. TIME itself seems to be leveraging this request for confidentiality in order to paint an inaccurate picture of what is actually going on and also making it substantially harder for people to orient towards the actual potential sources of risk in the surrounding community.
I don’t currently see a strong argument for not linking to evidence that I was easily able to piece together publicly, and also like, probably the accused can also figure out. The cost here is really only born by the people who lack context who I feel like are being substantially mislead by the absence of information here.
I’ll by-default repost the links and guess at identity of the person in-question in 24 hours unless some forum admin objects or someone makes a decent counterargument.
I personally found seeing a copy of the name and information (e.g., tweet) prior to its removal very clarifying for this particular instance (though other alarming instances still remain unresolved to me, and I hope they are similar). I suppose having the details without the name is still helpful, but I’m unsure. I find myself very conflicted when thinking through the request not to share this information—I want to be respectful, I don’t want to harm any victims, and I don’t want to be a unilateralist.
Reposting the concrete accusations: One of the accusations here seems very likely to be about Michael Vassar and one of his previous partners, who accused Michael publicly a few years ago about “[putting] his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping”.
Michael used to be somewhat central in the EA/Rationality community, but has not been for around 5-6 years, and also has been banned from the vast majority of large EA and Rationality-adjacent events and gathering spaces. He also very explicitly does not identify as “an EA” and indeed would consider himself more as an active enemy of the movement.
(Note: This comment is not an endorsement of the accusation representing the situation accurately. I haven’t looked into this, and I don’t really have much of any additional evidence on what happened here.)
Michael used to be somewhat central in the EA/Rationality community
Vassar was pretty central in the rationality community (president of MIRI, co-founder of Metamed, active LessWrong contributor, etc.), but not in the EA community. I don’t think he ever considered himself an EA, and was an early vocal critic of the movement.
Yes, Vassar was more than “somewhat central” in the rationality community. When I first visited SF in 2013 or so, he was one of the main figures in the rationalist tradition, especially as transmitted face-to-face. About as many people would recommend that you hear Michael talk as any other individual. Only 1 or 2 people were more notable. I remember hearing that in the earlier days, it was even more so, and that he was involved in travelling around to recruit the major early figures in the rationalist community from different parts of the US.
Although I can’t say for sure, I would also bet that there’s dozens of unofficial rationalist events (and a few unofficial EA events) that he attended in the last five years, given that he was literally hanging out in the miri/cfar reception area for hours per week, right until the time he was officially banned.
Whereas he was orders of magnitude less present in EA world (although his presence at all is still bad).
Whoever disagreed-voted my comment, could you explain why (feel free to PM)? I never ask for downvote or disagree-vote explanations, but I think I know the history of EA pretty well and I’m fairly confident that what I say above is accurate, so your explanation will either reveal that you are mistaken or cause a significant and valuable update for me.
ETA: Noe that the above was written when the disagree-vote count was negative.
Update: Someone on community health asked me to wait at least until Monday since they are trying to think it through and are somewhat under water right now. Seems reasonable to me, so I’ll wait.
It’s fine to link to information which is already easily publicly available. (I.e. don’t link to a Facebook post from seven years ago that they accidentally set to be public, but it’s okay to link to a very public Twitter thread.)
We may ask you to rot13 encrypt names so that your comment is not discoverable via search engine while still being useful to people reading this post
Don’t share addresses, contact info, or other information that could be used to harass someone, and don’t incite harassment
Note: this is a statement about what violates Forum norms, not what is ethical. There might be compelling reasons not to post this even if it doesn’t technically violate our rules.
Community health request, different from the moderation decision on whether this is allowed: The person whose Twitter thread has indicated elsewhere that she doesn’t think the accused should be identified, because that could reveal information about other women in the piece. The community health team is requesting that people not link to her Twitter thread.
If people are going to be allowed to use names in a post or comment pertaining to someone’s private life, there should be at least a norm/rule of rot13′ing those names upfront rather than having them up in cleartext unless and until a mod notices it.
Good thought, I very much prefer norms that don’t require moderators to notice things.
It’s hard to make a “bright line” rule here though. Maybe something like:
If you are sharing information about a specific individual which you believe they would not want associated with them, consider rot13ing the information so it’s not discoverable via search engine
?
(This is offhand and coming just from me, I suspect other moderators might have different opinions.)
Maybe the bright line rule is that if another Forum user asks you to rot13 a name in a discussion that even arguably implicates the principle of respect for the named person’s private life, you are expected to do so and can appeal to the mods if you think that request was inappropriate.
I think it’s hard to avoid a unilateralist problem either way on this one until mods can weigh in. Since I think the harm of erroneous rot13 is low, I would prefer to give a temporary veto to a single user who thinks rot13 is necessary than allowing a single user to decide that cleartext is appropriate.
I expect there would be few if any unreasonable rot13 requests, and thus very few appeals.
I would personally prefer for you/us not to publicly write the name, to set a very clear precedent that we respect these kinds of requests (unless there is a very strong reason not to), and because the relevant information (i.e. the individual has been banned from EA events for years, and is not currently a fan of EA) has been written in other comments.
I have seen confidentiality requests weaponized many time (indeed, it is one of the most common ways I’ve seen people end up in abusive situations), and as such I desperately don’t want us to have a norm of always erring on the side of confidentiality and heavily punishing people who didn’t even receive a direct request for confidentiality but are just sharing information they could figure out from publicly available information.
I’ll by-default post repost the links and guess at identity of the person in-question in 24 hours unless some forum admin objects or someone makes a decent counterargument.
I think the best counterargument would probably be something like: posting links and guessing the identity would deter other survivors from coming forwards. I feel like my model of what deters survivors from coming forwards is pretty bad, and I would want to read the literature on this (hopefully there is a high-quality literature?)
I’m pretty confused about what’s going on here. The person who made this accusation made it on Twitter under their real name using an unlocked account, and the accusation remains public to date. Is the concern here that the accused did not previously know of the accusation against them, but would be made aware of it by this discussion?
(I’m not sure whether I’d want them named in absence of a request to the contrary, but I don’t understand the implied threat model and think other explanations for the request are plausible, given the whole “public tweet” thing.)
If a journalist says that one or more of their sources asked that a name be removed to prevent possible retaliation, they mean exactly what they said: one or more of their sources asked that the name be removed to prevent possible retaliation.
I will not speculate as to who made this request or why. Revealing the identities of vulnerable people who directly asked not to be named is wrong. It is a major reason why women are hesitant to speak publicly about harassment and abuse. And one or more of the women involved has directly requested that their identity not be revealed.
I don’t need you to understand why revealing the identities of sources is wrong. Just don’t do it.
I’m not discussing naming the accuser, but the accused.
I do not think we have an obligation to avoid discussing object-level details of sexual assault claims when those claims have already been made publicly, if it seems like discussing them would otherwise be useful.
[EDIT: the article says more than this; see David’s response]
The article has “many of them asked that their alleged abusers not be named”. The article doesn’t name any of the alleged abusers, though, which makes me think the author decided to apply this even in cases where they weren’t asked to do so by the interviewees?
I’m this case we have someone who explicitly made the situation public on Twitter, including the name of their abuser. That seems like much stronger information about what they’re ok being public than what we have from the article?
No, the article has, directly after the passage in question, “TIME is not naming the man, like others in this story, due to the request of one or more women who made accusations against them, and who wanted to shield themselves from possible retaliation.”.
You cannot know why that line was written, and you will not know why until you have done more harm than you ever intended to. If the women in question want their words to be shared on this forum, they will share them. That is not a decision for you to make.
Thanks for pointing out that parenthetical; I’d forgotten that it was repeated and should have checked before writing above.
I’m still very confused on how to go from “doesn’t want the name included in Time” and “does want the name included in Twitter” to whether we should include the name in discussions on the EA Forum.
(Ex: I think it’s ok that I linked to the non-Forum original of a post that someone had deleted from the Forum, but I think maybe your argument here would say that I should be respecting their desire not to have it discussed on the Forum?)
I think it is much safer to mention someone who was named in the article than someone who wasn’t. Putting your name in TIME magazine isn’t a blanket invitation to discuss everything you have ever said or done, but redacting a name from TIME magazine is a strong request not to discuss the name or related details.
Let’s start with the basics and respect the request of women who asked that they and others not be named.
I think the article was fairly clear: “TIME is not naming the man, like others in this story, due to the request of one or more women who made accusations against them, and who wanted to shield themselves from possible retaliation”.
Please respect the wishes of women who face serious threats of professional and personal harm and have chosen to take steps to protect their identities.
The accusations are public and have already received substantial exposure. TIME itself seems to be leveraging this request for confidentiality in order to paint an inaccurate picture of what is actually going on and also making it substantially harder for people to orient towards the actual potential sources of risk in the surrounding community.
I don’t currently see a strong argument for not linking to evidence that I was easily able to piece together publicly, and also like, probably the accused can also figure out. The cost here is really only born by the people who lack context who I feel like are being substantially mislead by the absence of information here.
I’ll by-default repost the links and guess at identity of the person in-question in 24 hours unless some forum admin objects or someone makes a decent counterargument.
I personally found seeing a copy of the name and information (e.g., tweet) prior to its removal very clarifying for this particular instance (though other alarming instances still remain unresolved to me, and I hope they are similar). I suppose having the details without the name is still helpful, but I’m unsure. I find myself very conflicted when thinking through the request not to share this information—I want to be respectful, I don’t want to harm any victims, and I don’t want to be a unilateralist.
Reposting the concrete accusations: One of the accusations here seems very likely to be about Michael Vassar and one of his previous partners, who accused Michael publicly a few years ago about “[putting] his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping”.
Michael used to be somewhat central in the EA/Rationality community, but has not been for around 5-6 years, and also has been banned from the vast majority of large EA and Rationality-adjacent events and gathering spaces. He also very explicitly does not identify as “an EA” and indeed would consider himself more as an active enemy of the movement.
(Note: This comment is not an endorsement of the accusation representing the situation accurately. I haven’t looked into this, and I don’t really have much of any additional evidence on what happened here.)
Vassar was pretty central in the rationality community (president of MIRI, co-founder of Metamed, active LessWrong contributor, etc.), but not in the EA community. I don’t think he ever considered himself an EA, and was an early vocal critic of the movement.
Yes, Vassar was more than “somewhat central” in the rationality community. When I first visited SF in 2013 or so, he was one of the main figures in the rationalist tradition, especially as transmitted face-to-face. About as many people would recommend that you hear Michael talk as any other individual. Only 1 or 2 people were more notable. I remember hearing that in the earlier days, it was even more so, and that he was involved in travelling around to recruit the major early figures in the rationalist community from different parts of the US.
Although I can’t say for sure, I would also bet that there’s dozens of unofficial rationalist events (and a few unofficial EA events) that he attended in the last five years, given that he was literally hanging out in the miri/cfar reception area for hours per week, right until the time he was officially banned.
Whereas he was orders of magnitude less present in EA world (although his presence at all is still bad).
Whoever disagreed-voted my comment, could you explain why (feel free to PM)? I never ask for downvote or disagree-vote explanations, but I think I know the history of EA pretty well and I’m fairly confident that what I say above is accurate, so your explanation will either reveal that you are mistaken or cause a significant and valuable update for me.
ETA: Noe that the above was written when the disagree-vote count was negative.
Update: Someone on community health asked me to wait at least until Monday since they are trying to think it through and are somewhat under water right now. Seems reasonable to me, so I’ll wait.
Mod here.
It’s fine to link to information which is already easily publicly available. (I.e. don’t link to a Facebook post from seven years ago that they accidentally set to be public, but it’s okay to link to a very public Twitter thread.)
We may ask you to rot13 encrypt names so that your comment is not discoverable via search engine while still being useful to people reading this post
Don’t share addresses, contact info, or other information that could be used to harass someone, and don’t incite harassment
See more on our norms here.
Note: this is a statement about what violates Forum norms, not what is ethical. There might be compelling reasons not to post this even if it doesn’t technically violate our rules.
Community health request, different from the moderation decision on whether this is allowed:
The person whose Twitter thread has indicated elsewhere that she doesn’t think the accused should be identified, because that could reveal information about other women in the piece. The community health team is requesting that people not link to her Twitter thread.
If people are going to be allowed to use names in a post or comment pertaining to someone’s private life, there should be at least a norm/rule of rot13′ing those names upfront rather than having them up in cleartext unless and until a mod notices it.
Good thought, I very much prefer norms that don’t require moderators to notice things.
It’s hard to make a “bright line” rule here though. Maybe something like:
?
(This is offhand and coming just from me, I suspect other moderators might have different opinions.)
Maybe the bright line rule is that if another Forum user asks you to rot13 a name in a discussion that even arguably implicates the principle of respect for the named person’s private life, you are expected to do so and can appeal to the mods if you think that request was inappropriate.
I think it’s hard to avoid a unilateralist problem either way on this one until mods can weigh in. Since I think the harm of erroneous rot13 is low, I would prefer to give a temporary veto to a single user who thinks rot13 is necessary than allowing a single user to decide that cleartext is appropriate.
I expect there would be few if any unreasonable rot13 requests, and thus very few appeals.
I would personally prefer for you/us not to publicly write the name, to set a very clear precedent that we respect these kinds of requests (unless there is a very strong reason not to), and because the relevant information (i.e. the individual has been banned from EA events for years, and is not currently a fan of EA) has been written in other comments.
Written in a personal capacity, not as a mod
I have seen confidentiality requests weaponized many time (indeed, it is one of the most common ways I’ve seen people end up in abusive situations), and as such I desperately don’t want us to have a norm of always erring on the side of confidentiality and heavily punishing people who didn’t even receive a direct request for confidentiality but are just sharing information they could figure out from publicly available information.
I think the best counterargument would probably be something like: posting links and guessing the identity would deter other survivors from coming forwards. I feel like my model of what deters survivors from coming forwards is pretty bad, and I would want to read the literature on this (hopefully there is a high-quality literature?)
I’m pretty confused about what’s going on here. The person who made this accusation made it on Twitter under their real name using an unlocked account, and the accusation remains public to date. Is the concern here that the accused did not previously know of the accusation against them, but would be made aware of it by this discussion?
(I’m not sure whether I’d want them named in absence of a request to the contrary, but I don’t understand the implied threat model and think other explanations for the request are plausible, given the whole “public tweet” thing.)
If a journalist says that one or more of their sources asked that a name be removed to prevent possible retaliation, they mean exactly what they said: one or more of their sources asked that the name be removed to prevent possible retaliation.
I will not speculate as to who made this request or why. Revealing the identities of vulnerable people who directly asked not to be named is wrong. It is a major reason why women are hesitant to speak publicly about harassment and abuse. And one or more of the women involved has directly requested that their identity not be revealed.
I don’t need you to understand why revealing the identities of sources is wrong. Just don’t do it.
I’m not discussing naming the accuser, but the accused.
I do not think we have an obligation to avoid discussing object-level details of sexual assault claims when those claims have already been made publicly, if it seems like discussing them would otherwise be useful.
One of more of the article’s sources specifically requested that this name not be given. Take it down.
I haven’t included any names in any of my comments.
[EDIT: the article says more than this; see David’s response]
The article has “many of them asked that their alleged abusers not be named”. The article doesn’t name any of the alleged abusers, though, which makes me think the author decided to apply this even in cases where they weren’t asked to do so by the interviewees?
I’m this case we have someone who explicitly made the situation public on Twitter, including the name of their abuser. That seems like much stronger information about what they’re ok being public than what we have from the article?
No, the article has, directly after the passage in question, “TIME is not naming the man, like others in this story, due to the request of one or more women who made accusations against them, and who wanted to shield themselves from possible retaliation.”.
You cannot know why that line was written, and you will not know why until you have done more harm than you ever intended to. If the women in question want their words to be shared on this forum, they will share them. That is not a decision for you to make.
Thanks for pointing out that parenthetical; I’d forgotten that it was repeated and should have checked before writing above.
I’m still very confused on how to go from “doesn’t want the name included in Time” and “does want the name included in Twitter” to whether we should include the name in discussions on the EA Forum.
(Ex: I think it’s ok that I linked to the non-Forum original of a post that someone had deleted from the Forum, but I think maybe your argument here would say that I should be respecting their desire not to have it discussed on the Forum?)
I think it is much safer to mention someone who was named in the article than someone who wasn’t. Putting your name in TIME magazine isn’t a blanket invitation to discuss everything you have ever said or done, but redacting a name from TIME magazine is a strong request not to discuss the name or related details.
Let’s start with the basics and respect the request of women who asked that they and others not be named.
That’s a fair point — I’ve removed the name and Twitter link.
Thank you! :).