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.
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.