Another woman, who dated the same man several years earlier in a polyamorous relationship, alleges that he had once attempted to put his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping.
This rang a bell for me, and I was able to find an old Twitter thread (link removed on David’s request) naming the man in question. At least, all the details seem to match.
I’m pretty sure that the man in question (name removed on David’s request) has been banned from official EA events for many years. I remember an anecdote about him showing up without a ticket at EAG in the past and being asked to leave. As far as I know, the ban is because he has a long history of harassment with at least some assault mixed in.
I don’t know who introduced him to Sonia Joseph, but if she’d mentioned him to the people I know in EA, I think the average reaction would have been “oh god, don’t”. I guess there are still bubbles I’m not a part of where he’s seen as a “prominent man in the field”, though I haven’t heard anything about actual work from him in many years.
Anyway, while it sounds like many people mentioned in this article behaved very badly, it also seems possible that the incidents CEA knew about led to reasonable action from CEA.
I don’t remember a single mention in the article of someone being banned from official events, even though CEA has presumably done this for quite a few people (given that Wise “fielded roughly 20 complaints per year” for seven years). It’s surprising to me that the author wouldn’t have discovered this practice after talking to Wise.
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Anyway, it sounds like many people mentioned in this article did terrible things. I really hope that whatever “influential figure” had an interviewee stay at his home is no longer in a position of responsibility — or that, if the incident was never reported, they can be found and disciplined. And I hope that Aurora Quinn-Elmore, if this depiction of her is accurate, sees her mediation work dry up.
But I sympathize with CEA if the best tools they have, a central database of accusations and control over who gets to attend official events, were left out of the article despite getting regular use.
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I’ve hung around EA for many years, I’m not very active in any in-person EA social scene, but my impression is that the environment has a lot of similarities to the college I attended:
Most people there are smart and reasonably kind — at least no worse than people in other places (in EA, I see more people who are conspicuously morally excellent, but it’s not clear how much higher the “average” is).
There are thousands of people there, which means that some of them do terrible things, anywhere on the spectrum from “creepy conversation” to “assault”.
Some types of bad actors are more common at the college than in other spaces — like the ones who try to philosophize their way into someone’s pants. Others seem to be less common — like violent rapists or misogynists who claim that their god gave them authority over women.
Some of the bad actors stick around because no one reports them. Others are reported and face various consequences. Some of those consequences are mild enough not to remove them from the space (temporary suspension, forced sensitivity training). Others are as severe as the college can pull off (expulsion, firing).
But even the severe consequences can’t solve the problem if the bad actor is sufficiently determined. Someone can be expelled from college but rent a house on campus. A professor can leave the city but invite former students to sleep with them elsewhere with promises of knowledge or networking.
My college didn’t handle every situation well, and a few were handled quite badly.* But it would seem weird to describe the college as having a “toxic culture of sexual harassment and abuse”. In the end, it was a space like other spaces, trying to manage bad actors despite limited power to punish them or to manage the surrounding social dynamics (people will gossip and take sides anywhere you go).
I wouldn’t tell someone to stay away from my college because of the bad actors there, and I wouldn’t tell someone to avoid EA. There’s a huge amount of good in both places.
* The comparison falters here. I can’t say for sure that CEA handled any specific situation badly, because I know less about EA stuff than I did the stuff at my college.
And I hope that Aurora Quinn-Elmore, if this depiction of her is accurate, sees her mediation work dry up.
For what it’s worth, prior to reading this article, I knew Aurora by reputation as someone who was aggressively feminist. I remember having a conversation with a [edit: conservative-leaning] woman at a party who told me something like: “I tried to have a discussion with Aurora about consent, and I wasn’t able to get through to her. You might want to avoid kissing her or anything like that, to stay on the safe side.”
Needless to say, this leaves me feeling fairly confused about what’s actually going on.
I guess I don’t even really understand her relevance. Fully a third of the TIME article is about her mediation in an EA house, and makes her bad behaviour out to be emblematic of problems at the core of EA, but she’s… just some random person, right?
From some online digging: she’s listed as an attendee at EA Global 2016. She appeared on the Clearer Thinking podcast in 2021. She’s never posted on the EA Forum or LessWrong, at least not under her own name that I can find. Her relationship with EA seems at the most to be very, very slight. Am I missing something about her relevance in this whole thing?
I have had a terrible mediation experience with her where she was friends with the other party and not friends with me. This tracks with the Time Mag reporting where she did a mediation while dating one of the parties. Do not let her mediate anything. I saw once that she specializes in or was looking to help survivors of sexual assault. Stay away from this person.
This tracks with the Time Mag reporting where she did a mediation while dating one of the parties.
Maybe? The article has ” Quinn-Elmore told TIME, adding that although she spoke to both parties and recommended a path forward, she didnt consider this to be an official mediation.”
I think that sometimes when someone has a good experience with a mediator they doubt that it’s possible for other people to have bad experiences. Also Aurora is actually on this forum and messaged me to ask if I wanted to do a session so she can listen to the impact she’s had on me and I absolutely do not. If you mention that you had a negative experience with her, she might message you too, so watch out.
Yup, and specifically in Aurora’s case, low ability to empathize with others who aren’t her friends, and low ability to recognize that she should not be mediating a situation where she’s friends or dating one of the parties and not close with the other.
Well if everyone who receives it shares it with their friends (as instructed), and those friends share it with their friends (as instructed), and those friends… it will become a fully public document before long.
I do not think that bans on a person attending EA events or conferences necessarily should be interpreted as proof that that person was attending them before the ban.
I would expect that in some cases, a person reports “hey, this person acted violently towards me; I have no idea whether they might apply to attend this event, but I want the community health team to know about this so that, should they ever apply, they would be refused.”
Furthermore, lots of people might attend a professional conference who don’t identify with an associated movement or community, and CEA hosts lots of professional events many of which specifically try to attract non-EAs with relevant expertise; it’s not only environmentalists who attend climate change conferences, or only animal rights activists who attend events on the future of agriculture and food! It would be bizarre to me to claim it was proof someone was an environmentalist that they’d been banned from a conference on climate change.
More generally, it seems like a situation where there are bad actors who have been systematically banned from all EA events but who are still harming people at other, non-EA events is very different (in terms of what women should do for our safety) than a situation where bad actors are attending EA events, so I think it’s important for our safety to be clear about which of those situations is what’s happening.
writing “please do not post this in a public place” on the document seems like a good way to idiotproof this sort of thing? although I suppose it makes it slightly harder to tell whether it has been compromised
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.
The alleged perpetrator seems to be at least tolerated by some influential people. About Two years ago Anna Salomon wrote:
(1) X seems to me to precipitate psychotic episodes in his interlocutors surprisingly often, to come closer to advocating physical violence than I would like, and to have conversational patterns that often disorient his interlocutors and leave them believing different things while talking to X than they do a bit later.
(2) I don’t have overall advice that people ought to avoid X, in spite of (1), because it now seems to me that he is trying to help himself and others toward truth, and I think we’re bottlenecked on that enough that I could easily imagine (2) overshadowing (1) for individuals who are in a robust place (e.g., who don’t feel like they are trapped or “have to” talk to a person or do a thing) and who are choosing who they want to talk to. (There were parts of X’s conversational patterns that I was interpreting as less truth-conducive a couple years ago than I am now. I now think that this was partly because I was overanchored on the (then-recent) example of Brent, as well as because I didn’t understand part of how he was doing it, but it is possible that it is current-me who is wrong.) (As one example of a consideration that moved me here: a friend of mine whose epistemics I trust, and who has known X for a long time, said that she usually in the long-run ended up agreeing with her while-in-the-conversation self, and not with her after-she-left-the-conversation self.)
Also I was a bit discomfited when my previous LW comment was later cited by folks who weren’t all that LW-y in their conversational patterns as a general “denouncement” of X, although I should probably have predicted this, so, that’s another reason I’d like to try to publicly state my revised views. To be clear, I do not currently wish to “denounce” X, and I don’t even think that’s what I was trying to do last time, although I think the fault was mostly mine that some people read my previous comment as a general denouncement.
Also, to be clear, what I am saying here is just that on the strength of my own evidence (which is not all evidence), (1) and (2) seem true to me. I am not at all trying to be a court here, or to evaluate any objections anyone else may have to X, or to claim that there are no valid objections someone else might have, or anything like that. Just to share my own revised impression from my own limited first-hand observations.
One year ago she wrote:
I hereby apologize for the role I played in X’s ostracism from the community, which AFAICT was both unjust and harmful to both the community and X. There’s more to say here, and I don’t yet know how to say it well. But the shortest version is that in the years leading up to my original comment X was criticizing me and many in the rationality and EA communities intensely, and, despite our alleged desire to aspire to rationality, I and I think many others did not like having our political foundations criticized/eroded, nor did I and I think various others like having the story I told myself to keep stably “doing my work” criticized/eroded. This, despite the fact that attempting to share reasoning and disagreements is in fact a furthering of our alleged goals and our alleged culture. The specific voiced accusations about X were not “but he keeps criticizing us and hurting our feelings and/or our political support” — and nevertheless I’m sure this was part of what led to me making the comment I made above (though it was not my conscious reason), and I’m sure it led to some of the rest of the ostracism he experienced as well. This isn’t the whole of the story, but it ought to have been disclosed clearly in the same way that conflicts of interest ought to be disclosed clearly. And, separately but relatedly, it is my current view that it would be all things considered much better to have X around talking to people in these communities, though this will bring friction.
There’s broader context I don’t know how to discuss well, which I’ll at least discuss poorly:
Should the aspiring rationality community, or any community, attempt to protect its adult members from misleading reasoning, allegedly manipulative conversational tactics, etc., via cautioning them not to talk to some people? My view at the time of my original (Feb 2019) comment was “yes”. My current view is more or less “heck no!”; protecting people from allegedly manipulative tactics, or allegedly misleading arguments, is good — but it should be done via sharing additional info, not via discouraging people from encountering info/conversations. The reason is that more info tends to be broadly helpful (and this is a relatively fool-resistant heuristic even if implemented by people who are deluded in various ways), and trusting who can figure out who ought to restrict their info-intake how seems like a doomed endeavor (and does not degrade gracefully with deludedness/corruption in the leadership). (Watching the CDC on covid helped drive this home for me. Belatedly noticing how much something-like-doublethink I had in my original beliefs about X and related matters also helped drive this home for me.)
Should some organizations/people within the rationality and EA communities create simplified narratives that allow many people to pull in the same direction, to feel good about each others’ donations to the same organizations, etc.? My view at the time of my original (Feb 2019) comment was “yes”; my current view is “no — and especially not via implicit or explicit pressures to restrict information-flow.” Reasons for updates same as above.
It is nevertheless the case that X has had a tendency to e.g. yell rather more than I would like. For an aspiring rationality community’s general “who is worth ever talking to?” list, this ought to matter much less than the above. Insofar as a given person is trying to create contexts where people reliably don’t yell or something, they’ll want to do whatever they want to do; but insofar as we’re creating a community-wide include/exclude list (as in e.g. this comment on whether to let X speak at SSC meetups), it is my opinion that X ought to be on the “include” list.
Thoughts/comments welcome, and probably helpful for getting to shared accurate pictures about any of what’s above.
While I don’t really disagree, I think it’s worth pointing out that Anna here is talking about pretty different behaviors (precipitating psychotic episodes, approaching advocating physical violence, misleading reasoning, yelling) than we’re talking about here (sexual abuse).
Would be extremely surprising if she didn’t know about the sexual abuse allegations. They are very well known among her social circle. Despite this she has chosen to defend the fellow.
My interpretation of Anna was that if she thought there were credible allegations she would have included them in her long list of potentially undesirable actions?
From the article:
This rang a bell for me, and I was able to find an old Twitter thread (link removed on David’s request) naming the man in question. At least, all the details seem to match.
I’m pretty sure that the man in question (name removed on David’s request) has been banned from official EA events for many years. I remember an anecdote about him showing up without a ticket at EAG in the past and being asked to leave. As far as I know, the ban is because he has a long history of harassment with at least some assault mixed in.
I don’t know who introduced him to Sonia Joseph, but if she’d mentioned him to the people I know in EA, I think the average reaction would have been “oh god, don’t”. I guess there are still bubbles I’m not a part of where he’s seen as a “prominent man in the field”, though I haven’t heard anything about actual work from him in many years.
Anyway, while it sounds like many people mentioned in this article behaved very badly, it also seems possible that the incidents CEA knew about led to reasonable action from CEA.
I don’t remember a single mention in the article of someone being banned from official events, even though CEA has presumably done this for quite a few people (given that Wise “fielded roughly 20 complaints per year” for seven years). It’s surprising to me that the author wouldn’t have discovered this practice after talking to Wise.
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Anyway, it sounds like many people mentioned in this article did terrible things. I really hope that whatever “influential figure” had an interviewee stay at his home is no longer in a position of responsibility — or that, if the incident was never reported, they can be found and disciplined. And I hope that Aurora Quinn-Elmore, if this depiction of her is accurate, sees her mediation work dry up.
But I sympathize with CEA if the best tools they have, a central database of accusations and control over who gets to attend official events, were left out of the article despite getting regular use.
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I’ve hung around EA for many years, I’m not very active in any in-person EA social scene, but my impression is that the environment has a lot of similarities to the college I attended:
Most people there are smart and reasonably kind — at least no worse than people in other places (in EA, I see more people who are conspicuously morally excellent, but it’s not clear how much higher the “average” is).
There are thousands of people there, which means that some of them do terrible things, anywhere on the spectrum from “creepy conversation” to “assault”.
Some types of bad actors are more common at the college than in other spaces — like the ones who try to philosophize their way into someone’s pants. Others seem to be less common — like violent rapists or misogynists who claim that their god gave them authority over women.
Some of the bad actors stick around because no one reports them. Others are reported and face various consequences. Some of those consequences are mild enough not to remove them from the space (temporary suspension, forced sensitivity training). Others are as severe as the college can pull off (expulsion, firing).
But even the severe consequences can’t solve the problem if the bad actor is sufficiently determined. Someone can be expelled from college but rent a house on campus. A professor can leave the city but invite former students to sleep with them elsewhere with promises of knowledge or networking.
My college didn’t handle every situation well, and a few were handled quite badly.* But it would seem weird to describe the college as having a “toxic culture of sexual harassment and abuse”. In the end, it was a space like other spaces, trying to manage bad actors despite limited power to punish them or to manage the surrounding social dynamics (people will gossip and take sides anywhere you go).
I wouldn’t tell someone to stay away from my college because of the bad actors there, and I wouldn’t tell someone to avoid EA. There’s a huge amount of good in both places.
* The comparison falters here. I can’t say for sure that CEA handled any specific situation badly, because I know less about EA stuff than I did the stuff at my college.
They are also is not a fan of EA,[1] which would make them an even odder example for this article, if that is indeed who they are referring to.
(Previous version cited evidence; removing as per David’s suggestion)
I’ve removed the name of the alleged person and the Twitter link as a result of David’s comment. I’d recommend you do the same here.
For what it’s worth, prior to reading this article, I knew Aurora by reputation as someone who was aggressively feminist. I remember having a conversation with a [edit: conservative-leaning] woman at a party who told me something like: “I tried to have a discussion with Aurora about consent, and I wasn’t able to get through to her. You might want to avoid kissing her or anything like that, to stay on the safe side.”
Needless to say, this leaves me feeling fairly confused about what’s actually going on.
I guess I don’t even really understand her relevance. Fully a third of the TIME article is about her mediation in an EA house, and makes her bad behaviour out to be emblematic of problems at the core of EA, but she’s… just some random person, right?
From some online digging: she’s listed as an attendee at EA Global 2016. She appeared on the Clearer Thinking podcast in 2021. She’s never posted on the EA Forum or LessWrong, at least not under her own name that I can find. Her relationship with EA seems at the most to be very, very slight. Am I missing something about her relevance in this whole thing?
I have had a terrible mediation experience with her where she was friends with the other party and not friends with me. This tracks with the Time Mag reporting where she did a mediation while dating one of the parties. Do not let her mediate anything. I saw once that she specializes in or was looking to help survivors of sexual assault. Stay away from this person.
Maybe? The article has ” Quinn-Elmore told TIME, adding that although she spoke to both parties and recommended a path forward, she didnt consider this to be an official mediation.”
This comment is currently at −6 agreement votes. Does anyone want to explain to me why this is so?
I think that sometimes when someone has a good experience with a mediator they doubt that it’s possible for other people to have bad experiences. Also Aurora is actually on this forum and messaged me to ask if I wanted to do a session so she can listen to the impact she’s had on me and I absolutely do not. If you mention that you had a negative experience with her, she might message you too, so watch out.
I suppose “low ability to empathize with the perspectives of others” could be a unifying thread here.
[edit: or maybe annoying everyone equally shows you’re doing a good job?]
Yup, and specifically in Aurora’s case, low ability to empathize with others who aren’t her friends, and low ability to recognize that she should not be mediating a situation where she’s friends or dating one of the parties and not close with the other.
Good point. Removed, as requested.
Per David’s comment, I recommend removing this name and the linked spreadsheet.
Why was this comment downvoted?
The document literally says:
Being able to see the document is useful to people because it proves that the perpetrator was not actually an EA.
I interpret that as a request to share privately within friend groups, not publicly in a community like this?
Well if everyone who receives it shares it with their friends (as instructed), and those friends share it with their friends (as instructed), and those friends… it will become a fully public document before long.
I do not think that bans on a person attending EA events or conferences necessarily should be interpreted as proof that that person was attending them before the ban.
I would expect that in some cases, a person reports “hey, this person acted violently towards me; I have no idea whether they might apply to attend this event, but I want the community health team to know about this so that, should they ever apply, they would be refused.”
Furthermore, lots of people might attend a professional conference who don’t identify with an associated movement or community, and CEA hosts lots of professional events many of which specifically try to attract non-EAs with relevant expertise; it’s not only environmentalists who attend climate change conferences, or only animal rights activists who attend events on the future of agriculture and food! It would be bizarre to me to claim it was proof someone was an environmentalist that they’d been banned from a conference on climate change.
More generally, it seems like a situation where there are bad actors who have been systematically banned from all EA events but who are still harming people at other, non-EA events is very different (in terms of what women should do for our safety) than a situation where bad actors are attending EA events, so I think it’s important for our safety to be clear about which of those situations is what’s happening.
writing “please do not post this in a public place” on the document seems like a good way to idiotproof this sort of thing? although I suppose it makes it slightly harder to tell whether it has been compromised
ok as long as some as there is some story behind this, it’d be a little silly if I were the first person to point out the obvious :P
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! :).
The alleged perpetrator seems to be at least tolerated by some influential people. About Two years ago Anna Salomon wrote:
One year ago she wrote:
While I don’t really disagree, I think it’s worth pointing out that Anna here is talking about pretty different behaviors (precipitating psychotic episodes, approaching advocating physical violence, misleading reasoning, yelling) than we’re talking about here (sexual abuse).
Would be extremely surprising if she didn’t know about the sexual abuse allegations. They are very well known among her social circle. Despite this she has chosen to defend the fellow.
My interpretation of Anna was that if she thought there were credible allegations she would have included them in her long list of potentially undesirable actions?
I doubt she agrees with the accusations but I assume she knows they exist.
Probably important nitpick: The last bit of your first quoted paragraph misses a redaction.
Given what I’ve heard of this person, I’m really surprised and dismayed by the tolerance of this person by some, and wish they wouldn’t do that.
Pm’d you
The comments in question seem to be
1) [redacted]
2) [redacted]
X is [redacted]
(I am posting this because I agree with the reasoning here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=tQfPCeSGrhonCtJ4g )
I have redacted this comment based on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=9hdQzfxNZ9K4cBCGG , please lets give the teams a few days