What do you think of the idea to do a broad anonymous survey of women in EA regarding their experiences related to romantic and sexual behaviour in EA settings?
I imagine it could provide some useful information like
In what EA sub-communities it’s more or less prevalent (which would help with prioritizing interventions and potentially learning from sub-communities that might do a good job preventing issues)
If women have more or fewer bad experiences related to sexual and romantic advances in EA settings compared to similar non-EA settings
If women know who they can reach out to, and feel comfortable reaching out to those places
Potential difficulties
Identifying and reaching all women with relevant experiences might be difficult?
I assume there are some online groups for women in EA, and maybe orgs like Magnify Mentoring have a good network to share something like this?
Maybe one could ask respondents to share the survey with other women who they think have had relevant experiences?
[EDIT: This project has been passed on to the CEA Community Heath Team, and folded in to a much larger investigation which will gather and analyze data from many other sources in addition to a survey. Thank you to all who messaged me questions and thoughts. All of this (plus all I have done and thoughts I have) have been passed on to Catherine Low who is orchestrating the project. You can read her announcement, posted Feb 14th, here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mEkRrDweNSdNdrmvx/plans-for-investigating-and-improving-the-experience-of ]
FYI for anyone reading this and thinking about taking on this project, I’m moving forward with a similar survey idea today.
It’s been percolating in my mind since November, so I think it might take me less time than many others. But please DM me if you want to help or have ideas you think I may miss!
To add to MaxRa’s ‘wishlist’, I would add questions about location and other demographic, to see if the patterns we’ve been discussing elsewhere in this thread (eg the Bay area being particularly problematic) are real.
I imagine many people would be very interested in the results of this survey. As probably not many people saw your comment here, I could imagine it being worth to share your plans as a stand-alone post and to wait with sharing it widely until maybe end of week, as I imagine many people have good ideas to share here and would be excited about helping make the survey as informative as possible.
[Edit: The list of stakeholders/beta-testers has grown quite a lot so it might take over a week from today (Tuesday Feb 6) to get it out and finish all the review I want. I’m likely to make a forum post on this survey in a day or two, to set expectations on timing and let the community know things are being done. The remainder of this comment has been updated for what’s true today]
Thanks! Well I’d rather not use the forum front-page to promote a work-in-progress. The survey is already looking pretty long, and the survey is for all EAs of all genders so it will be quite a community-wide effort already. I don’t want to use people’s potentially limited energy for this topic by making them read a pre-post.
FWIW I also posted in the Women and Non-Binary EA Facebook group, which has been getting some good responses and DMs. I’ve also had a deep discussion with Catherine Low of the Community Health Team and she’ll be as involved at all the key junctions.
I also hope to specifically get feedback from at least a couple of the women in the TIME piece, the leaders of the EA Diversity Group (who messaged me), GSand, J_J, and ~5 people who do survey design professionally (the Rethink Priorities Survey Team, Spencer Greenberg of Guided Track, and an Austin EA I know). I have only messaged maybe 20% of these people so far and I’d rather not make a public post til I’ve messaged all of them.
From there it will be shared to other beta-testers’ (like my friends and EAs who messaged me wishing to beta-test).
And then it will done and be shared with the community broadly.
I think this is enough that I don’t need to make a standalone post to request feedback (though good to share to set people’s minds at ease). It’s also already a lot of things for me to track tbh. But if anyone is reading this here, you can still DM me or comment your thoughts or ask to get involved!
Thanks for the response, yeah I agree that this does sound like you’re reaching out to sufficiently many people with good ideas to make this survey particularly informative.
FWIW, if I understand your reservations correctly, I personally wouldn’t worry a) that sharing your work-in-progress plans comes across as a promotion of your work. I think it’s a project that is meant to help the broader EA community and requesting feedback for a survey / offering to adapt a survey based on requests from others is reasonable, collaborative and useful. b) about taking up people’s time, as I feel like people can decide for themselves what they want to spend their limited time on and I’d then make that decision for them.
Looking forward to read the results, thanks again for doing this!
[I edited my comment above to more accurately reflect the state and timeline of project, and this comment is my way of pinging you that. I’m likely to make a pre-post sometime after all, just cuz of setting people’s minds at ease that things are being tried and projects are in the pipeline re: EA gender/sex stuff]
Ivy has personally been involved in a cover up of more than one assault perpetrated by EA members. I would highly recommend for someone impartial to be responsible for this piece of work.
Some concerns and critiques are understandable, because a complex situation occurred in a local EA group under my leadership. But these characterizations and conclusions are untrue:
(accidental?) that there are multiple noteworthy “EA members”. I think catan just spoke hastily here.
There is one, and only one, sex-related or gender-related case of an EA member that I handled in any notable way. It is true that this EA man had “more than one” incident, but those were not assaults, never within EA or rationalist spaces or professional spaces, and not ongoing, they were in his past. I simply became privy to some of his private history, and, in this case, due to particular features of the case I explain below, I chose to balance safety with discretion (not secrecy or coverup).
I did not defer any report or delay in handling any current sex-related incident. Again, there were no incident reports made against him nor any request that he be removed from the group or anything like that. I’ll also note that, in EA or my own life, when I have come across a man doing a troubling thing to a woman or when a woman has reported a particular incident to me she was involved in, I have always reported the incident straight to others who can take better action than me.
The rest of this comment will explain that one unusual case and address claims 1-3:
Case Summary:
The case I believe catan is referring to involves an EA man who was in recovery from and was (by his own voluntary efforts) receiving ongoing treatment for some troubling behaviors, which he had done outside the EA/rationality communities, and which he had voluntarily stopped over a year prior. His past acts (only one behavior, but done repeatedly) legally falls among a category called “non-contact sex offenses”. The act is NOT classed as assault.[2] So what happened? A man was a member of both a local EA group (which I led) and a local LW group. I became aware of some non-contact sex offenses he had done in his past outside of either community or any professional spaces, and I handled his case for the EA group myself, via intense investigation of him[3] and enacting a supervisory safety plan (just in case I was wrong). I was told by some people in the local LW community who had been keeping an eye on him and doing a sort of whisper network about him. (myself, not being one for speculation, then did an investigation of him and determine he was safe with very high confidence, but implemented a safety plan for the EA group in case I was wrong). Unfortunately, his past did escalate to some visibility in the local LW group, because he told friends, some misunderstandings occurred, and the situation ended up extremely labor-intensive for both local EA leadership (me) and the local LW leadership: It appears that a small numberof people in that local LW community shared misunderstandings and speculation about the man in question in their spaces, which grew into some negative sentiment against him and false rumors. It also appears (I have since found out) that a small number of those members also shared misunderstandings and speculations about how the local EA leadership (me) had handled his case prior, without asking me about what really happened first. These people were under false impressions that the man was more dangerous, manipulative, or dishonest than he actually was. In reality he was extremely deferential when I had done the investigation of him. Anyway, some LW members, hearing of his past (or what they thought they knew of his past) requested a ban of him, and so the local LW group started their own deeper investigation of him to determine if they should ban him, when they had previously only been keeping an eye on him. I told them I’d respect any decision they made, and I helped their elected leadership by sharing my documents covering my own investigationband answering their questions. The leadership decided to ban him, and I think they made the right decision for them. A lot of trust had been destroyed between him and the group members in that process. Notably, those local community leaders were diligent in trying to correct false rumors about him after-the-fact, and wished the man (and me as a group organizer) well despite the conclusion and knowing that we in the EA group had made a different decision. After that, I and the man (each) offered and shared our own primary documents with over 100 people for the sake of full transparency, which by then he had grown to be comfortable with and not as embarrassed and fearful about reception to his past. While I made some mistakes (which I go over here and in linked documents, and I did so in even greater detail to CEA) I did my best to behave ethically and put women’s safety first always in a very complex situation. I am still not happy with some of the mistakes I made to this day (not with safety or mishandling non-existent complaints, but with PR and asking CEA for advice sooner). But I don’t think my mistakes are worthy of a warning given about me, and neither do others: some people closely involved (including some EA higher-ups) told me that they thought I handled the situation approximately-okay as a community manager could be expected to (I took this to mean that falling short of perfection should maybe not be surprising in complex cases), or even handled it well. But unfortunately falsehoods and exaggerations have a life of their own, and are hard to address until they pop up and are suddenly visible. I especially simply wasn’t privy to rumors about me (people wouldn’t say such things to me or my friends I suppose). My guess is that catan is not an EA (because I have made so much transparent to so many EAs[4]), and that their comment is well-meaning but stems from some (months-old) misunderstandings. [Edit: although actually I have a new concerning guess in an edit below]. So I will use this space to address their three concerns:
On “Cover Up”: I did make some some information-related mistakes. The major one was not volunteering the man’s past to the Community Health Team in September when I first learned of it (although that was not a final decision). But I wouldn’t describe anything I did as a cover up: I never hid information or lied. I also told some people voluntarily early on: When I took action to protect women in the community, just in case, I admit I did so without all women members’ input. I did tell some key members (including women) and those who helped supervise (again just in case!). To be honest this is hard to talk about because if I admit I out a safety plan in place some people would say “so you admit he wasn’t safe!”. But, no, I truly believe and still believe he is safe. If I thought he was at all risky, even a little bit, I simple would have banned him. I simply was ethically unwilling to make the decision to include him without a safety plan in place, without the consent of every woman member, present and future. But that was practically impossible as well as likely to make people uncomfortable for little to no reason when I could just make the situation 100% safe. I definitely did prefer to respect his privacy, given his recovery focus, but there was also not really a “coverup” to be done: The man had voluntarily sought treatment, and had shared his past with key people in his social circle (hence how rumors of him later grew in the other community). Also, in a world where no one else knew of his past, I would have gladly told women and other leadership in that other local LW community, but they already knew and had told me they were handling details of his past in their own way, which I tried to respect and stay out of even if I thought the way they were handling things (whisper network) was likely to cause undue problems down the line. For my part, I was open about his past whenever anyone asked me, but almost no one did. I think people might claim that I had tried to suppress his past for my personal gain, but this doesn’t make sense either. I also had nothing to gain from doing a coverup: I must admit that he helped me with some operations tasks, which was sort of useful to me (moreso to the EA community), but accepting his help didn’t require a coverup because I did not feel ashamed or guilty to accept his help knowing the facts of his case. While I had felt stressed about accepting any help from him before investigating him, I simply didn’t feel that way after doing the investigation. Some people who told me of his past before I investigated him, witnessed my initial shock and might have thought I changed my tune because I realized that the EA group or me benefited from his work. That is not the case. I changed my tune because after I investigated him, rather than going by hearsay, I believed him to be safe. And I stand firm that his presence was not a meaningful safety or privacy risk to the group. I did feel worried for his future if people started shaming him given he had voluntarily had a self-improvement focus well-prior (I don’t have this extent of concern for just any man’s privacy who did bad things in their past, I know how that routinely leads to reluctance to convict that messes with the justice system, and I know it’s a cliche to worry about a man’s “future” but to me it is very different when a person makes the voluntary choice to change rather than have to have a case brought against them), so I tried to simply be discrete about his history (again I was still considering disclosing to CH Team later). And I did feel nervous about the possibility of games of telephone going wrong due to less-careful actors, as I knew others knew his past. But, from a moral point-of-view, I didn’t see worries about what other people might do (or mess up), as a valid reason for me to gatekeep a well-meaning, self-improving person (I’m less sure of this now given the odds and degree of chaos were higher than put decent probability on, but that’s what I believed then, and I still believe it on general principle). So, to try to address my concerns of telephone without being discriminatory to him or controlling of others, I actively tried (although I failed) to cultivate an understanding among everyone who knew his past (including him) akin to: “secrets do not exist”, “this is information that is validly concerning so you shouldn’t ask people to keep it to themselves, that isn’t right”, “(to anyone who learned): I am here if you or anyone else has any questions”, “if you want to tell anyone about his past, that’s up to you, but I strongly recommend you speak to him so facts can be confirmed correct, or I am happy to help if you prefer”. I fear that the last sentiment in particular got misconstrued as trying to control the narrative, but I hope here it is obvious that I merely had concerns about people’s ability to convey the truth, and that this would lead to unjust treatment and chaos. In any case, nobody took me up on that offer to help figure out the facts of his past til much later. And while I wish I had said things in a different way, my concerns about “telephone” and truthful narrative were later proven correct, so honestly if I had to redo it I would change my language a lot but I would still say something to try to get people to consider careful speech. Despite my concerns, I prioritized respecting people’s freedom to handle his info how they wished, and I deferred to people’s freedom to talk even when that eventually began to look like gossip. In fact, if I had wished to cover up the man’s past, I would have at least been proactive in dispelling false rumors about him among those local LW community members in early December (which blew up later). Instead, I mostly viewed what went wrong outside of the local EA group as “his social life” and “due to his poor communications with his friend group” which he could learn from and handle himself. Persons I made a mistake here from a an EA group leader perspective I should have taken the lead. But I did not view falsehoods circulating in a non-EA community with their own totally capable leadership to be my responsibility, nor did I view it as morally okay to suppress discussion, nor did I want to be seen as possibly doing that. So I corrected no rumors circulating in the LW group until the LW leadership requested I answer some questions to help them. Only *then* I did my job and shared info, extensively. By then I had a lot to say in one fell swoop: about 7 pages-worth of documents and emails that gave them key insights and also disproved multiple rumors. I worry that my sudden infodump here looked like a coverup campaign to people who experienced this and struggled to update that many rumors they themselves had been sharing had truly been false and he truly was quite a safe actor to have around (everyone in our local EA group has agreed with this point including all women). But if I wanted to cover things up, wouldn’t I have proactively messaged people to correct misconceptions? Basically, once people in the other community (never the EA group) were talking about his past, I stayed out of rumors and other people’s narratives to a literal fault. My intentional non-involvement might sound cruel, but I’m not in favor of norms where women clean up the sexual messes of men or related communication messes of those men. So multiple times in the process I deliberately chose to not do that. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about that, but thankfully, I think he (and I!) did learn a lot through the process. Ongoing transparency: Since his ban from that community, I have shared or offered to share my internal documents with over 100 people, including our entire local EA Slack, the EA Community health team, my at-the-time employer, his at-the-time employer, the local LW ban committee, and other members of the local LW group. The man shared similar: all details (in-depth) of his past and recovery plan with everyone, and also his family. I have some big regrets about the case, but involvement in a coverup is not one of them.
On “Impartiality”: Nor do I believe I am biased toward men or away from women or their safety. I believe this is evident because I clearly put women’s safety far above inclusivity to him, and I did a very intense investigation of him over two weeks with openness to the idea of taking much more drastic measures, like banning him from the local EA group or even informing police. Unlike the typical behavior evidenced by others, I went straight to multiple sources on his behavior and tried to determine facts, going well out of my way to avoid bias which could be present in secondary tellings. I also believe I am evidently not biased (any more than anyone else) because others have supported the main ways I handled the case and his information. I have made mistakes and others have noted those but still anyone who has bothered to find out the details of the case does not feel I was biased, though definitely lacking foresight at times. And no one has registered complaints to the EA CH Team despite my internally promoting that as an option. I’ve also reported and been involved in reporting other incidents over the years, so I’d say I don’t generally lean away from reporting sex-related issues. It just so happens that this is one case I thought I could handle myself as a community organizer. If someone else were the community organizer I’d have reported to them. But I felt that the buck stopped with me and not the CH team, although I was going to revisit disclosure to the EA CH Team should I stop organizing. I have also been on the receiving end of plenty of sex offenses and gendered injustice in my own life (rape and more), so if anything the normal assumption should be that I am biased against men who have done related acts. Also, while it’s a bit weird to add, sexual abuse of women (by men) was my primary activist cause for years (before finding veganism), and basically every social sciences project I did in college was somehow related to sexual assault by men against women. I truly do take such issues very seriously. I don’t think anything I did in this case or elsewhere in my history implies I am less impartial than any other EA woman on sex offenses and gender-related injustices.
On “Assaults”: I also want to reiterate that while the man in question did troubling sex/gender-related offenses, they are not classed as assault and they were never done in EA or LW communities. While I am not sharing full details here, I can say that the type and details of his behaviors mattered because it made it easier to decide that he was likely not a safety or privacy risk to members. Particularly with the just-in-case-I’m-wrong safety plan in place and accounting for all I’d learned about his tranformed beliefs and behaviors (so much!), he became, in my opinion, safer than the average unsupervised man can be expected to be in community, from behind the veil of ignorance.
Still want to know more?
You should read Document 1 (same one I linked above) which goes over all my handling of the case from September ’22-January ’23. If you still have concerns after reading that, there are options at the bottom of that document. And you are always welcome to message me!
[NEXT-DAY ADDITION: The more I reflect on this, the more unhappy I feel that catan decided to handle their concern in this way. They could have messaged me to ask why I think I’m a strong or weak candidate for this (volunteer) role given whatever appears to them like a coverup, or messaged the Community Health Team (who know about this) or Forum Mods. I’m at least confident claiming that catan does not know full details of what they are talking about, and has not confirmed their information as forum mods recommend. Instead they made their anonymous account solely to dash off this one comment about me. In fact, what took catan a few seconds to write took me hours spread across multiple days to respond such that, if I were a third party stumbling upon this thread, I’d feel properly informed of what the misunderstandings in catan’s comment are. This pulled me from the project for the good of women in the community that I was meant to be working on. Catan’s comment was likely net-negative for EA women, and I am extremely unhappy about this.
Part of this later unhappiness and intense response is because I suspect I know who catan is, and I now suspect this is not a simple misunderstanding: To my knowledge, the only person who believes I was involved in any intentional “cover up”, is someone adjacent to my community (not an EA) who was one of the gossip-spreaders in the case, and very opinionated. Perhaps they feel self conscious that they might come out looking bad, and have been lashing out because of that. IDK. Whatever the reason, this actor (maybe sockpuppeting as catan) elected to not have a conversation with me or read my transparency documents when I offered to them over DM (twice now). Instead they responded aggressively and shut me down at my first attempt at transparency and conversation, and blocked me after my second attempt. I have, since the close of the case, heard from others that this actor made claims of my cover up or self-interest in this case. These were well after they knew that informed others did not agree with their characterizations (such people actually tried to speak to them and get them to see some sense), and after willfully refusing my actual primary information in form of google docs. If catan is that bad actor, I could easily claim the above comment amounts to libel because of the willfullness and recklessness with which that person has repeatedly refused to learn the actual facts of the case. If catan is not that particular bad actor, but a different simply-negligent actor, it still might be possible that I could seek damages if I lose opportunities based on false claims, because it does appear that catan wants me to lose opportunities wrongly (even volunteer ones). I’ll add that if a crime is being charged, forum anonymity and pseudonyms won’t matter. Forum moderators will be (at least morally but I think also legally) obligated to give up IP address and other account details. This is one reason why even bad and lazy actors should be careful what they say, and look into things closely as forum mods recommend: out of pure self preservation. I hate to speak this forcefully, because most forum readers who are conscientious enough to have read this far probably find mention of libel revolting, and maybe catan did have a misunderstanding without negligence, or maybe even a bad actor lied to catan. But I believe that people should play defensively when needed and that includes me. And frankly I have been so transparent it is hard for me to imagine anyone having a misunderstanding about my actions and intentions in this case without being willfully ignorant.
FWIW I do not mind at all (really!) if people discuss my information and past, including my mistakes or poor actions, to the extent what anyone says is potentially-relevant and true. (Catan’s comment would be potentially-relevant, except thatit is blatantly false, on four counts in 2 sentences!).Community discussion and transparency is very important.
TBH I would have liked to address the concerns more loosely if they could be known to be in good faith. But I felt my hand forced to respond at length, and share the whole story with precision (and even more details in the google docs) because:
Catan’s comment might be malicious libel. If so, it takes care and precision to disincentivize any future libel attempts.
Given recent EA controversies, even if catan’s claim is well-meaning, it could be dug up by someone else with malicious intent.
Critiques are fine, but when informing new people I’d rather they decide for themselves, what they think. Any mistakes I’ve made should be named as the actual actions I’ve done on the world, not one-word summaries like “cover up” or “biased” which just express how someone else evaluated the situation, especially without proof that catan has any reason to know what they are talking about.As the saying goes, “I’ll sleep in the bed I’ve made for myself”… But I fear bad or hasty actors making me sleep in a bed I haven’t made.
I realized a question or comment might come up again, so I may as well document thoroughly in a way that’s transparent to someone who isn’t at all involved, for future use. To the extent it’s possible, I’d rather handle grievances ahead of time.
If my response still seems out of scale to you, consider that I am myself a survivor of extensive sexual mistreatment and gender-related injustice, who finds it so important of a topic that I was trying to lead a project centered on it, so I am personally offended at the implication that I would intentionally cover up sexual predation or any misbehavior toward women.
I’ve not decided yet if I want to ask Forum mods to remove or encrypt catan’s comment. It puts both me and CEA in an awkward position. Deletions may look like suppressing concerns, but maybe some concerns and critiques are fair, because I did make mistakes (see Document 1). The actual intent in removing catan’s comment would be to delete false or libel-as-written statements. I will keep considering asking the forum mods to delete or encrypt catan’s comment, and I have flagged catan’s comment to the EA Community Health Team, who already knew all details of the case I discussed above.]
My initial investigation doc as well as the man’s apology doc (with full details of his past) have already been shared or offered to be shared with over 100 people with his name attached.
A broad survey seems good but it might also help to specifically survey conference attendees, since it might help eliminate some sample biases and since the in-person nature of conferences seems to facilitate some of the harassment.
Actually, if someone is doing a survey, what I am now very interested in is knowing what value different groups in the community get from various kinds of experiences in EA spaces.
For example, I’m curious how most women would weigh being in an EA space (including EAGs, local EA events, EA houses, etc) that lets them access healthy professional networks free from the tensions of inappropriate* sexual/romantic advances against being in an EA space where they are able to find find EA partners. (I am implying that there is a tradeoff here.)
I am also curious if the men in the community have an opposing view—if so, it might be important to think about how the existing state of the community (that may have been shaped by the views of the majority gender) may make it less attractive to women currently in or considering joining the community.
*example of inappropriate—young EA job seekers being propositioned by potential bosses/seniors in their field after making it clear to them that they were looking for job opportunities/contacts/mentoring in that field.
What do you think of the idea to do a broad anonymous survey of women in EA regarding their experiences related to romantic and sexual behaviour in EA settings?
I imagine it could provide some useful information like
In what EA sub-communities it’s more or less prevalent (which would help with prioritizing interventions and potentially learning from sub-communities that might do a good job preventing issues)
If women have more or fewer bad experiences related to sexual and romantic advances in EA settings compared to similar non-EA settings
If women know who they can reach out to, and feel comfortable reaching out to those places
Potential difficulties
Identifying and reaching all women with relevant experiences might be difficult?
I assume there are some online groups for women in EA, and maybe orgs like Magnify Mentoring have a good network to share something like this?
Maybe one could ask respondents to share the survey with other women who they think have had relevant experiences?
[EDIT: This project has been passed on to the CEA Community Heath Team, and folded in to a much larger investigation which will gather and analyze data from many other sources in addition to a survey. Thank you to all who messaged me questions and thoughts. All of this (plus all I have done and thoughts I have) have been passed on to Catherine Low who is orchestrating the project. You can read her announcement, posted Feb 14th, here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mEkRrDweNSdNdrmvx/plans-for-investigating-and-improving-the-experience-of ]
FYI for anyone reading this and thinking about taking on this project, I’m moving forward with a similar survey idea today.
It’s been percolating in my mind since November, so I think it might take me less time than many others. But please DM me if you want to help or have ideas you think I may miss!
To add to MaxRa’s ‘wishlist’, I would add questions about location and other demographic, to see if the patterns we’ve been discussing elsewhere in this thread (eg the Bay area being particularly problematic) are real.
Yup that’s in there!
Thanks for doing this Ivy!
I imagine many people would be very interested in the results of this survey. As probably not many people saw your comment here, I could imagine it being worth to share your plans as a stand-alone post and to wait with sharing it widely until maybe end of week, as I imagine many people have good ideas to share here and would be excited about helping make the survey as informative as possible.
[Edit: The list of stakeholders/beta-testers has grown quite a lot so it might take over a week from today (Tuesday Feb 6) to get it out and finish all the review I want. I’m likely to make a forum post on this survey in a day or two, to set expectations on timing and let the community know things are being done. The remainder of this comment has been updated for what’s true today]
Thanks! Well I’d rather not use the forum front-page to promote a work-in-progress. The survey is already looking pretty long, and the survey is for all EAs of all genders so it will be quite a community-wide effort already.
I don’t want to use people’s potentially limited energy for this topic by making them read a pre-post.FWIW I also posted in the Women and Non-Binary EA Facebook group, which has been getting some good responses and DMs. I’ve also had a deep discussion with Catherine Low of the Community Health Team and she’ll be as involved at all the key junctions.
I also hope to specifically get feedback from at least a couple of the women in the TIME piece, the leaders of the EA Diversity Group (who messaged me), GSand, J_J, and ~5 people who do survey design professionally (the Rethink Priorities Survey Team, Spencer Greenberg of Guided Track, and an Austin EA I know). I have only messaged maybe 20% of these people so far and I’d rather not make a public post til I’ve messaged all of them.
From there it will be shared to other beta-testers’ (like my friends and EAs who messaged me wishing to beta-test).
And then it will done and be shared with the community broadly.
I think this is enough that I don’t need to make a standalone post to request feedback (though good to share to set people’s minds at ease). It’s also already a lot of things for me to track tbh. But if anyone is reading this here, you can still DM me or comment your thoughts or ask to get involved!
Thanks for the response, yeah I agree that this does sound like you’re reaching out to sufficiently many people with good ideas to make this survey particularly informative.
FWIW, if I understand your reservations correctly, I personally wouldn’t worry
a) that sharing your work-in-progress plans comes across as a promotion of your work. I think it’s a project that is meant to help the broader EA community and requesting feedback for a survey / offering to adapt a survey based on requests from others is reasonable, collaborative and useful.
b) about taking up people’s time, as I feel like people can decide for themselves what they want to spend their limited time on and I’d then make that decision for them.
Looking forward to read the results, thanks again for doing this!
[I edited my comment above to more accurately reflect the state and timeline of project, and this comment is my way of pinging you that. I’m likely to make a pre-post sometime after all, just cuz of setting people’s minds at ease that things are being tried and projects are in the pipeline re: EA gender/sex stuff]
Ivy has personally been involved in a cover up of more than one assault perpetrated by EA members. I would highly recommend for someone impartial to be responsible for this piece of work.
Some concerns and critiques are understandable, because a complex situation occurred in a local EA group under my leadership. But these characterizations and conclusions are untrue:
that I was “involved in a cover up”
that the EA member did “assault”
that I am not “impartial”[1]
(accidental?) that there are multiple noteworthy “EA members”. I think catan just spoke hastily here.
There is one, and only one, sex-related or gender-related case of an EA member that I handled in any notable way. It is true that this EA man had “more than one” incident, but those were not assaults, never within EA or rationalist spaces or professional spaces, and not ongoing, they were in his past. I simply became privy to some of his private history, and, in this case, due to particular features of the case I explain below, I chose to balance safety with discretion (not secrecy or coverup).
I did not defer any report or delay in handling any current sex-related incident. Again, there were no incident reports made against him nor any request that he be removed from the group or anything like that. I’ll also note that, in EA or my own life, when I have come across a man doing a troubling thing to a woman or when a woman has reported a particular incident to me she was involved in, I have always reported the incident straight to others who can take better action than me.
The rest of this comment will explain that one unusual case and address claims 1-3:
Case Summary:
The case I believe catan is referring to involves an EA man who was in recovery from and was (by his own voluntary efforts) receiving ongoing treatment for some troubling behaviors, which he had done outside the EA/rationality communities, and which he had voluntarily stopped over a year prior. His past acts (only one behavior, but done repeatedly) legally falls among a category called “non-contact sex offenses”. The act is NOT classed as assault.[2]
So what happened? A man was a member of both a local EA group (which I led) and a local LW group. I became aware of some non-contact sex offenses he had done in his past outside of either community or any professional spaces, and I handled his case for the EA group myself, via intense investigation of him[3] and enacting a supervisory safety plan (just in case I was wrong). I was told by some people in the local LW community who had been keeping an eye on him and doing a sort of whisper network about him. (myself, not being one for speculation, then did an investigation of him and determine he was safe with very high confidence, but implemented a safety plan for the EA group in case I was wrong). Unfortunately, his past did escalate to some visibility in the local LW group, because he told friends, some misunderstandings occurred, and the situation ended up extremely labor-intensive for both local EA leadership (me) and the local LW leadership:
It appears that a small number of people in that local LW community shared misunderstandings and speculation about the man in question in their spaces, which grew into some negative sentiment against him and false rumors. It also appears (I have since found out) that a small number of those members also shared misunderstandings and speculations about how the local EA leadership (me) had handled his case prior, without asking me about what really happened first. These people were under false impressions that the man was more dangerous, manipulative, or dishonest than he actually was. In reality he was extremely deferential when I had done the investigation of him. Anyway, some LW members, hearing of his past (or what they thought they knew of his past) requested a ban of him, and so the local LW group started their own deeper investigation of him to determine if they should ban him, when they had previously only been keeping an eye on him. I told them I’d respect any decision they made, and I helped their elected leadership by sharing my documents covering my own investigationband answering their questions. The leadership decided to ban him, and I think they made the right decision for them. A lot of trust had been destroyed between him and the group members in that process. Notably, those local community leaders were diligent in trying to correct false rumors about him after-the-fact, and wished the man (and me as a group organizer) well despite the conclusion and knowing that we in the EA group had made a different decision. After that, I and the man (each) offered and shared our own primary documents with over 100 people for the sake of full transparency, which by then he had grown to be comfortable with and not as embarrassed and fearful about reception to his past. While I made some mistakes (which I go over here and in linked documents, and I did so in even greater detail to CEA) I did my best to behave ethically and put women’s safety first always in a very complex situation. I am still not happy with some of the mistakes I made to this day (not with safety or mishandling non-existent complaints, but with PR and asking CEA for advice sooner). But I don’t think my mistakes are worthy of a warning given about me, and neither do others: some people closely involved (including some EA higher-ups) told me that they thought I handled the situation approximately-okay as a community manager could be expected to (I took this to mean that falling short of perfection should maybe not be surprising in complex cases), or even handled it well. But unfortunately falsehoods and exaggerations have a life of their own, and are hard to address until they pop up and are suddenly visible. I especially simply wasn’t privy to rumors about me (people wouldn’t say such things to me or my friends I suppose). My guess is that catan is not an EA (because I have made so much transparent to so many EAs[4]), and that their comment is well-meaning but stems from some (months-old) misunderstandings. [Edit: although actually I have a new concerning guess in an edit below]. So I will use this space to address their three concerns:
(Document 1: If you want more details, Click here to see a timeline, how I handled it throughout, the EA community’s response, and how his case is being handled moving forward.)
Returning to the 3 Claims in Catan’s Comment:
On “Cover Up”: I did make some some information-related mistakes. The major one was not volunteering the man’s past to the Community Health Team in September when I first learned of it (although that was not a final decision). But I wouldn’t describe anything I did as a cover up:
I never hid information or lied. I also told some people voluntarily early on: When I took action to protect women in the community, just in case, I admit I did so without all women members’ input. I did tell some key members (including women) and those who helped supervise (again just in case!). To be honest this is hard to talk about because if I admit I out a safety plan in place some people would say “so you admit he wasn’t safe!”. But, no, I truly believe and still believe he is safe. If I thought he was at all risky, even a little bit, I simple would have banned him. I simply was ethically unwilling to make the decision to include him without a safety plan in place, without the consent of every woman member, present and future. But that was practically impossible as well as likely to make people uncomfortable for little to no reason when I could just make the situation 100% safe. I definitely did prefer to respect his privacy, given his recovery focus, but there was also not really a “coverup” to be done: The man had voluntarily sought treatment, and had shared his past with key people in his social circle (hence how rumors of him later grew in the other community). Also, in a world where no one else knew of his past, I would have gladly told women and other leadership in that other local LW community, but they already knew and had told me they were handling details of his past in their own way, which I tried to respect and stay out of even if I thought the way they were handling things (whisper network) was likely to cause undue problems down the line. For my part, I was open about his past whenever anyone asked me, but almost no one did.
I think people might claim that I had tried to suppress his past for my personal gain, but this doesn’t make sense either. I also had nothing to gain from doing a coverup: I must admit that he helped me with some operations tasks, which was sort of useful to me (moreso to the EA community), but accepting his help didn’t require a coverup because I did not feel ashamed or guilty to accept his help knowing the facts of his case. While I had felt stressed about accepting any help from him before investigating him, I simply didn’t feel that way after doing the investigation. Some people who told me of his past before I investigated him, witnessed my initial shock and might have thought I changed my tune because I realized that the EA group or me benefited from his work. That is not the case. I changed my tune because after I investigated him, rather than going by hearsay, I believed him to be safe. And I stand firm that his presence was not a meaningful safety or privacy risk to the group.
I did feel worried for his future if people started shaming him given he had voluntarily had a self-improvement focus well-prior (I don’t have this extent of concern for just any man’s privacy who did bad things in their past, I know how that routinely leads to reluctance to convict that messes with the justice system, and I know it’s a cliche to worry about a man’s “future” but to me it is very different when a person makes the voluntary choice to change rather than have to have a case brought against them), so I tried to simply be discrete about his history (again I was still considering disclosing to CH Team later). And I did feel nervous about the possibility of games of telephone going wrong due to less-careful actors, as I knew others knew his past. But, from a moral point-of-view, I didn’t see worries about what other people might do (or mess up), as a valid reason for me to gatekeep a well-meaning, self-improving person (I’m less sure of this now given the odds and degree of chaos were higher than put decent probability on, but that’s what I believed then, and I still believe it on general principle). So, to try to address my concerns of telephone without being discriminatory to him or controlling of others, I actively tried (although I failed) to cultivate an understanding among everyone who knew his past (including him) akin to: “secrets do not exist”, “this is information that is validly concerning so you shouldn’t ask people to keep it to themselves, that isn’t right”, “(to anyone who learned): I am here if you or anyone else has any questions”, “if you want to tell anyone about his past, that’s up to you, but I strongly recommend you speak to him so facts can be confirmed correct, or I am happy to help if you prefer”. I fear that the last sentiment in particular got misconstrued as trying to control the narrative, but I hope here it is obvious that I merely had concerns about people’s ability to convey the truth, and that this would lead to unjust treatment and chaos. In any case, nobody took me up on that offer to help figure out the facts of his past til much later. And while I wish I had said things in a different way, my concerns about “telephone” and truthful narrative were later proven correct, so honestly if I had to redo it I would change my language a lot but I would still say something to try to get people to consider careful speech.
Despite my concerns, I prioritized respecting people’s freedom to handle his info how they wished, and I deferred to people’s freedom to talk even when that eventually began to look like gossip. In fact, if I had wished to cover up the man’s past, I would have at least been proactive in dispelling false rumors about him among those local LW community members in early December (which blew up later). Instead, I mostly viewed what went wrong outside of the local EA group as “his social life” and “due to his poor communications with his friend group” which he could learn from and handle himself. Persons I made a mistake here from a an EA group leader perspective I should have taken the lead. But I did not view falsehoods circulating in a non-EA community with their own totally capable leadership to be my responsibility, nor did I view it as morally okay to suppress discussion, nor did I want to be seen as possibly doing that. So I corrected no rumors circulating in the LW group until the LW leadership requested I answer some questions to help them. Only *then* I did my job and shared info, extensively. By then I had a lot to say in one fell swoop: about 7 pages-worth of documents and emails that gave them key insights and also disproved multiple rumors. I worry that my sudden infodump here looked like a coverup campaign to people who experienced this and struggled to update that many rumors they themselves had been sharing had truly been false and he truly was quite a safe actor to have around (everyone in our local EA group has agreed with this point including all women). But if I wanted to cover things up, wouldn’t I have proactively messaged people to correct misconceptions?
Basically, once people in the other community (never the EA group) were talking about his past, I stayed out of rumors and other people’s narratives to a literal fault. My intentional non-involvement might sound cruel, but I’m not in favor of norms where women clean up the sexual messes of men or related communication messes of those men. So multiple times in the process I deliberately chose to not do that. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about that, but thankfully, I think he (and I!) did learn a lot through the process.
Ongoing transparency: Since his ban from that community, I have shared or offered to share my internal documents with over 100 people, including our entire local EA Slack, the EA Community health team, my at-the-time employer, his at-the-time employer, the local LW ban committee, and other members of the local LW group. The man shared similar: all details (in-depth) of his past and recovery plan with everyone, and also his family.
I have some big regrets about the case, but involvement in a coverup is not one of them.
On “Impartiality”: Nor do I believe I am biased toward men or away from women or their safety. I believe this is evident because I clearly put women’s safety far above inclusivity to him, and I did a very intense investigation of him over two weeks with openness to the idea of taking much more drastic measures, like banning him from the local EA group or even informing police. Unlike the typical behavior evidenced by others, I went straight to multiple sources on his behavior and tried to determine facts, going well out of my way to avoid bias which could be present in secondary tellings. I also believe I am evidently not biased (any more than anyone else) because others have supported the main ways I handled the case and his information. I have made mistakes and others have noted those but still anyone who has bothered to find out the details of the case does not feel I was biased, though definitely lacking foresight at times. And no one has registered complaints to the EA CH Team despite my internally promoting that as an option. I’ve also reported and been involved in reporting other incidents over the years, so I’d say I don’t generally lean away from reporting sex-related issues. It just so happens that this is one case I thought I could handle myself as a community organizer. If someone else were the community organizer I’d have reported to them. But I felt that the buck stopped with me and not the CH team, although I was going to revisit disclosure to the EA CH Team should I stop organizing. I have also been on the receiving end of plenty of sex offenses and gendered injustice in my own life (rape and more), so if anything the normal assumption should be that I am biased against men who have done related acts. Also, while it’s a bit weird to add, sexual abuse of women (by men) was my primary activist cause for years (before finding veganism), and basically every social sciences project I did in college was somehow related to sexual assault by men against women. I truly do take such issues very seriously.
I don’t think anything I did in this case or elsewhere in my history implies I am less impartial than any other EA woman on sex offenses and gender-related injustices.
On “Assaults”: I also want to reiterate that while the man in question did troubling sex/gender-related offenses, they are not classed as assault and they were never done in EA or LW communities. While I am not sharing full details here, I can say that the type and details of his behaviors mattered because it made it easier to decide that he was likely not a safety or privacy risk to members. Particularly with the just-in-case-I’m-wrong safety plan in place and accounting for all I’d learned about his tranformed beliefs and behaviors (so much!), he became, in my opinion, safer than the average unsupervised man can be expected to be in community, from behind the veil of ignorance.
Still want to know more?
You should read Document 1 (same one I linked above) which goes over all my handling of the case from September ’22-January ’23. If you still have concerns after reading that, there are options at the bottom of that document. And you are always welcome to message me!
[NEXT-DAY ADDITION:
The more I reflect on this, the more unhappy I feel that catan decided to handle their concern in this way. They could have messaged me to ask why I think I’m a strong or weak candidate for this (volunteer) role given whatever appears to them like a coverup, or messaged the Community Health Team (who know about this) or Forum Mods. I’m at least confident claiming that catan does not know full details of what they are talking about, and has not confirmed their information as forum mods recommend. Instead they made their anonymous account solely to dash off this one comment about me. In fact, what took catan a few seconds to write took me hours spread across multiple days to respond such that, if I were a third party stumbling upon this thread, I’d feel properly informed of what the misunderstandings in catan’s comment are. This pulled me from the project for the good of women in the community that I was meant to be working on. Catan’s comment was likely net-negative for EA women, and I am extremely unhappy about this.
Part of this later unhappiness and intense response is because I suspect I know who catan is, and I now suspect this is not a simple misunderstanding: To my knowledge, the only person who believes I was involved in any intentional “cover up”, is someone adjacent to my community (not an EA) who was one of the gossip-spreaders in the case, and very opinionated. Perhaps they feel self conscious that they might come out looking bad, and have been lashing out because of that. IDK. Whatever the reason, this actor (maybe sockpuppeting as catan) elected to not have a conversation with me or read my transparency documents when I offered to them over DM (twice now). Instead they responded aggressively and shut me down at my first attempt at transparency and conversation, and blocked me after my second attempt. I have, since the close of the case, heard from others that this actor made claims of my cover up or self-interest in this case. These were well after they knew that informed others did not agree with their characterizations (such people actually tried to speak to them and get them to see some sense), and after willfully refusing my actual primary information in form of google docs. If catan is that bad actor, I could easily claim the above comment amounts to libel because of the willfullness and recklessness with which that person has repeatedly refused to learn the actual facts of the case. If catan is not that particular bad actor, but a different simply-negligent actor, it still might be possible that I could seek damages if I lose opportunities based on false claims, because it does appear that catan wants me to lose opportunities wrongly (even volunteer ones). I’ll add that if a crime is being charged, forum anonymity and pseudonyms won’t matter. Forum moderators will be (at least morally but I think also legally) obligated to give up IP address and other account details. This is one reason why even bad and lazy actors should be careful what they say, and look into things closely as forum mods recommend: out of pure self preservation. I hate to speak this forcefully, because most forum readers who are conscientious enough to have read this far probably find mention of libel revolting, and maybe catan did have a misunderstanding without negligence, or maybe even a bad actor lied to catan. But I believe that people should play defensively when needed and that includes me. And frankly I have been so transparent it is hard for me to imagine anyone having a misunderstanding about my actions and intentions in this case without being willfully ignorant.
FWIW I do not mind at all (really!) if people discuss my information and past, including my mistakes or poor actions, to the extent what anyone says is potentially-relevant and true. (Catan’s comment would be potentially-relevant, except that it is blatantly false, on four counts in 2 sentences!). Community discussion and transparency is very important.
TBH I would have liked to address the concerns more loosely if they could be known to be in good faith. But I felt my hand forced to respond at length, and share the whole story with precision (and even more details in the google docs) because:
Catan’s comment might be malicious libel. If so, it takes care and precision to disincentivize any future libel attempts.
Given recent EA controversies, even if catan’s claim is well-meaning, it could be dug up by someone else with malicious intent.
Critiques are fine, but when informing new people I’d rather they decide for themselves, what they think. Any mistakes I’ve made should be named as the actual actions I’ve done on the world, not one-word summaries like “cover up” or “biased” which just express how someone else evaluated the situation, especially without proof that catan has any reason to know what they are talking about. As the saying goes, “I’ll sleep in the bed I’ve made for myself”… But I fear bad or hasty actors making me sleep in a bed I haven’t made.
I realized a question or comment might come up again, so I may as well document thoroughly in a way that’s transparent to someone who isn’t at all involved, for future use. To the extent it’s possible, I’d rather handle grievances ahead of time.
If my response still seems out of scale to you, consider that I am myself a survivor of extensive sexual mistreatment and gender-related injustice, who finds it so important of a topic that I was trying to lead a project centered on it, so I am personally offended at the implication that I would intentionally cover up sexual predation or any misbehavior toward women.
I’ve not decided yet if I want to ask Forum mods to remove or encrypt catan’s comment. It puts both me and CEA in an awkward position. Deletions may look like suppressing concerns, but maybe some concerns and critiques are fair, because I did make mistakes (see Document 1). The actual intent in removing catan’s comment would be to delete false or libel-as-written statements. I will keep considering asking the forum mods to delete or encrypt catan’s comment, and I have flagged catan’s comment to the EA Community Health Team, who already knew all details of the case I discussed above.]
which I will treat as claiming that I am less impartial than the average woman in the EA community, because complete impartiality is impossible
where he or I live, or anywhere else I’m aware of
Which took 2 weeks, and which he passed. See Document 2 for details
My initial investigation doc as well as the man’s apology doc (with full details of his past) have already been shared or offered to be shared with over 100 people with his name attached.
A broad survey seems good but it might also help to specifically survey conference attendees, since it might help eliminate some sample biases and since the in-person nature of conferences seems to facilitate some of the harassment.
Actually, if someone is doing a survey, what I am now very interested in is knowing what value different groups in the community get from various kinds of experiences in EA spaces.
For example, I’m curious how most women would weigh being in an EA space (including EAGs, local EA events, EA houses, etc) that lets them access healthy professional networks free from the tensions of inappropriate* sexual/romantic advances against being in an EA space where they are able to find find EA partners. (I am implying that there is a tradeoff here.)
I am also curious if the men in the community have an opposing view—if so, it might be important to think about how the existing state of the community (that may have been shaped by the views of the majority gender) may make it less attractive to women currently in or considering joining the community.
*example of inappropriate—young EA job seekers being propositioned by potential bosses/seniors in their field after making it clear to them that they were looking for job opportunities/contacts/mentoring in that field.