you frame your behaviour as part of an unavoidable “tradeoff” between different communication styles rather than as something you should work to change
This seems inconsistent with the post—they give a list of various ways they tried to work to change it in the “Evidence of caring” section. This seemed like a pretty central part of the post to me and I’m confused by how you missed it (unless your comment was LLM written, which I would consider poor form—you do have 5 em-dashes after all)
He didn’t succeed at changing their behavior, but (assuming they made a sincere effort) I consider that more about ability than intent. I’m not trying to minimise this: the impact on others remains serious regardless of intent, and I think asking him to leave community spaces to minimize harm to others is reasonable. But I think this is still an important difference, especially when passing moral judgement on him.
My impression from the post is that he intends to continue not going to EA events, even after the ban. If true, this actually seems like a pretty good strategy for minimizing future harm done within the EA community, and better than him rejoining events and trying harder to fix his behavior.
On the outside view, I predict that if someone tries to fix a problem with their behavior and self describes as “as careful as I could be” but fails to avoid future incidents, then no matter how hard they try/what approach they adopt, their next attempt has a decent chance to fail. So from a harm minimisation perspective, removing themselves from situations where they could cause harm seems better. Suggesting that he just try harder without additional specifics, seems like it will increase the expected number of women harmed, which I consider irresponsible advice. The top priority is harm minimisation, not about getting him to accept personal responsibility.
This doesn’t address the risk of causing harm in their other social contexts, but that feels harder to judge without more information. I think the EA community has a uniquely strong mix of social and professional contexts that can be particularly hard to navigate well, especially EAGs. I can totally believe there are people whose behaviour causes harm in EA circles who are fine elsewhere.
This seems inconsistent with the post—they give a list of various ways they tried to work to change it in the “Evidence of caring” section. This seemed like a pretty central part of the post to me and I’m confused by how you missed it (unless your comment was LLM written, which I would consider poor form—you do have 5 em-dashes after all)
He didn’t succeed at changing their behavior, but (assuming they made a sincere effort) I consider that more about ability than intent. I’m not trying to minimise this: the impact on others remains serious regardless of intent, and I think asking him to leave community spaces to minimize harm to others is reasonable. But I think this is still an important difference, especially when passing moral judgement on him.
My impression from the post is that he intends to continue not going to EA events, even after the ban. If true, this actually seems like a pretty good strategy for minimizing future harm done within the EA community, and better than him rejoining events and trying harder to fix his behavior.
On the outside view, I predict that if someone tries to fix a problem with their behavior and self describes as “as careful as I could be” but fails to avoid future incidents, then no matter how hard they try/what approach they adopt, their next attempt has a decent chance to fail. So from a harm minimisation perspective, removing themselves from situations where they could cause harm seems better. Suggesting that he just try harder without additional specifics, seems like it will increase the expected number of women harmed, which I consider irresponsible advice. The top priority is harm minimisation, not about getting him to accept personal responsibility.
This doesn’t address the risk of causing harm in their other social contexts, but that feels harder to judge without more information. I think the EA community has a uniquely strong mix of social and professional contexts that can be particularly hard to navigate well, especially EAGs. I can totally believe there are people whose behaviour causes harm in EA circles who are fine elsewhere.