I feel kind of complicated about my previous comments on this post. I do still stand by what I said. But I feel kind of bad that my comments have got more karma than the post itself, because I do think that we should worry about toxicity towards women in the community, and many of the things Keerthana describes are really bad and on balance, I think I’m happy she wrote this post.
The reaction to this post (and my comments) exemplifies a dynamic I’ve seen before on the Forum, where people’s posts are disregarded, criticized, downvoted etc because they are emotional, impressionistic, openly angered or outraged, emphatic… etc, and praised for being detached, dry, measured, caveat-ed… We should care about epistemics, but I think sometimes readers of the Forum are not charitable enough to people who communicate in different ways to them.
I think this a really important point about the dynamic of criticism toward emotionally raw posts. I see the reactions to this post as illustrative of the very problem that the OP is describing about using LessWrong jedi mindtricks to ignore boundaries and frankly to rationalize harrassment. In this case, a member of the community has shared their personal experiences and reactions to toxic behavior, and a significant number of people seem to be responding with criticisms of the intellectual merit of the post, as if the post were a logic exercise and not a situation which is uncomfortable and threatening for real people.
I don’t mean to imply that we as a community should never engage in a more detached dialogue about the causes and possible solutions to the sexual harassment and misogyny described. However, I feel really uncomfortable when I read comments saying that expressing anger is useless or that the author should have done more to describe different possible interpretations of their experience or ways in which their experience may not be representative of everyone’s. I wish I could believe that this forum is a place where I could describe my own experiences without fearing that people will treat feelings of sadness or anger as some kind of prompt for a rationalist debate.
On that note, inspired by Keerthana’s bravery in sharing, I will mention my own experiences as a woman in EA. I am not a well-known member of the community or a frequent forum poster, but I am using an alternate account because of what I described in the paragraph above. I have experienced quite a bit of casual misogyny in interactions in EA spaces. I have walked away from a handful of conversations at EA events feeling that people have dismissed my ideas, mansplained topics about which I am knowledgable, or aggressively interrupted and silenced others. I sometimes read forum posts that make concerns about gender-based violence or community health feel like a footnote. I am thankful that this describes a minority of my experiences, but unfortunately it’s enough to make me wary when participating in EA events.
I completely agree that OP raises totally legitimate points that are worthy of being taken seriously.
However, I am grateful for you initial comment and really disagree that the issue here is being emotional and impressionistic. The problem with the post is that it is bigoted. OP makes a central issue of people not respecting one’s “poly/mono” choice and then proceeds to suggest that women in poly relationships are unhappy and that poly men are uniquely likely to be sexual predators. This is all framed as a matter of OP’s experience, and I have no reason to doubt the truthfulness of it all. But that doesn’t excuse framing the issue as a matter of one’s choice to be poly or not. Imagine if this framing was done for any other group. Even if you have legitimate negative experiences with members of a certain group, framing the issue as relevant to membership in that group without any evidence whatsoever is unfair to say the least. This is especially true for something like sexual pressure, which monogamous people have been engaging in far and wide since the dawn of time. In any case, it is a really tired trope to paint anyone who does not fall very neatly in line with conventional ideas of relationship structures as a sexual predator.
It’s also frankly quite hypocritical in that OP seems to be the one not respecting others “mono/poly” choice.
None of this is to say that OPs experiences are not real or that they are not a problem. Of course they are! But that does not make this a fair or productive post and it would have been much better received if OP didn’t make it about something irrelevant.
This is the comment that made me feel very unsafe and take down the post.
What I said:
1. you can find many unhappy women in poly relationships
2. many poly men are sexual predators
You reframed my sentences to your convenience to claim that I said :
proceeds to suggest that women in poly relationships are unhappy and that poly men are uniquely likely to be sexual predators
the rest of your post bases on that assumption. Many != all, that is an important distinction. I am qualifying my sentences with “some of these men”, “many men” in various places but you’ve ignored that. I am not anonymous, so your calling me bigoted seems retaliatory, personal and unwarranted. The reason I didn’t take specific names but used many was because I don’t want to get into more issues, but usually the definition of many is more than one. I have not stopped a poly person from being poly so what do you mean by “not respecting others mono/poly choices”? Who did I coerce?
@lizka, @julia_wise, take note, I cannot presume your forum permits retaliation, name calling and personal attacks.
I didn’t call you bigoted, I called your post bigoted and I stand by it. If my comment about your post made you feel “very unsafe,” then I do not wish to argue about the matter and risk coming off as even more of a threat to you, as that could not be further from my intention. I wish you the best.
This comment feels important, like something I’ve been considering trying to spin into a full post. Finding a frame has been hard, because it feels like I’m trying to translate what’s (unfortunately) a distinctively non-EA culture norm into reasoning that EAs will take more seriously.
One thought that I do want to share though is that I don’t think seeing this as something that needs to be weighed against good epistemics feels quite right. I think our prizing good epistemics should mean being able to reason clearly and adjust our reactions to tone/emotional tenor from people who (very understandably!) are speaking from a place of trauma and deep hurt.
The best frame I have so far for a post is reminding people about Julia Galef’s straw-Vulcan argument and arguing what it implies for conversations on (understandably) incredibly emotionally heavy topics, and in tough times more generally. Roughly rehashing the argument because I can’t find a good link on it: Spock frequently makes assumptions that humans will be perfectly rational creatures under all circumstances, and when this leads him astray essentially shrugs and responds “it’s not my fault that I did not predict their actions correctly, they were being irrational!”. Galef’s point of course, is that this is horrible rationality: the failure to reason about how emotions might effect people and adjust accordingly means your epistemics are severely impoverished.
Setting aside the Klingon style rationality argument, there also feels like there should be a argument along the lines of how (to me, incredibly!) obvious it should be that tone like this demands sympathy and willingness to take on the burden of being accommodating from people serious about thinking of themselves as invested in altruism as a value. I’m still figuring out how to express this crisply (and to be clear, without bitterness) so that it will resonate.
If you have thoughts on what the best frame would be here, would love to hear any thoughts you have or discuss more.
Edited to take out something unkind. Trying to practice what I preach here.
I think this isn’t central to your point, but I wanted to push the “straw Vulcan” point a bit further. It’s not just that it’s rational to try to understand other people’s emotional behaviour, it’s that even your own emotional responses are frequently rational and that being attuned and responsive and reactive to your emotions is an important epistemic tool. When people hurt you it is rational to be angry, or sad; it is not rational to be ruled by these emotions, but ignoring them entirely is just as bad. Your emotions are a part of your sensory / observational experience of the world, just as much as your vision or your hearing are, and if you don’t acknowledge their role in your understanding, I think you will make worse predictions about what will happen.
I don’t think your criticisms were because the post was emotional, and I don’t think the criticism of the allusion to Caroline benefiting from this culture was a criticism of tone. They were criticisms of the content / claims / ideas / attitudes in the post, and I think it was important to make them.
I do think it’s fair to be concerned that these criticisms are getting more attention than the rest of what is said in the post. The issues Keerthana raises are serious and it would be wrong to ignore them entirely because of some objectionable aspects of the post, especially ones that don’t seem super central to the message. But just because an emotional post is being criticised, doesn’t mean it’s being criticised for its emotion, and doesn’t mean emotional posts are unwelcome here.
The reaction to this post (and my comments) exemplifies a dynamic I’ve seen before on the Forum, where people’s posts are disregarded, criticized, downvoted etc because they are emotional, impressionistic, openly angered or outraged, emphatic… etc, and praised for being detached, dry, measured, caveat-ed… We should care about epistemics, but I think sometimes readers of the Forum are not charitable enough to people who communicate in different ways to them.
Maybe because those caveats are really important, if you want to actually improve things and not just cause chaos.
Like, there’s a failure mode that’s really common where there’s anger at a problem, and that anger fuels solutions that wouldn’t actually solve the problem, then try to implement it and get surprised at how much the policy is failing, never considering that caveats and measures always mattered, and they’re just too angry to notice the problems with their solution.
It’s a good thing that EA rejects the notion in practice on social media, that controversy and anger = good. They aren’t that good in practice.
I agree that controversy and anger aren’t good per se, but people can be broadly right and also angry. Sometimes anger is pretty appropriate, even though critical distance and wisdom is also appropriate. I think people have over-updated from ‘I shouldn’t take people seriously just because they are emotional/angry’ to ‘if people are emotional/angry, I shouldn’t take them seriously’.
I also suspect that people care more about how anger is expressed, than the presence of it. E.g., Will McAskill and Rob Wiblin, in their recent statements on FTX, expressed anger -Will said ‘I am outraged’ and Rob said ‘I am fucking appalled’. But their statements were generally well-received, I suspect because though they stated they were angry, their tone was nonetheless detached.
I feel kind of complicated about my previous comments on this post. I do still stand by what I said. But I feel kind of bad that my comments have got more karma than the post itself, because I do think that we should worry about toxicity towards women in the community, and many of the things Keerthana describes are really bad and on balance, I think I’m happy she wrote this post.
The reaction to this post (and my comments) exemplifies a dynamic I’ve seen before on the Forum, where people’s posts are disregarded, criticized, downvoted etc because they are emotional, impressionistic, openly angered or outraged, emphatic… etc, and praised for being detached, dry, measured, caveat-ed… We should care about epistemics, but I think sometimes readers of the Forum are not charitable enough to people who communicate in different ways to them.
I think this a really important point about the dynamic of criticism toward emotionally raw posts. I see the reactions to this post as illustrative of the very problem that the OP is describing about using LessWrong jedi mindtricks to ignore boundaries and frankly to rationalize harrassment. In this case, a member of the community has shared their personal experiences and reactions to toxic behavior, and a significant number of people seem to be responding with criticisms of the intellectual merit of the post, as if the post were a logic exercise and not a situation which is uncomfortable and threatening for real people.
I don’t mean to imply that we as a community should never engage in a more detached dialogue about the causes and possible solutions to the sexual harassment and misogyny described. However, I feel really uncomfortable when I read comments saying that expressing anger is useless or that the author should have done more to describe different possible interpretations of their experience or ways in which their experience may not be representative of everyone’s. I wish I could believe that this forum is a place where I could describe my own experiences without fearing that people will treat feelings of sadness or anger as some kind of prompt for a rationalist debate.
On that note, inspired by Keerthana’s bravery in sharing, I will mention my own experiences as a woman in EA. I am not a well-known member of the community or a frequent forum poster, but I am using an alternate account because of what I described in the paragraph above. I have experienced quite a bit of casual misogyny in interactions in EA spaces. I have walked away from a handful of conversations at EA events feeling that people have dismissed my ideas, mansplained topics about which I am knowledgable, or aggressively interrupted and silenced others. I sometimes read forum posts that make concerns about gender-based violence or community health feel like a footnote. I am thankful that this describes a minority of my experiences, but unfortunately it’s enough to make me wary when participating in EA events.
I completely agree that OP raises totally legitimate points that are worthy of being taken seriously.
However, I am grateful for you initial comment and really disagree that the issue here is being emotional and impressionistic. The problem with the post is that it is bigoted. OP makes a central issue of people not respecting one’s “poly/mono” choice and then proceeds to suggest that women in poly relationships are unhappy and that poly men are uniquely likely to be sexual predators. This is all framed as a matter of OP’s experience, and I have no reason to doubt the truthfulness of it all. But that doesn’t excuse framing the issue as a matter of one’s choice to be poly or not. Imagine if this framing was done for any other group. Even if you have legitimate negative experiences with members of a certain group, framing the issue as relevant to membership in that group without any evidence whatsoever is unfair to say the least. This is especially true for something like sexual pressure, which monogamous people have been engaging in far and wide since the dawn of time. In any case, it is a really tired trope to paint anyone who does not fall very neatly in line with conventional ideas of relationship structures as a sexual predator.
It’s also frankly quite hypocritical in that OP seems to be the one not respecting others “mono/poly” choice.
None of this is to say that OPs experiences are not real or that they are not a problem. Of course they are! But that does not make this a fair or productive post and it would have been much better received if OP didn’t make it about something irrelevant.
This is the comment that made me feel very unsafe and take down the post.
What I said:
1. you can find many unhappy women in poly relationships
2. many poly men are sexual predators
You reframed my sentences to your convenience to claim that I said :
the rest of your post bases on that assumption. Many != all, that is an important distinction. I am qualifying my sentences with “some of these men”, “many men” in various places but you’ve ignored that. I am not anonymous, so your calling me bigoted seems retaliatory, personal and unwarranted. The reason I didn’t take specific names but used many was because I don’t want to get into more issues, but usually the definition of many is more than one. I have not stopped a poly person from being poly so what do you mean by “not respecting others mono/poly choices”? Who did I coerce?
@lizka, @julia_wise, take note, I cannot presume your forum permits retaliation, name calling and personal attacks.
I didn’t call you bigoted, I called your post bigoted and I stand by it. If my comment about your post made you feel “very unsafe,” then I do not wish to argue about the matter and risk coming off as even more of a threat to you, as that could not be further from my intention. I wish you the best.
This comment feels important, like something I’ve been considering trying to spin into a full post. Finding a frame has been hard, because it feels like I’m trying to translate what’s (unfortunately) a distinctively non-EA culture norm into reasoning that EAs will take more seriously.
One thought that I do want to share though is that I don’t think seeing this as something that needs to be weighed against good epistemics feels quite right. I think our prizing good epistemics should mean being able to reason clearly and adjust our reactions to tone/emotional tenor from people who (very understandably!) are speaking from a place of trauma and deep hurt.
The best frame I have so far for a post is reminding people about Julia Galef’s straw-Vulcan argument and arguing what it implies for conversations on (understandably) incredibly emotionally heavy topics, and in tough times more generally. Roughly rehashing the argument because I can’t find a good link on it: Spock frequently makes assumptions that humans will be perfectly rational creatures under all circumstances, and when this leads him astray essentially shrugs and responds “it’s not my fault that I did not predict their actions correctly, they were being irrational!”. Galef’s point of course, is that this is horrible rationality: the failure to reason about how emotions might effect people and adjust accordingly means your epistemics are severely impoverished.
Setting aside the Klingon style rationality argument, there also feels like there should be a argument along the lines of how (to me, incredibly!) obvious it should be that tone like this demands sympathy and willingness to take on the burden of being accommodating from people serious about thinking of themselves as invested in altruism as a value. I’m still figuring out how to express this crisply (and to be clear, without bitterness) so that it will resonate.
If you have thoughts on what the best frame would be here, would love to hear any thoughts you have or discuss more.
Edited to take out something unkind. Trying to practice what I preach here.
I think this isn’t central to your point, but I wanted to push the “straw Vulcan” point a bit further. It’s not just that it’s rational to try to understand other people’s emotional behaviour, it’s that even your own emotional responses are frequently rational and that being attuned and responsive and reactive to your emotions is an important epistemic tool. When people hurt you it is rational to be angry, or sad; it is not rational to be ruled by these emotions, but ignoring them entirely is just as bad. Your emotions are a part of your sensory / observational experience of the world, just as much as your vision or your hearing are, and if you don’t acknowledge their role in your understanding, I think you will make worse predictions about what will happen.
I don’t think your criticisms were because the post was emotional, and I don’t think the criticism of the allusion to Caroline benefiting from this culture was a criticism of tone. They were criticisms of the content / claims / ideas / attitudes in the post, and I think it was important to make them.
I do think it’s fair to be concerned that these criticisms are getting more attention than the rest of what is said in the post. The issues Keerthana raises are serious and it would be wrong to ignore them entirely because of some objectionable aspects of the post, especially ones that don’t seem super central to the message. But just because an emotional post is being criticised, doesn’t mean it’s being criticised for its emotion, and doesn’t mean emotional posts are unwelcome here.
Maybe because those caveats are really important, if you want to actually improve things and not just cause chaos.
Like, there’s a failure mode that’s really common where there’s anger at a problem, and that anger fuels solutions that wouldn’t actually solve the problem, then try to implement it and get surprised at how much the policy is failing, never considering that caveats and measures always mattered, and they’re just too angry to notice the problems with their solution.
It’s a good thing that EA rejects the notion in practice on social media, that controversy and anger = good. They aren’t that good in practice.
I agree that controversy and anger aren’t good per se, but people can be broadly right and also angry. Sometimes anger is pretty appropriate, even though critical distance and wisdom is also appropriate. I think people have over-updated from ‘I shouldn’t take people seriously just because they are emotional/angry’ to ‘if people are emotional/angry, I shouldn’t take them seriously’.
I also suspect that people care more about how anger is expressed, than the presence of it. E.g., Will McAskill and Rob Wiblin, in their recent statements on FTX, expressed anger -Will said ‘I am outraged’ and Rob said ‘I am fucking appalled’. But their statements were generally well-received, I suspect because though they stated they were angry, their tone was nonetheless detached.