[Epistemic status: I’ve done a lot of thinking about these issues previously; I am a female mathematician who has spent several years running mentorship/support groups for women in my academic departments and has also spent a few years in various EA circles.]
I wholeheartedly agree that EA needs to improve with respect to professional/personal life mixing, and that these fuzzy boundaries are especially bad for women. I would love to see more consciousness and effort by EA organizations toward fixing these and related issues. In particular I agree with the following:
> Not having stricter boundaries for work/sex/social in mission focused organizations brings about inefficiency and nepotism [...]. It puts EA at risk of alienating women / others due to reasons that have nothing to do with ideological differences.
However, I can’t endorse the post as written, because there’s a lot of claims made which I think are wrong or misleading. Like: Sure, there are poly women who’d be happier being monogamous, but there are also poly men who’d be happier being monogamous, and my own subjective impression is that these are about equally common. Also, “EA/rationalism and redpill fit like yin and yang” does not characterize my experiences within the EA movement at all. I’m sure there are EAs who are creeps that subscribe to horrible beliefs about gender, but the vast majority of EAs I know are not like that at all. In a similar vein, regarding the claim “many men, often competing with each other, will persuade you to join polyamory using LessWrong style jedi mindtricks while they stand to benefit from the erosion of your boundaries”—I completely agree that this is absolutely awful if/when it happens, but I also think this is a lot less common than this post makes it sound.
Overall, the post seems to do a mixture of pointing out legitimate problems and making angry overarching accusations that I don’t think are true. I believe this post comes from a place of hurt, and I am sincerely sorry that you’ve had such negative experiences. I really do want the EA community to improve at this, and I want the people who’ve given you such bad experiences to be appropriately dealt with so that they don’t harass others in future. However, I don’t think this post as written will help much, because the overarching accusations are likely to turn people off from taking the rest of the post seriously.
[ETA: Wanted to add that the supportiveness and collaborative brainstorming suggested in the thread above by Megan, Keerthana, and Rockwell totally do seem helpful and productive to me, and I am excited to see this happening.]
[Second ETA: This comment was written in response to an earlier version of this post. Since then the author has made several edits which make what I’ve said here somewhat irrelevant.]
Availability bias informed by personal experience affects our perception of rate of incidence a lot. So I added this stat.
“Edit: I have personally experienced this more than three times in less than one year of attending EA events and that is far too many times.”
I have two other female friends I talk to who are not ready to speak up yet who were involved longer and report higher numbers.
Also, the post is not optimized for analytical/argumentative quality. My only goal is to speak my mind, my authentic experience and bring awareness that this happened to me and others I know. I would like to see these issues fixed but I am not overly invested in it yet, because there are also lots of interesting things to do in the world.
Yep, you are totally right about availability bias and I don’t mean to downplay at all your experience—that’s awful and I’d be delighted to see more efforts by EA groups to prevent this sort of thing.
And yeah, if you don’t feel like optimizing for argumentative quality that’s valid and my comment isn’t worth minding in that case! Not your job to fix these issues, and thank you for taking the time to bring awareness.
Experienced what 3 times in a year? Being asked out multiple times by the same person? Not having your no respected? Asked to join a polycule? I don’t get what the grievances are tbh
When you say that the author’s experience is uncommon, what evidence do you draw on? Having been an event organizer to whom some women feel safe reporting, I have heard a few reports of similar nature. That said, even one case is one too many.
To some experiences, anger is an appropriate and healthy response. When you say that this post “comes from a place of hurt”, it sounds as if you’re positioning that as a reason to criticize it. I’m worried that this raises an unreasonable standard for reports of harm. By the nature of the matter, victims have feelings about what they experienced. They should not be expected to present comprehensive analysis or perfect solutions because that’s not a job they willingly signed up for. If they have enough activation energy to report harm even though it is a charged topic for them or they fear backlash, it behooves us to honor their reports. A judgment whether to endorse or not endorse a report puts every reader in the position of judge, jury, and executioner, which I don’t think is the most helpful from a long-term view towards community health. Emotional charges can be taken at face value—as an indicator that this topic has hurt feelings, not more and not less.
Yes, I agree with what you’ve written here. “This comes from a place of hurt” was actually meant as hedging/softening; “because you have had bad experiences it makes sense for your post to be angry and emotionally charged and it should not be held to the same epistemic standards as a typical EA Forum post on a less personal issue.” Sorry that wasn’t clear.
My response was based on my impressions from several years being a woman in EA circles, which are that these issues absolutely do exist and affect an unfortunately high number of women to various extents, and also that some of what’s described in this post is atypically severe. (Obviously, none of this should ever happen, to any degree of severity, and I really want to see EA get better at preventing it!) Originally, I wasn’t clear on the fact that the post was written as a personal report of harm experienced, and that its descriptions of the severity were not intended as universal claims about what is typical. The author has now made a number of edits which make the scope/intent of the post much clearer, thereby obviating much of my comment. I agree that the idea of “endorsing” someone’s report of their own experience is not useful for the reasons you describe, and on further reflection I do want to be more careful in future to respond to reports of harm in ways that don’t disincentivize reporting—that is the last thing I want to do!
[Epistemic status: I’ve done a lot of thinking about these issues previously; I am a female mathematician who has spent several years running mentorship/support groups for women in my academic departments and has also spent a few years in various EA circles.]
I wholeheartedly agree that EA needs to improve with respect to professional/personal life mixing, and that these fuzzy boundaries are especially bad for women. I would love to see more consciousness and effort by EA organizations toward fixing these and related issues. In particular I agree with the following:
> Not having stricter boundaries for work/sex/social in mission focused organizations brings about inefficiency and nepotism [...]. It puts EA at risk of alienating women / others due to reasons that have nothing to do with ideological differences.
However, I can’t endorse the post as written, because there’s a lot of claims made which I think are wrong or misleading. Like: Sure, there are poly women who’d be happier being monogamous, but there are also poly men who’d be happier being monogamous, and my own subjective impression is that these are about equally common. Also, “EA/rationalism and redpill fit like yin and yang” does not characterize my experiences within the EA movement at all. I’m sure there are EAs who are creeps that subscribe to horrible beliefs about gender, but the vast majority of EAs I know are not like that at all. In a similar vein, regarding the claim “many men, often competing with each other, will persuade you to join polyamory using LessWrong style jedi mindtricks while they stand to benefit from the erosion of your boundaries”—I completely agree that this is absolutely awful if/when it happens, but I also think this is a lot less common than this post makes it sound.
Overall, the post seems to do a mixture of pointing out legitimate problems and making angry overarching accusations that I don’t think are true. I believe this post comes from a place of hurt, and I am sincerely sorry that you’ve had such negative experiences. I really do want the EA community to improve at this, and I want the people who’ve given you such bad experiences to be appropriately dealt with so that they don’t harass others in future. However, I don’t think this post as written will help much, because the overarching accusations are likely to turn people off from taking the rest of the post seriously.
[ETA: Wanted to add that the supportiveness and collaborative brainstorming suggested in the thread above by Megan, Keerthana, and Rockwell totally do seem helpful and productive to me, and I am excited to see this happening.]
[Second ETA: This comment was written in response to an earlier version of this post. Since then the author has made several edits which make what I’ve said here somewhat irrelevant.]
Availability bias informed by personal experience affects our perception of rate of incidence a lot. So I added this stat.
“Edit: I have personally experienced this more than three times in less than one year of attending EA events and that is far too many times.”
I have two other female friends I talk to who are not ready to speak up yet who were involved longer and report higher numbers.
Also, the post is not optimized for analytical/argumentative quality. My only goal is to speak my mind, my authentic experience and bring awareness that this happened to me and others I know. I would like to see these issues fixed but I am not overly invested in it yet, because there are also lots of interesting things to do in the world.
Yep, you are totally right about availability bias and I don’t mean to downplay at all your experience—that’s awful and I’d be delighted to see more efforts by EA groups to prevent this sort of thing.
And yeah, if you don’t feel like optimizing for argumentative quality that’s valid and my comment isn’t worth minding in that case! Not your job to fix these issues, and thank you for taking the time to bring awareness.
:)
Experienced what 3 times in a year? Being asked out multiple times by the same person? Not having your no respected? Asked to join a polycule? I don’t get what the grievances are tbh
When you say that the author’s experience is uncommon, what evidence do you draw on? Having been an event organizer to whom some women feel safe reporting, I have heard a few reports of similar nature. That said, even one case is one too many.
To some experiences, anger is an appropriate and healthy response. When you say that this post “comes from a place of hurt”, it sounds as if you’re positioning that as a reason to criticize it. I’m worried that this raises an unreasonable standard for reports of harm. By the nature of the matter, victims have feelings about what they experienced. They should not be expected to present comprehensive analysis or perfect solutions because that’s not a job they willingly signed up for. If they have enough activation energy to report harm even though it is a charged topic for them or they fear backlash, it behooves us to honor their reports. A judgment whether to endorse or not endorse a report puts every reader in the position of judge, jury, and executioner, which I don’t think is the most helpful from a long-term view towards community health. Emotional charges can be taken at face value—as an indicator that this topic has hurt feelings, not more and not less.
Edit: grammar
Yes, I agree with what you’ve written here. “This comes from a place of hurt” was actually meant as hedging/softening; “because you have had bad experiences it makes sense for your post to be angry and emotionally charged and it should not be held to the same epistemic standards as a typical EA Forum post on a less personal issue.” Sorry that wasn’t clear.
My response was based on my impressions from several years being a woman in EA circles, which are that these issues absolutely do exist and affect an unfortunately high number of women to various extents, and also that some of what’s described in this post is atypically severe. (Obviously, none of this should ever happen, to any degree of severity, and I really want to see EA get better at preventing it!) Originally, I wasn’t clear on the fact that the post was written as a personal report of harm experienced, and that its descriptions of the severity were not intended as universal claims about what is typical. The author has now made a number of edits which make the scope/intent of the post much clearer, thereby obviating much of my comment. I agree that the idea of “endorsing” someone’s report of their own experience is not useful for the reasons you describe, and on further reflection I do want to be more careful in future to respond to reports of harm in ways that don’t disincentivize reporting—that is the last thing I want to do!