Thanks Julia; this is a really insightful post. I will make sure to use it if anyone in the EA community asks me questions related to community health/the process for complaints in the future.
One of the things I’m curious about is how you see the balance of these trade-offs:
Encourage the sharing of research and other work, even if the people producing it have done bad stuff personally
Don’t let people use EA to gain social status that they’ll use to do more bad stuff
Take the talent bottleneck seriously; don’t hamper hiring / projects too much
Take culture seriously; don’t create a culture where people can predictably get away with bad stuff if they’re also producing impact
It feels like CEA’s default is to be overly cautious and tread lightly in situations where someone is accused of bad behaviour. (Ie. if ‘cautious action’ vs ‘rash action’ is a metric here, I would think that CEA would sit considerably more on the cautious side.) This is quite understandable, but I wonder how you think about the risk of being too slow to condemn certain behaviours?
For example, I could imagine situations where something bad happens, and both the accuser and the accused contribute valuable work to the community. However, due to CEA’s response leaning towards the side of caution, the accuser walks away feeling like their complaint hasn’t been taken seriously enough/that CEA should have been quicker to act, and possibly feels less inclined to be involved in EA in the future. Do you feel like this has happened and, if so, how do you think about these types of situations?
due to CEA’s response leaning towards the side of caution, the accuser walks away feeling like their complaint hasn’t been taken seriously enough/that CEA should have been quicker to act
I’m sure this has happened, and I’m sad about that.
I also know different people who would say that CEA has been too aggressive in kicking people out, too willing to take action based on limited evidence.
I want to weigh the fact that people will feel alienated by both of these perceptions/experiences. But ultimately we can’t make decisions based only on whether someone will feel disillusioned with EA as a result, because it often seems any call we make will result in someone feeling we were too far in some direction.
Thanks Julia; this is a really insightful post. I will make sure to use it if anyone in the EA community asks me questions related to community health/the process for complaints in the future.
One of the things I’m curious about is how you see the balance of these trade-offs:
It feels like CEA’s default is to be overly cautious and tread lightly in situations where someone is accused of bad behaviour. (Ie. if ‘cautious action’ vs ‘rash action’ is a metric here, I would think that CEA would sit considerably more on the cautious side.) This is quite understandable, but I wonder how you think about the risk of being too slow to condemn certain behaviours?
For example, I could imagine situations where something bad happens, and both the accuser and the accused contribute valuable work to the community. However, due to CEA’s response leaning towards the side of caution, the accuser walks away feeling like their complaint hasn’t been taken seriously enough/that CEA should have been quicker to act, and possibly feels less inclined to be involved in EA in the future. Do you feel like this has happened and, if so, how do you think about these types of situations?
I’m sure this has happened, and I’m sad about that.
I also know different people who would say that CEA has been too aggressive in kicking people out, too willing to take action based on limited evidence.
I want to weigh the fact that people will feel alienated by both of these perceptions/experiences. But ultimately we can’t make decisions based only on whether someone will feel disillusioned with EA as a result, because it often seems any call we make will result in someone feeling we were too far in some direction.