Never ever would I have guessed this. You were living proof to me that at least some, if not many, decent men people exist. I am completely devastated.
EA has been dying. But for me, this is the ultimate death blow.
[Edit: Comment was modified to no longer refer to a specific demographic group.]
I’m a straight guy, and I grew up in an era of pre-#metoo, sex-positive feminism. The doctrine of the day was “men and women are pretty much the same in every way and it’s sexist to claim otherwise”. “Slut shaming is bad, women can be just as horny as men, wanting women to be chaste and pure is patriarchical and bad, trying to give women special protection from harm is benevolent sexism and therefore bad, treating people the same regardless of their gender is good and desirable.”
An anecdote from this era of feminism—I once read a woman claim something like: if a man hears a new dirty joke, and he tells it to his male friends but not his female friends, that’s sexism.
I figured: “OK, well if men and women are pretty much the same in every way, and treating women as delicate flowers is sexist and bad, that means I can model women’s dating preferences by just putting myself in their shoes and asking myself how I would feel if I was in their situation. Women are just people, after all!”
Obviously, at a certain point I figured out that this was a bad heuristic. I believe I’ve technically been the victim of sexual assault (rot13′d: n qehax thl ng n cnegl tenoorq zl pebgpu bhg bs gur oyhr nsgre V gbyq uvz ur jnf cneglvat gbb uneq—V unir ab vagrerfg va thlf naq jnf tvivat fvtanyf bs naablnapr, abg frkhny vagrerfg). I found it about as unpleasant as brushing off a persistent insect. I basically forgot about it for years, until #metoo came along and I thought to myself “huh, I guess maybe I’ve been assaulted too.”
I’ve also been catcalled by women a few times—those are fond memories that I recall when my self-esteem is low.
I hesitate to share this, because I fear readers will think I’m suggesting that women’s preferences are somehow less important or legitimate. That’s not the case. I recognize that society is full of diverse peope with diverse preferences, and I think we should work to satisfy everyone’s preferences in a harmonious way.
Rather, what I’m trying to say is: I think society underrates how often men have trouble modeling women’s preferences. It looks to me like a preference modeling failure at least partially explains the OP. I think failure to model preferences accurately is a mistake that decent people sometimes make. The OP doesn’t read at all to me like an instance of premeditated, deliberate harm. (And, separately, I wish women would invest more in helping men model their preferences. It seems like if a guy says “that doesn’t seem bad to me”, the most common response is some variant of “you’re a horrible person!”, which is counterproductive for learning. It doesn’t communicate any general rule which could allow me to extrapolate from this instance and accurately model your preferences in other situations.)
@Aptdell this comment is frustrating to read as a woman who has experienced unwanted sexual harassment/attention in the EA community (for context: I was very involved in the EA community for about 4.5 years, I worked at CEA in Oxford for several years and had/have many friends who would probably count as influential people in the movement.)
Firstly, your description of sexism, including ‘benevolent sexism’, is overly simplistic and unhelpful here. Infantilising women (i.e. treating them as ‘delicate flowers’) need not be conflated with respecting women, respecting their autonomy and existence as sexual human beings. I suspect your description of a “dirty joke” is actually a joke that denigrates and disrespects women—your female friend probably underestimated your ability to understand that nuance. I’ll match your anecdote with another: I have many close and dear male friends—several of whom have a very ‘edgy’ sense of humour, they are able to joke about sex, men, women, relationships—any number of topics, without ever making me feel unsafe. Probably because ‘women’ are not the butt of their jokes—because they see women as full human beings.
Congrats on being cat-called—let us know when you’re yelled at on the street by a human a foot taller than you who could clearly kill you if they wanted to. Let us know when you’ve been followed home, or pushed up against a wall and groped.
“I wish women would invest more in helping men model their preferences.”—this part gripes me the most. You wish we would do MORE emotional labour to help men learn how to stop behaving badly? How often and loudly do we need to say that we don’t want to be yelled at in the street, or hit-on at work, or sent multiple messages after we’ve politely declined advances? I personally have spent so much of my own time gently and patiently trying to explain to “awkward” men why their behaviour sucks. I’m so tired.
[Edit: as much as I do have problems with @Aptdell’s post above, I also think they’re getting the brunt of my frustration with this whole situation. I write this not to undermine my post but just to acknowledge that my emotions were running high when I wrote it, and I might revise some parts tomorrow. ]
this comment is frustrating to read as a woman who has experienced unwanted sexual harassment/attention in the EA community
Sorry to hear that.
To clarify my perspective more broadly, I’ll link to an older comment I made: “Even in the hypothetical where you dotted every possible i and crossed every possible t, getting affirmative verbal consent for every individual muscle movement as though you were in some sort of parody video—if she feels violated afterwards, something went wrong.”
I personally have spent so much of my own time gently and patiently trying to explain to “awkward” men why their behaviour sucks. I’m so tired.
It seems to me that this is a valuable activity and it would be good if it was possible to do it in a more scalable way, to improve the benefit-to-effort ratio. Obviously if you’re feeling burnt out on it, you should take a break.
I’m sorry you’re feeling tired.
(Side note: I had some responses to your other points, but I kept deleting them because I didn’t have a good theory of how they would help move the discussion forwards. It felt like there was a danger of getting lost in the weeds in an “ordinary internet argument” which didn’t contribute to any “action-relevant” important broader point. If you want to discuss more, maybe you could articulate specific important broader points you think we disagree on that would be good to hash out. Alternatively, if you want to have an ordinary internet argument, we could move this to a different medium, e.g. you can send me a private message.)
(This comment is not intended to provide anyone who has committed misconduct with an excuse, it is meant to inform preventive measures.)
I think this is a strong argument for clearer / more explicit community norms, and much more training/education. (I am talking about formal training/education provided by organizations; I am not saying that women have an obligation to “educate” men).
I’d suggest (1) society as a whole does a lousy job in this area; (2) men in EA may be less likely to have picked up on and internalized the lessons society as a whole does attempt to teach; and (3) the norms in EA seem to be different than the norms in general society, so that people may be unsure which general-society norms to follow.
I’m not sure what type of training/education would be helpful, but I know it needs to more intense, more tailored to EA, and more effective than standard corporate anti-harassment training.
If men in general (or men in EA) “have trouble modeling women’s preferences,” that points to a need for relatively more bright-line rules than there would be in a world where that isn’t the case. If an individual man has difficulty in this area, he needs to recognize that issue and err on the side of caution.
I largely agree. I think the thing to do is to poll a representative sample of women in EA regarding when they would / would not want a guy to flirt with them (and how), then formulate some guidelines based on the poll results and publish the guidelines.
Julia Wise previously expressed skepticism, saying:
My sense is that pre-specified criteria for what constitutes something like “offensive actions” or “unwanted sexual attention” and what the response should be isn’t realistic or a good idea. A lot of factors play into what constitutes a problem — words, body language, setting (the career fair vs. an afterparty vs. a deserted street outside the venue at night), power and status differences between the people, etc.
However, I don’t think this has to be an obstacle in principle. It’s easy to imagine separating these factors out into a point system or rubric—some sort of checklist, decision rule, or decision tree that I can memorize and go through in my head before flirting with someone.
As a side note, I see this as more of an issue with society than with EA. I’d love to see the poll idea done for the general population as well, and given the place we’re at right now as a society, I’m not sure I would expect anyone to reliably forecast the results of such a poll. (As an intuition pump, consider the massive standard deviation values found in Aella’s rape spectrum survey.)
EDIT: I did some introspection on this, and it seems to me like positive “do this” guidelines (like “prioritize ensuring that the other person is comfortable”) could be a lot more effective than negative “don’t do this” guidelines.
I think it can be somewhat useful to talk explicitly about factors likely to make flirting welcome or unwelcome. But a problem I have with this is that it’s wrong to interact with people based on averages, basically. If 70% of EA women like or dislike being flirted with in X way, what do you do? Do the 30% minority just have to put up with discomfort (or, less seriously, a lack of enjoyable flirting)? Are you 70% flirtatious (pleasing no-one fully)?
I think the problem with checklists is that fundamentally, negotiating social interactions so that everyone is happy and comfortable, and flirting and appropriate escalation, are social skills. And social skills tend to be fuzzy and involve very different types of thinking than analysis, or rule-following. So when people throw their hands up in despair, or ask for explicit rules, it feels a bit like they’re getting annoyed that they can’t just throw their technical skills at a social-skills problem. (Written as someone who finds some social skills hard, including in the areas of flirting/romance)
But most professional contexts outside of EA have more explicit norms/rules than EA does. Those professional cultures presumably developed those more explicit norms/rules for a reason (most likely learning from experience). So I think one has to be careful with assumptions about why people want clearer rules. Maybe, for instance, they don’t trust other people’s social skills.
But a problem I have with this is that it’s wrong to interact with people based on averages, basically. If 70% of EA women like or dislike being flirted with in X way, what do you do? Do the 30% minority just have to put up with discomfort (or, less seriously, a lack of enjoyable flirting)? Are you 70% flirtatious (pleasing no-one fully)?
I agree this is a problem, but I don’t think we solve this problem by ignoring it.
Right now men are choosing to flirt with women/not flirt with women based on some mishmash of: past experiences, flirting intuitions, cultural conditioning, etc. My claim isn’t that the approach I suggested is perfect. My claim is that it’s likely an improvement on this baseline.
I’d suggest getting the community health team to analyze the survey results and generate some guidelines that are acceptable to, say, 95% of women surveyed. Publish the guidelines and say “if you don’t like the guidelines, we recommend you avoid EA events”.
I think if EA has a major problem with sexual harassment, an approach like this could be really effective. On the other hand, if sexual harassment is not actually much of a problem in EA, we may as well continue with the current approach.
I think the problem with checklists is that fundamentally, negotiating social interactions so that everyone is happy and comfortable, and flirting and appropriate escalation, are social skills. And social skills tend to be fuzzy and involve very different types of thinking than analysis, or rule-following. So when people throw their hands up in despair, or ask for explicit rules, it feels a bit like they’re getting annoyed that they can’t just throw their technical skills at a social-skills problem. (Written as someone who finds some social skills hard, including in the areas of flirting/romance)
First, I suspect there are cultures in which romantic interactions are much more ritualized than our current culture. Flirting doesn’t have to be this super fuzzy thing if we don’t want it to be.
I also think there’s room for social skills in the approach I suggested. People seem to believe there are situations where you shouldn’t flirt with someone even if you think they’re trying to flirt with you—some examples might be: when you’re interviewing them for a job, when you’re in a confined space, when you’re on a deserted street late at night, etc. Basically, social perception can just be another factor on the list of factors to consider. But, as you state, it’s an inherently fuzzy factor, so it probably shouldn’t be as load-bearing as it currently is.
I don’t know Owen that well—I’ve probably interacted with him for half an hour or something—but he never struck me as particularly deficient in social skills. My guess is if he had read this situation accurately, and the woman in question appreciated his edginess, we never would’ve heard about any of this. People seem to favor a really punitive approach to Owen’s actions, but the problem is that even if you’re really good at reading social situations, say 99% accurate, there are always going to be those 1% misreadings which show up if you have a large enough number of social interactions.
Speaking for myself, I don’t think I am notably deficient in social skills. I enjoy social deduction games, acting classes, etc. In my mind, the issue has more to do with differing moral intuitions, especially regarding when harsh punishments are appropriate. (My own moral intuitions would be along the lines of: “First, there is no such thing as a romantically or sexually successful person who has never ever creeped anyone out. Give yourself permission to be creepy. I am not saying that you should go around trying to creep people out… [but, stuff happens].”) I’m usually comfortable trusting my social intuitions, but when so many condemn so harshly based on a short description of a situation with very little social context, that’s when I wonder if social intuitions are really enough.
Maybe a good intuition pump is: Imagine if people could send you to jail if they thought you were being kind of an asshole. Can you see how you would be tempted to stop posting on social media and never leave your room? Even if you’re fairly skilled socially, it’s inevitable that people will sometimes think you’re being kind of an asshole, unless you have an unhealthy obsession with what others think. Now consider that, as far as I can tell, Owen’s crime was essentially “being kind of an asshole”, but in the romantic/sexual domain. If the costs of “being kind of an asshole” in the romantic/sexual domain are much higher than in other domains—I have no particular reason to doubt that—then maybe it’s worthwhile to add in additional precautions beyond just “use social skills”?
I’m really sorry that you’re feeling this way. I think a lot of us have strong emotions about this news and don’t know how to process it. Given that you wrote “[hastily written],” I assume that this comment is helping you process the news.
At the same time, I think it’s important for us to not slip away from our norms on the Forum, which include making sure the space is welcoming to different groups of people, including men. There are a few different ways to interpret the part of your comment that’s about men. Unfortunately, I think right now it’s not clear whether you’re saying that “there are no decent men” (which would be norm-violating). (If you replace “men” with a different demographic group, you clearly see that the statement is not acceptable. This test doesn’t always work — sometimes there’s a long history of stereotype or power that makes statements about a demographic group much worse than the same statement about a different demographic group, but I think it’s a useful signal here.)
So it might be worth clarifying what you mean in the comment. In the future, please avoid sweeping statements about demographic groups.
Thank you Lizka. You are making a good point and I have edited the comment above to no longer refer to a specific demographic group.
I would not want anyone to get the impression that Owen’s poor behaviour is merely a strong negative update on men.
It is a strong negative update on the decency of everybody.
(Though I would expect women to show a lack of decency in slightly different ways than men.)
I still expect some decent people to exist. I just now think there are even more rare than I previously thought.
Fwiw, my read of Denise’s comment was more like “My previous impression of Owen was that he was an outstanding example of what a decent man should look like, and thus this news is especially disappointing and devastating”, rather than something like “Owen was the last decent man, and this shows that there are no decent men”.
Or: “learning of this significantly updated my assessment of the number of decent men downward, especially in EA.”
As a man, I wasn’t offended in light of the circumstances of the statement (though I don’t speak for all men).
Although I’m not endorsing the wording, the message that Owen’s behavior harmed people other than those directly involved, and eroded community trust in multiple ways, is an important message for him and others to hear.
However, I completely understand why Lizka wrote the mod comment and think it was a balanced comment.
This was also my interpretation, though I can imagine others interpreting it differently.
I would also like to clarify that I strongly disagreed (but didn’t downvote) Denise’s post strictly in response to the final paragraph, to express something like “Let’s not overreact to recent events. EA has accomplished great things and will likely recover from these setbacks. And I hope you don’t leave EA, Denise!” This strikes me as a case where the meaning of the disagree vote count is particularly opaque, so it seemed worth adding this clarification.
I appreciate Denise’s hastily written comment. As others have noted, ‘feelings’ are missing from this thread—strong feelings that many people (women) are feeling. Her reactive comment gives us a good glimpse into the harm being felt, even if it’s hyperbolic .
Lizka, this isn’t a good idea. This kind of moderation will have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to express appropriate emotions at a difficult time.
You state and consider the natural explanation for why Denise’s statement is okay (that there is no especially problematic history of using this and similar statements to oppress men). If open defense of race science and questioning of sexual abuse victims falls within acceptable discourse norms, I think Denise’s statement should fall comfortably within them too.
I’m confused about why David’s comment was downvoted into negative territory but agreevoted positively (-9 / +13 at the time I saw it). Whether or not people agree with it, it’s a valid point (and they seem to agree with it on net . . .)
I assume EAs think I’m speaking a bit sharply here? These discussions are hard because EAs often place a very high value on polite/unemotional discourse, whereas non-EAs often place a higher value on discourse that won’t cause harms to groups/people and think that sharper or more emotional discourse can sometimes be an appropriate response (or even the only appropriate response) in such cases.
Maybe the norms-controlling/moderator team could take into account the millennia-old tradition of male power (as a demographic group) over everyone else (as a demographic group), making the statement about there (not) being decent men meaningfully different from a statement about e.g. there (not) being decent women...
Just gonna flag that I feel like −100 agreement for someone being sad feels weird to me. Sure I guess you can disagree that it’s the deathblow of EA, but I dunno, just feels a bit much. Not telling anyone off, or trying to create some complex social rule, but maybe it should be % or something.
I’m sorry that you’re hurting, Denise, and I know that this was hastily written. And I think there’s some value in others knowing how you’re feeling.
But I worry that your ‘death blow’ comment reinforces the ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ narrative:
“Recently, bright young people have been energized by the political activist movement. Political activism says that instead of helping your friends or spending time with your family, you should have opinions on national politics, vote for candidates you like, donate to campaigns, and go to protests. But these high-sounding ideas came crashing down when President Bill Clinton, a hero of the political activism movement, was caught having sex with his intern Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky, herself a political activist, was lured into the White House with grandiose promises of “making a difference” and “doing her civic duty”. But in the end, political activism’s ideas proved nothing more than a cover for normal human predatory behavior. Young people should resist the lure of political activism and stick to time-honored ways of making a difference, like staying in touch with their family and holding church picnics.”
[hastily written]
Never ever would I have guessed this. You were living proof to me that at least some, if not many, decent
menpeople exist. I am completely devastated.EA has been dying. But for me, this is the ultimate death blow.
[Edit: Comment was modified to no longer refer to a specific demographic group.]
How do you define “decent”?
I’m a straight guy, and I grew up in an era of pre-#metoo, sex-positive feminism. The doctrine of the day was “men and women are pretty much the same in every way and it’s sexist to claim otherwise”. “Slut shaming is bad, women can be just as horny as men, wanting women to be chaste and pure is patriarchical and bad, trying to give women special protection from harm is benevolent sexism and therefore bad, treating people the same regardless of their gender is good and desirable.”
An anecdote from this era of feminism—I once read a woman claim something like: if a man hears a new dirty joke, and he tells it to his male friends but not his female friends, that’s sexism.
I figured: “OK, well if men and women are pretty much the same in every way, and treating women as delicate flowers is sexist and bad, that means I can model women’s dating preferences by just putting myself in their shoes and asking myself how I would feel if I was in their situation. Women are just people, after all!”
Obviously, at a certain point I figured out that this was a bad heuristic. I believe I’ve technically been the victim of sexual assault (rot13′d: n qehax thl ng n cnegl tenoorq zl pebgpu bhg bs gur oyhr nsgre V gbyq uvz ur jnf cneglvat gbb uneq—V unir ab vagrerfg va thlf naq jnf tvivat fvtanyf bs naablnapr, abg frkhny vagrerfg). I found it about as unpleasant as brushing off a persistent insect. I basically forgot about it for years, until #metoo came along and I thought to myself “huh, I guess maybe I’ve been assaulted too.”
I’ve also been catcalled by women a few times—those are fond memories that I recall when my self-esteem is low.
I hesitate to share this, because I fear readers will think I’m suggesting that women’s preferences are somehow less important or legitimate. That’s not the case. I recognize that society is full of diverse peope with diverse preferences, and I think we should work to satisfy everyone’s preferences in a harmonious way.
Rather, what I’m trying to say is: I think society underrates how often men have trouble modeling women’s preferences. It looks to me like a preference modeling failure at least partially explains the OP. I think failure to model preferences accurately is a mistake that decent people sometimes make. The OP doesn’t read at all to me like an instance of premeditated, deliberate harm. (And, separately, I wish women would invest more in helping men model their preferences. It seems like if a guy says “that doesn’t seem bad to me”, the most common response is some variant of “you’re a horrible person!”, which is counterproductive for learning. It doesn’t communicate any general rule which could allow me to extrapolate from this instance and accurately model your preferences in other situations.)
@Aptdell this comment is frustrating to read as a woman who has experienced unwanted sexual harassment/attention in the EA community (for context: I was very involved in the EA community for about 4.5 years, I worked at CEA in Oxford for several years and had/have many friends who would probably count as influential people in the movement.)
Firstly, your description of sexism, including ‘benevolent sexism’, is overly simplistic and unhelpful here. Infantilising women (i.e. treating them as ‘delicate flowers’) need not be conflated with respecting women, respecting their autonomy and existence as sexual human beings. I suspect your description of a “dirty joke” is actually a joke that denigrates and disrespects women—your female friend probably underestimated your ability to understand that nuance. I’ll match your anecdote with another: I have many close and dear male friends—several of whom have a very ‘edgy’ sense of humour, they are able to joke about sex, men, women, relationships—any number of topics, without ever making me feel unsafe. Probably because ‘women’ are not the butt of their jokes—because they see women as full human beings.
Congrats on being cat-called—let us know when you’re yelled at on the street by a human a foot taller than you who could clearly kill you if they wanted to. Let us know when you’ve been followed home, or pushed up against a wall and groped.
“I wish women would invest more in helping men model their preferences.”—this part gripes me the most. You wish we would do MORE emotional labour to help men learn how to stop behaving badly? How often and loudly do we need to say that we don’t want to be yelled at in the street, or hit-on at work, or sent multiple messages after we’ve politely declined advances? I personally have spent so much of my own time gently and patiently trying to explain to “awkward” men why their behaviour sucks. I’m so tired.
[Edit: as much as I do have problems with @Aptdell’s post above, I also think they’re getting the brunt of my frustration with this whole situation. I write this not to undermine my post but just to acknowledge that my emotions were running high when I wrote it, and I might revise some parts tomorrow. ]
Sorry to hear that.
To clarify my perspective more broadly, I’ll link to an older comment I made: “Even in the hypothetical where you dotted every possible i and crossed every possible t, getting affirmative verbal consent for every individual muscle movement as though you were in some sort of parody video—if she feels violated afterwards, something went wrong.”
It seems to me that this is a valuable activity and it would be good if it was possible to do it in a more scalable way, to improve the benefit-to-effort ratio. Obviously if you’re feeling burnt out on it, you should take a break.
I’m sorry you’re feeling tired.
(Side note: I had some responses to your other points, but I kept deleting them because I didn’t have a good theory of how they would help move the discussion forwards. It felt like there was a danger of getting lost in the weeds in an “ordinary internet argument” which didn’t contribute to any “action-relevant” important broader point. If you want to discuss more, maybe you could articulate specific important broader points you think we disagree on that would be good to hash out. Alternatively, if you want to have an ordinary internet argument, we could move this to a different medium, e.g. you can send me a private message.)
(This comment is not intended to provide anyone who has committed misconduct with an excuse, it is meant to inform preventive measures.)
I think this is a strong argument for clearer / more explicit community norms, and much more training/education. (I am talking about formal training/education provided by organizations; I am not saying that women have an obligation to “educate” men).
I’d suggest (1) society as a whole does a lousy job in this area; (2) men in EA may be less likely to have picked up on and internalized the lessons society as a whole does attempt to teach; and (3) the norms in EA seem to be different than the norms in general society, so that people may be unsure which general-society norms to follow.
I’m not sure what type of training/education would be helpful, but I know it needs to more intense, more tailored to EA, and more effective than standard corporate anti-harassment training.
If men in general (or men in EA) “have trouble modeling women’s preferences,” that points to a need for relatively more bright-line rules than there would be in a world where that isn’t the case. If an individual man has difficulty in this area, he needs to recognize that issue and err on the side of caution.
I largely agree. I think the thing to do is to poll a representative sample of women in EA regarding when they would / would not want a guy to flirt with them (and how), then formulate some guidelines based on the poll results and publish the guidelines.
Julia Wise previously expressed skepticism, saying:
However, I don’t think this has to be an obstacle in principle. It’s easy to imagine separating these factors out into a point system or rubric—some sort of checklist, decision rule, or decision tree that I can memorize and go through in my head before flirting with someone.
As a side note, I see this as more of an issue with society than with EA. I’d love to see the poll idea done for the general population as well, and given the place we’re at right now as a society, I’m not sure I would expect anyone to reliably forecast the results of such a poll. (As an intuition pump, consider the massive standard deviation values found in Aella’s rape spectrum survey.)
EDIT: I did some introspection on this, and it seems to me like positive “do this” guidelines (like “prioritize ensuring that the other person is comfortable”) could be a lot more effective than negative “don’t do this” guidelines.
I think it can be somewhat useful to talk explicitly about factors likely to make flirting welcome or unwelcome. But a problem I have with this is that it’s wrong to interact with people based on averages, basically. If 70% of EA women like or dislike being flirted with in X way, what do you do? Do the 30% minority just have to put up with discomfort (or, less seriously, a lack of enjoyable flirting)? Are you 70% flirtatious (pleasing no-one fully)?
I think the problem with checklists is that fundamentally, negotiating social interactions so that everyone is happy and comfortable, and flirting and appropriate escalation, are social skills. And social skills tend to be fuzzy and involve very different types of thinking than analysis, or rule-following. So when people throw their hands up in despair, or ask for explicit rules, it feels a bit like they’re getting annoyed that they can’t just throw their technical skills at a social-skills problem. (Written as someone who finds some social skills hard, including in the areas of flirting/romance)
But most professional contexts outside of EA have more explicit norms/rules than EA does. Those professional cultures presumably developed those more explicit norms/rules for a reason (most likely learning from experience). So I think one has to be careful with assumptions about why people want clearer rules. Maybe, for instance, they don’t trust other people’s social skills.
I agree this is a problem, but I don’t think we solve this problem by ignoring it.
Right now men are choosing to flirt with women/not flirt with women based on some mishmash of: past experiences, flirting intuitions, cultural conditioning, etc. My claim isn’t that the approach I suggested is perfect. My claim is that it’s likely an improvement on this baseline.
I’d suggest getting the community health team to analyze the survey results and generate some guidelines that are acceptable to, say, 95% of women surveyed. Publish the guidelines and say “if you don’t like the guidelines, we recommend you avoid EA events”.
I think if EA has a major problem with sexual harassment, an approach like this could be really effective. On the other hand, if sexual harassment is not actually much of a problem in EA, we may as well continue with the current approach.
First, I suspect there are cultures in which romantic interactions are much more ritualized than our current culture. Flirting doesn’t have to be this super fuzzy thing if we don’t want it to be.
I also think there’s room for social skills in the approach I suggested. People seem to believe there are situations where you shouldn’t flirt with someone even if you think they’re trying to flirt with you—some examples might be: when you’re interviewing them for a job, when you’re in a confined space, when you’re on a deserted street late at night, etc. Basically, social perception can just be another factor on the list of factors to consider. But, as you state, it’s an inherently fuzzy factor, so it probably shouldn’t be as load-bearing as it currently is.
I don’t know Owen that well—I’ve probably interacted with him for half an hour or something—but he never struck me as particularly deficient in social skills. My guess is if he had read this situation accurately, and the woman in question appreciated his edginess, we never would’ve heard about any of this. People seem to favor a really punitive approach to Owen’s actions, but the problem is that even if you’re really good at reading social situations, say 99% accurate, there are always going to be those 1% misreadings which show up if you have a large enough number of social interactions.
Speaking for myself, I don’t think I am notably deficient in social skills. I enjoy social deduction games, acting classes, etc. In my mind, the issue has more to do with differing moral intuitions, especially regarding when harsh punishments are appropriate. (My own moral intuitions would be along the lines of: “First, there is no such thing as a romantically or sexually successful person who has never ever creeped anyone out. Give yourself permission to be creepy. I am not saying that you should go around trying to creep people out… [but, stuff happens].”) I’m usually comfortable trusting my social intuitions, but when so many condemn so harshly based on a short description of a situation with very little social context, that’s when I wonder if social intuitions are really enough.
Maybe a good intuition pump is: Imagine if people could send you to jail if they thought you were being kind of an asshole. Can you see how you would be tempted to stop posting on social media and never leave your room? Even if you’re fairly skilled socially, it’s inevitable that people will sometimes think you’re being kind of an asshole, unless you have an unhealthy obsession with what others think. Now consider that, as far as I can tell, Owen’s crime was essentially “being kind of an asshole”, but in the romantic/sexual domain. If the costs of “being kind of an asshole” in the romantic/sexual domain are much higher than in other domains—I have no particular reason to doubt that—then maybe it’s worthwhile to add in additional precautions beyond just “use social skills”?
I’m commenting as a moderator right now.
I’m really sorry that you’re feeling this way. I think a lot of us have strong emotions about this news and don’t know how to process it. Given that you wrote “[hastily written],” I assume that this comment is helping you process the news.
At the same time, I think it’s important for us to not slip away from our norms on the Forum, which include making sure the space is welcoming to different groups of people, including men. There are a few different ways to interpret the part of your comment that’s about men. Unfortunately, I think right now it’s not clear whether you’re saying that “there are no decent men” (which would be norm-violating). (If you replace “men” with a different demographic group, you clearly see that the statement is not acceptable. This test doesn’t always work — sometimes there’s a long history of stereotype or power that makes statements about a demographic group much worse than the same statement about a different demographic group, but I think it’s a useful signal here.)
So it might be worth clarifying what you mean in the comment. In the future, please avoid sweeping statements about demographic groups.
Thank you Lizka. You are making a good point and I have edited the comment above to no longer refer to a specific demographic group.
I would not want anyone to get the impression that Owen’s poor behaviour is merely a strong negative update on men. It is a strong negative update on the decency of everybody.
(Though I would expect women to show a lack of decency in slightly different ways than men.)
I still expect some decent people to exist. I just now think there are even more rare than I previously thought.
Fwiw, my read of Denise’s comment was more like “My previous impression of Owen was that he was an outstanding example of what a decent man should look like, and thus this news is especially disappointing and devastating”, rather than something like “Owen was the last decent man, and this shows that there are no decent men”.
Or: “learning of this significantly updated my assessment of the number of decent men downward, especially in EA.”
As a man, I wasn’t offended in light of the circumstances of the statement (though I don’t speak for all men).
Although I’m not endorsing the wording, the message that Owen’s behavior harmed people other than those directly involved, and eroded community trust in multiple ways, is an important message for him and others to hear.
However, I completely understand why Lizka wrote the mod comment and think it was a balanced comment.
This was also my interpretation, though I can imagine others interpreting it differently.
I would also like to clarify that I strongly disagreed (but didn’t downvote) Denise’s post strictly in response to the final paragraph, to express something like “Let’s not overreact to recent events. EA has accomplished great things and will likely recover from these setbacks. And I hope you don’t leave EA, Denise!” This strikes me as a case where the meaning of the disagree vote count is particularly opaque, so it seemed worth adding this clarification.
I appreciate Denise’s hastily written comment. As others have noted, ‘feelings’ are missing from this thread—strong feelings that many people (women) are feeling. Her reactive comment gives us a good glimpse into the harm being felt, even if it’s hyperbolic .
Lizka, this isn’t a good idea. This kind of moderation will have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to express appropriate emotions at a difficult time.
You state and consider the natural explanation for why Denise’s statement is okay (that there is no especially problematic history of using this and similar statements to oppress men). If open defense of race science and questioning of sexual abuse victims falls within acceptable discourse norms, I think Denise’s statement should fall comfortably within them too.
I’m confused about why David’s comment was downvoted into negative territory but agreevoted positively (-9 / +13 at the time I saw it). Whether or not people agree with it, it’s a valid point (and they seem to agree with it on net . . .)
I assume EAs think I’m speaking a bit sharply here? These discussions are hard because EAs often place a very high value on polite/unemotional discourse, whereas non-EAs often place a higher value on discourse that won’t cause harms to groups/people and think that sharper or more emotional discourse can sometimes be an appropriate response (or even the only appropriate response) in such cases.
That seems fine? The chilling effect is something Mill identified as being a problem when it prevents good ideas from being shared.
Maybe the norms-controlling/moderator team could take into account the millennia-old tradition of male power (as a demographic group) over everyone else (as a demographic group), making the statement about there (not) being decent men meaningfully different from a statement about e.g. there (not) being decent women...
I think this is misguided. Seems very much like “#NotAllMen”.
Just gonna flag that I feel like −100 agreement for someone being sad feels weird to me. Sure I guess you can disagree that it’s the deathblow of EA, but I dunno, just feels a bit much. Not telling anyone off, or trying to create some complex social rule, but maybe it should be % or something.
I imagine that most of the disagreement is with (implied, but not stated) conditional “that Owen did this means that decent men don’t exist”.
Yeah, it feels like a weird case for the agree/disagree voting system. Not a perfect fit for every situation, and this one seems like one of those.
I’m sorry that you’re hurting, Denise, and I know that this was hastily written. And I think there’s some value in others knowing how you’re feeling.
But I worry that your ‘death blow’ comment reinforces the ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ narrative:
“Recently, bright young people have been energized by the political activist movement. Political activism says that instead of helping your friends or spending time with your family, you should have opinions on national politics, vote for candidates you like, donate to campaigns, and go to protests. But these high-sounding ideas came crashing down when President Bill Clinton, a hero of the political activism movement, was caught having sex with his intern Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky, herself a political activist, was lured into the White House with grandiose promises of “making a difference” and “doing her civic duty”. But in the end, political activism’s ideas proved nothing more than a cover for normal human predatory behavior. Young people should resist the lure of political activism and stick to time-honored ways of making a difference, like staying in touch with their family and holding church picnics.”
(https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-the-media-reported-on-other-things)