I feel there’s a bit of a “missing mood” in some of the comments here, so I want to say:
I felt shocked, hurt, and betrayed at reading this. I never expected the Oxford incident to involve someone so central and well-regarded in the community, and certainly not Owen. Other EAs I know who knew Owen and the Oxford scene better are even more deeply hurt and surprised by this. (As other commenters here have already attested, tears have not been uncommon.)
Despite the length and thoughtfulness of the apology, it’s difficult for me to see how someone who was already in a position of power and status in EA—a community many of us see as key to the future of humanity—behaved in a way that seems so inappropriate and destructive. I’m angry not only at the harm that was done to women trying to do good in the world, but also to the health, reputation, and credibility of our community. We deserve better from our leaders.
I really sympathize with all the EAs—especially women—who feel betrayed and undermined by this news. To all of you who’ve had bad experiences like this in EA—I’m really sorry. I hope we can do better. I think we can do better—I think we already have the seeds of something better—but first we need to look hard at what we’re not doing well.
(Also: I think this apology was necessary, and was also unusually well-done, but I disagree with another highly upvoted commenter about it being “healing”. The revelation that Owen Cotton-Barratt did this feels very damaging to my relationship with the UK EA community—which typically does so much better than the Bay Area community on metrics like this! I hope that healing and a degree of rehabilitation can come in time, but I personally feel that talk about healing, redemption, etc, is somewhat premature, and that now is the time to pause for people’s hurt and grief.)
I appreciate you writing this. To me, this clarifies something. (I’m sorry there’s a rant incoming and if this comunity needs its hand held through these particular revelations, I’m not the one):
It seems like many EAs still (despite SBF) didn’t put significant probability on the person from that particular Time incident being a very well-known and trusted man in EA, such as Owen. This despite the SBF scandal and despite (to me) this incident being the most troubling incident in the Time piece by far which definitely sounded to be attached to a “real” EA more than any of the others (I say as someone who still has significant problems with the Time piece). Some of us had already put decent odds on the probability that this was an important figure doing something that was at least thoughtless and ended up damaging the EA movement… I mean the woman who reported him literally tried to convey that he was very well-connected and important.
It seems like the community still has a lot to learn from the surprise of SBF about problematic incidents and leaders in general: No one expects their friends or leaders are gonna be the ones who do problematic things. That includes us. Update now.
Some EAs think that a public reckoning in the comments is what is needed but honestly, if I was a victim looking in, such a show of shock and pearl-clutching just looks naive and frankly some of the responses would frustrate me a bit. Like “do you guys think you are a community of angels [or robots] or something?” I hypothesize that many of the people who are reacting kindly to Owen already got our surprise and despair out of our systems before now. Like I already mourned this, both that leaders can do dumb stuff that puts their own movement at risk and that the men I know and respect can do sexually problematic and power-naive things. And I’ve mourned it many times before now too, inside and outside of EA, when finding out that friends of mine or even partners have sexually problematic or manipulative pasts, or even been the one on the receiving end of sexual misconduct or worse from the people I love and trust the most. [I’ve also mourned my own professional stupidity plenty so I know deep in my bones that people who usually try pretty hard to do good can make major fuckups.]
I don’t want this message to be taken as dramatically proclaiming something like “men suck” or “reject all gods” or something.… I don’t think either of those are useful scripts. But honestly.… this community needs to come to terms that sexual harrassment or professional misconduct can be done by anyone. Sexual-assault-awareness advocates have been trumpeting that for decades now. Frankly the surprise this community is displaying is more concerning to me than Owen’s behavior itself. Like.… this is almost exactly what we should expect this to look like? Men have been disrespecting women or just not noticing the perspectives of women for most of human history, only improving sharply on a sociological level a few years ago, which is after most of the men in this community reached adulthood. The decent men with past fuckups are trying to atone for their past sins or mistakes, and I guarantee we all are connected to at least some of those men. You don’t realize who they are, but you should factor in that you are already close to a couple of them. So just like you shouldn’t be surprised when a woman tells you she has sexual abuse in her past or is uncomfortable, don’t be so surprised when a man tells you he has done something intentionally or accidentally problematic. Like, start integrating these social justice and human lessons, please. I feel this should be a relatively quick update to make, you should have downloaded almost the entire package already -_-
Again thank you for writing, it really did help me clarify a lot about this community’s reaction vs. my own, I think.
[Edit: I want to add that from a personal development perspective, I know mistakes happen, including moral mistakes and professional or social mistakes. I’ve done them and so has every person I’ve ever become close enough with to discuss such things with. That is one reason I want to treat both the women and Owen kindly. It could be you or your loved one or your child next time, trying to present a truthful situation that everyone views as outlandish but which you’d have found troubling in their shoes. Likewise, it could be you, or your loved one or your child next time being caught up after doing something everyone else thinks (and which you now humiliatingly agree) is egregious. From behind the veil of ignorance, how would you want the world to treat your or your child’s incident report or apology letter?]
It seems like many EAs still (despite SBF) didn’t put significant probability on the person from that particular Time incident being a very well-known and trusted man in EA, such as Owen.
These cases seem very different to me. One big update from the FTX situation was “in case you didn’t already notice, dark triad traits can be really bad.” By contrast, while I’m still processing the update from Owen’s case, I think it’s gonna be something more like, “probably there really is something unusually bad/unwelcoming with aspects of EA culture even outside the Bay area, sorry I didn’t see this earlier.” I don’t see how I could’ve made that update just from the FTX scandal.
For what it’s worth, I did have significant probability mass on the influential EA figure mentioned in the TIME article being someone who is indeed still influential within EA, despite the fact that the TIME article misrepresented the degree of involvement and centrality of one of accused in one of the other incidents they described. So, it’s not like I thought “no way this could happen to EA.” The main thing I was taken aback by is that it ended up being someone who was not only very influential within EA, but also someone to whom the adjective “trusted” applied to a very high degree. In my view, SBF was never “trusted” in the same way Owen was, even though he was even more influential and better known. (I still agree that “by far most EAs trusted SBF” is an accurate statement overall. I just want to highlight that there’s a difference between “minimum degree of trust required for someone to hold influential positions” and “would trust this person so much that they’d be among the very last people I’d expect to cause some kind of scandal.”)
But honestly.… this community needs to come to terms that sexual assault or professional misconduct can be done by anyone.
I want to distinguish here between types of sexual assault or professional misconduct that are very rare for anyone who isn’t high on dark tetrad traits and types of it that also frequently happen with people without dark tetrad traits. Both are bad, but if someone is a serial predator high on dark tetrad traits, you’ll potentially end up with several dozens of victims and there can be violence or very explicitand agentic threats to physical safety and ruining someone’s reputation, as opposed to just contextually having to worry that one’s reputation might suffer as a consequence of speaking up. Owen’s case was nothing remotely like the former, so it seems super important to still have a category that is qualitatively different and a lot worse (and that’s the category SBF was in, with respect to financial/regulatory misconduct rather than sexual misconduct).
The difference is easy to pin down.* Ask the question: “Does someone genuinely care about not messing up, not harming others or making them uncomfortable (or breaking laws/regulations/moral conventions), etc.? Yes or no?” If the answer is “yes,” then you’re in a different regime than if it’s “no.”
*Edit: actually, it’s probably a bit harder to pin this down. I think some bad actors may consciously care about not harming others, but their mind might have anti-social patterns of underlying emotions and self-deception and so on, which can trick highly-empathetic people into wanting to give them second and third chances because it convincingly seems as though they “mean well.” So, maybe instead of asking “do they care (conscious intent)?,” we have to also ask if they have a mind that’s sufficiently conducive to genuinely caring.
Yeah, I mean I don’t disagree with a lot of what you wrote. Maybe my comment was complicated by me trying to word it in such a way that anyone can “get it” whether they believe Owen did a anything “bad”, from a minor faux pas (socially bad, not ill-intentioned) to actual SA (morally bad, or creepy and otherwise badly and selfishly-intentioned)
At the end of the day what I’m trying to get at is something like:
“Not every scandal/negative incident is a black swan event. Everything relevant to this situation from ‘your supposedly-sage leaders do PR-risky professional misconduct’ to ‘your trusted friends and idols do SA within your community’ should be in your model of the world already.
On the other side of the coin, just because an incident is not a black swan event, doesn’t mean you think you should have been able to predict it. Surprises exist. The community shouldn’t feel a need to do a lot of handwringing about the community, society, and what happened. At least not if having these types of surprises (SAs or professional misconduct, including by leaders) were factored in. Why suddenly do a lot of self-flagellation in response?
That the incident is confirmed and by a leader doesn’t mean there are necessarily deep underlying structural problems (some cracks I’d like to see sealed, sure!). In particular I’m pretty upset about the amount of pushback Julia and the CH team is getting. Mistakes happen. We are all learning. Factor in that, sometimes, mistakes (as by Julia) will line up with other mistakes (as by Owen) and/or bad-intentioned acts (as by the journalist or Owen depending on your perspective) and create a bigger mishap. Roll the dice enough and it happens. And also, frankly, we should expect to see this happen in a way that brings up gender issues and SA, or just straight up is it, because that’s how the world goes [this is what my above comment might have appeared to focus on, but I also want to make the more complex point about expecting mishaps in general]
Also, that this incident is confirmed and by Owen doesn’t mean we should be updating that the community has a horrible problem out of scale with other (neurodivergent-heavy in cases of faux pas or male-heavy in cases of SA) communities, or that the Time piece was otherwise honest or something. I’d say it’s more clear than ever that the journalist had an intention to create a salacious narrative even if they stated facts as they knew them. And if anyone had significant suspicion before Owen’s post that the Time piece was overblown.. well this is exactly what they should have been imagining. This is what you’d expect a piece written by a bad-actor, lying journalist to look like.… nuggets of truth slanted in such a way that truth is on the back-burner and scandal put front and center.
So idk, if ppl are updating much now (which the handwringing implies) I kinda think EAs just did a bad job in the beginning? Sorry to rub it in to those who are shocked, but that’s actually a problem cuz that’s what EA is supposed to be good at..?
As someone who has herself “reported” men doing problematic stuff in EA ~twice (one for a faux pas, one for being an actual danger, and also a third man this year but I don’t want to count it because it’s more complicated), and gone through a lot of garbage in my own life, including my own faux pas, idk Owen’s piece hardly updates me at all. It fit in my pre-existing model perfectly? Sometimes these things just happen. It’s a bug of the world. Mistakes happen. Crappy people get into good places and do crappy things. We will never catch all of these people. Also, good people do crappy or dumb things. We will never prevent all the stupid acts. In both cases, we should also expect it will disproportionately fall onto women in a male-heavy community. We should keep trying to do better, but I don’t think we need a show of handwringing about it because it is inevitable even in the best communities (before AGI anyway) that things like this happen eventually and that you will be the one witnessing it eventually if you are paying attention.
I therefore think the shock shows EA’s naivete tbh, and it is ironically making me less confident that EAs will notice when things are going awry (than I was before) , because people still seem to have protected categories in their head (leaders and friends and EA itself). Like, I’m shockedtoo, but I’m shocked that the majority community reaction sounds to be anything other than ‘Welp this sucks. Guess getting one of the more-disappointing-but-still-not-too-surprising outcomes is how the cookie crumbled here.’ But maybe this is the area I needed to update on? EAs’ naivete (around SA and/or social risks) and automatic self-flagellation (or other-flagellation) tendencies? Which is why I was thankful for that comment.”
I feel like I’m beating a dead horse and saying things redundantly, but I hope it makes this perspective more clear.
[There was a paragraph here I deleted. I decided I didn’t agree with it myself without leagues more caveats or something. I suspect need for caveats is why I got disagrees, but it was off-topic and not important enough to save]
I’d say it’s more clear than ever that the journalist had an intention to create a salacious narrative even if they stated facts as they knew them. And if anyone had significant suspicion before Owen’s post that the Time piece was overblown.. well this is exactly what they should have been imagining. This is what you’d expect a piece written by a bad-actor, lying journalist to look like.… nuggets of truth slanted in such a way that truth is on the back-burner and scandal put front and center.
I find this characterization of the journalist to be wildly uncharitable, overblown and exaggerated. I’ll explain why in detail with reference to this incident, which is the only one where we know anything close to the full story.
Here is the passage from the article:
A third [woman] described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”
“influential figure in EA”: 100% correct.
″ whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs”: Slightly incorrect in that he did not hold the role officially at the time. However he did appear to be doing the role unofficially, to the point where he said it it “makes sense to me that this was her perception”
“After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview” : Presumably correct (he recommended her for the job and was in contact with the organization), although not explicitly confirmed.
“she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel”: 100% correct as relayed by Owen himself.
“When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.””: presumably correct as Owen never denied the claim.
There was also some context that was not mentioned:
Context that makes Owen look better: Owen and the woman were friends at the time, Owen and the woman had talked about sex and masturbation before, so the comments were less out of the blue. Owen felt bad about what he did and claims to be trying to reform. (there was also the aforementioned misunderstanding about his role).
Context that makes Owen look worse: The woman only learned about this accommodation on the exact day of the flying out, making her alternative options limited, thus making it hard for her to say no to staying with him. Owen self-admittedly went on to make other innapropriate comments to people on 4 other occasions (although they were self-judged to be less egregious).
So the final score is 4⁄5 statements true, 1⁄5 misleading due to an understandable mistake. Some missing context made Owen look better, some missing context made Owen look worse.
Overall I see a flattening of context that made Owen look somewhat worse than he actually was, but not by a significant degree. I see nothing to justify these accusations of outright lying you claim occurred here.
Owen is married, lives with his wife, and offered their spare bedroom in their home
[IDK if his wife was out of town or not, but if in town I’d consider it important context that a woman/his wife were there]
She stayed in a hotel all but one night
The people running the recruitment talked to him in a “this is your friend you recommended, could you help out?” way, before he offered the room
Regardless, I think that counting facts is not fully the right approach here. Like I say, I think a mal-intentioned journalist is going to use nuggets of truth, but put the whole truth on the backburner and a scandalous narrative upfront. When evaluating the intention of the journalism, it’s the comparison of the facts to the words surrounding the facts that matters. You don’t have to call it lying exactly if that term implies too much forethought to you. But the journalist definitely seemed to be acting in service of a narrative about EA not of the truth.
[I’ve also discussed this (what I and many would call “lying”) being an unsurprising human tendency here, using veganism as an example EAs might “get” more. I also discuss two groups I think are necessary to false narratives spreading. Who knows, maybe one day the journalist will apologize and we will see they are kind of in the second group rather than a “liar” themself. But either way, I think no way we can put favorable odds on “the journalist put truth before salacious story for the piece”]
Owen is married, lives with his wife, and offered their spare bedroom in their home
I’ve had several experiences where I think men used their relationship status as a shield/to get me to let my guard down/to push my boundaries. Like, they would engage in behavior that I would have otherwise interpreted as them hitting on me, but I would instead assume I was misreading the situation. If I’m confident someone is hitting on me, I can shut them down, but the more unsure I am, the more presumptuous/awkward it is to do this. So, if the woman in this situation knew he was married, but didn’t know he was poly (which she might not have, since he says his marriage was “in practice… monogamous”), that makes things worse, not better, imo.
Yes I agree that that is a possibility, albeit a slimmer one as we are travelling down the chain of qualifiers now. You are right that it is worthy context whether she knew he was trying poly or not [or interested in this woman]
Yeah, for sure! I mainly made this point because this is a mistake I’ve made several times (letting my guard down on the basis of relationship status), and I didn’t want others to make the same mistake (“reader decide importance”).
This is more than a mere “nugget of truth”. It’s majority truth , with some context missing. (I don’t think your added context adds much, given that Owen was polyamorous and self-admittedly attracted to the woman. Also, he could have pushed the org to pay for a hotel room but didn’t)
As for the larger picture, this anecdote was used to prove the point that there was “sexual misconduct” in EA. This absolutely fits that description.
As for the wider point, the article title implies that there is a “toxic culture of sexual harrassment and abuse” in EA. (It only explicitly claims that “these women” say that, but in general it sides with the idea that this is true).
The victim in this case (who again, was 100% honest in her account) claims that there are “systemic issues” in EA. Owen himself claims that the culture of EA contributed to his sexual misconduct. We also now know that a third party in EA (the org hiring) failed to see the problems in her situation, and was not willing to pay for a hotel room to avoid it.
Does this prove, on it’s own, that EA has a “toxic culture”? Certainly not on it’s own. But it is evidence in it’s favor, and this is only one anecdote. You can disagree with the conclusion if you want (I don’t think it’s entirely fair), but no part of this was “lying” or dishonesty.
Owen himself claims that the culture of EA contributed to his sexual misconduct.
Regardless of my own views about which are the largest cultural problems in EA, what’s your prior that people who do wrongdoing are accurate in their public assessment of factors that diminish their moral responsibility and/or make themselves look better? Your italicized bolding implies that you think this is an unusually reliable source of truth, whereas I pretty straightforwardly think it’s unusually bad evidence.
“As for the wider point, the article title implies that there is a ‘toxic culture of sexual harrassment and abuse’ in EA.”
But this is the part I don’t agree with and I think the journalist could have found that the alarm-ringing they chose to go with was easily downgradable in many senses.
You can even tell from the title that put salaciousness before accuracy and in implication, which I consider a bad-faith move:
Title: “Effective Altruism has Sexual Harassment Problem, Women Say”
Better title: “Some Women Say Effective Altruism has Neglected a Toxic Culture Toward Women”
I realize the person who wrote the title is likely not the journalist, but surely you can see how their actual piece prioritizes the scandalous first narrative while putting the second (a truth many more can get behind) on the backburner? It’s messed up tbh. [I realize this is normal in journalism but that’s why many people find it to be a messed-up field til proven otherwise, and “normal practice” does not mean “okay practice” or “epistemically honest practice”]
And I think all groups have a toxic culture and “systemic issues” around gendered experience. I don’t think EA has more of either than the world or tech at large. I actually I think it has way less of them.
[Edit: I also think that saying that the wife not being present doesn’t mean much because of poly shows a fundamental misunderstanding of poly and how primary poly relationships tend to function. If you want to throw it out as a useless factoid, I recommend you throw it out cuz you don’t expect wives to stand up for other women to their husbands or something? (obviously that has it’s own problems). But not because you think established people in poly relationships would uniquely allow bad behavior they notice or something. Sigh.]
And I think all groups have a toxic culture and “systemic issues” around gendered experience. I don’t think EA has more of either than the world or tech at large. I actually I think it has way less of them.
Okay, so you think that EA does have a toxic culture around women, you just don’t think it’s worse than tech at large. (as a sidenote, what mostly matters is whether there is room for improvement, which I think is undeniable at this point). Your perspective is included in the article with the quotes from Julia Wise: “it’s hard to gauge how common such issues are within EA compared to broader society”.
But the women they are interviewing disagree with that. They think it’s “particularly acute”, and are presenting evidence in favor of that proposition. Do you think they should have refrained from stating their honest opinion? That the reporter should not have reported their honest opinion?
I also think the language could have been downgraded somewhat, but this is way below the level of “lying bad-actor”.
I think it’s better than tech at large or basically anywhere else I’ve found. [Edit: Nobody just writes a Time piece about a community that needs the same level of improvement as other places. Come on.. the world knows this and let’s not pretend otherwise. The world therefore should not be happy and shrug its shoulders and allow its attention to be collectively wasted in such a way? Readers should be able to trust that if something is published in Time that it is important and actually noteworthy. To publish something non-noteworthy in there is inherently espistemic dishonesty. So no, that “improvement is needed” is not the only thing that matters when it comes to the question of whether the journalist was dishonest, mal-intentioned, etc]
And I think an investigative journalist absolutely could have found more claims to the actual contrary, yeah, and actually should have before blasting a narrative on a nation-wide scale. I see them as basically paying lip service to neutrality by quoting Julia there (if they were truly neutral, they could have just said that themselves, as I see similar qualifying sentiments in Kelsey Piper’s journalism). And paying lip service to neutrality allows them to avoid accusations that they didn’t show both sides (like severely overweighting one side is so much better?). It also allows them to dodge any claims from normies and colleagues that they aren’t following journalistic integrity. But the bare-minimum journalistic integrity doesn’t hold a candle to unqualified, every-man integrity, and I think that’s closer to what the journalist’s presentation lacked.
Nobody just writes a Time piece about a community that needs the same level of improvement as other places
Time has no way of determining if the rate is higher in EA than in other places. Sexual harassment is hidden by nature, and EA is a niche group. Are you expecting them to conduct a survey or something? That’s our job.
The only way of determining the rate of sexual harassment is to raise awareness of the cases that you do know about, so that others feel safe to speak out. I for one am incredibly glad that these cases have come to light. I do not think the world would be a better place if this honest woman had remained silent.
I realized I neglected your question above about how I feel about the women. Sorry about that:
Actually I am very glad the women came forwardand even glad they tried a new method than the CH team (those who had reported already but weren’t happy with the outcome). And I respect them for doing so. [My impression is that women were and are still bouncing off EA because of mismatch in professional and cultural expectations so this needed addressing. And I believe it is important for anyone who suspects they might view something awry with our culture to try to raise alarm bells so it can be fixed.]
I am much less happy that the method chosen was to speak to Time. Is any EA happy about this reality specifically? Are the women? I think other methods, like posting anonymous incident reports on the Forum or something with actual usable details (which still no woman has done),could have led to faster resolution, including outcomes like OCB stepping down from the board and prompting a period of reflection where he and other men figure out why he/they’d been so slow to improve and notice perspectives of women before (in other words, both tangible and intangible systemic improvements).
BUT I simultaneously do not blame the women or hold it against them or think they acted immorally or dishonestly or something by speaking to TIME. My respect for them stands.
Firstly I imagine that most if not all were sought out by the journalist for their takes, and responding to and and trusting journalists is very normal thing to do. I claim it’s a risky move to talk to journalists without further caveats [but I don’t expect anyone else to believe this and I myself would not have even have held back from talking to journalists up til say a year ago. In other words, I have an inkling they did as I would have done just a couple years ago if a journalist asked me for my perspective. If a Time journalist reaches out to a normal conscientious person, they are going to assume it is an important reason and do their part.]
It also makes total sense that the women would be worried about SA and toxicity-to-women in EA because, from the POV of experiencing it, and feeling anxiety that something has gone awry, they can’t really tell if the experiences that made them uncomfortable are a sign of something bigger or if they had a bad dice roll. Actually from the POV of experiencing worse in EA than elsewhere, without knowing anyone else’s experiences, it should update the women that there is a significant problem in EA.
Also, in any of the cases where there were misunderstandings, I get it and don’t think this is itself a reason that we should expect people to be quiet about their discomfort. Where someone is feeling uncomfortable, they may also be new, so it’s understandable that they would struggle to tell who is vs isn’t a self-described EA, or EA vs rationalist, or EA-adjacent vs EA-central, or coincidental invite vs actual ingroup, or anomaly vs norm, or awkwardness vs sexually or selfishly-motivated etc. It falls on the journalist to put together the right narrative, much more than the women.
Of course it’s possible that one or more of the women were intentionally scandal-promoting in their own telling, but that would not be the majority of women and anyway the buck is supposed to stop at the journalist (they are supposed to be able to find bad actors pushing a self-interested narrative), so I am not even entertaining the possibility in this moment. I don’t think it meaningfully changes the conclusions about the journalist.
Sorry to always write so much but I just don’t have any simple one-line opinions about anything about this situation.
I agree that surveys are the community’s job. And that option has been considered since the November SA post (I know cuz I talked to Catherine about it) and is now moving forward. Tbh I chalk it up to bad timing that concerns about gendered experiences in EA weren’t handled immediately with such a survey back in November. That would have been really in character for the community before then. But the major post about SA came right after the FTX crisis, and the community had just lost a lot of slack to start new projects. Everyone’s workload at CEA grew, and I doubt they could even do much hiring due to concerns about financial investigations. It seems to me that a truth-intentioned (and skilled) journalist could have shown how EA was struggling right then and portrayed things in a nuanced and better light (again like Kelsey did here in a response to that very Time piece). Normally it’s correct to assume incompetence rather than mal-intent/ulterior motives, but we have to assume a Time Magazine journalist is about as skilled as they come, so I think not-well-intentioned, or not-well-enough-intentioned when it comes to prioritizing truth over scandal, holds water.
Regardless of surveys, some of these incidents were easily-noted to be (accidental on the part of the women I assume) red herrings when it came to the claim that EA (not rationality, not bay area group houses, not tech, but EA) has an acute sexual harassment problem or toxicity problem, and it is the role of the truth-focused journalist to figure out which is which. Just read these details which have since come out about the Time incidents. I think all those details would have been trivially easy for a truth-focused journalist to figure out, if they had made it known to Julia or Catherine that they wanted them. And I think they should have wanted them before blasting something on the national stage.
Of course, the problem from a journalist’s perspective with getting more details and a more nuanced view is that they can make the piece no longer important-seeming enough to be worthy of Time Magazine. And then all your investigation will have to go on the chopping block and never be seen really. So incentives align for them to blow things out of proportion, both intentionally and self-servingly/unconsciously. [I’d even guess there is a selection effect that journalists who get enough clout to work at Time are adapted to do this].
So yes it seems like the journalist jumped on this with little to no good faith assumptions or curiosity as to other hypotheses for how a narrative could come to them which might look real but actually be false. And that’s the very generous way of putting it that I don’t necessarily put as high odds on as a simpler narrative about outright dishonesty and willful ignorance.
I think I can’t keep responding to this thread but you should feel free to write a response if you like. If you want some further perspective on what I think about journalists vs the women, you might grok it from this post reflecting on different levels of comms or this comment thread (including the responses, but starting there). Have a good one.
I’m happy to leave it here too. I hope I did not get too argumentative in this conversation, I respect your opinion and I appreciate that you are willing to write a lot of detail on it, especially considering the heated topic matter.
As my last word, I’ll just point out that the some of the women did try going through EA channels like the community team and making posts on this forum, but were unhappy with the results, feeling ignored and belittled. Whereas it seems like the article has caused at least some positive change.
If we want to discourage future articles from coming out, we need to ensure that the people coming forward are treated with the kindness and respect they deserve, and that their reports and concerns are taken seriously.
Owen self-admittedly went on to make other innapropriate comments to people on 4 other occasions (although they were self-judged to be less egregious).
Sorry, what was your prior belief here? Upon reading that section in the Time article, I definitely did not interpret (paraphrased) “telling a job interviewee staying at your house about your masturbation habits” as a one-off incident by someone who never otherwise does creepy things, and I doubt the average Time reader did.
EDIT: I’m confused about the disagree-votes. Did other people reading the Time article assume that it was a one-off incident before Owen’s apology?
EDIT2: Fwiw I thought the rest of the comment that I replied to was a good contribution to the discourse, and I upvoted it before my comment.
Upon reading the Time article, I immediately assumed that whoever the article was talking about did other creepy things. Assuming the Time article did not misrepresent things hugely, the idea that the person (who we now know is Owen) has not done any other creepy things did not even cross my mind. I feel like this is an extremely normal, even boring, within-context reading.
On the other hand, when you said that “Context that makes Owen look worse” includes “Owen self-admittedly went on to make other inappropriate comments to people on 4 other occasions” this implies to me that your prior belief before reading Owen’s statement was that whoever the Time article was referring to did not do other bad things, or at least did less bad things than say 4 other inappropriate comments of similar magnitude.
Because your reading appears to have differed so much from my own, I’m remarking on how this seems like a pretty odd prior to have, from my perspective.
We don’t actually know that there were only 4 other incidents. The only evidence we have for that is that Owen said so, and that other incidents have not currently come to light. We only know that there were at least 4 other incidents. So they’ve confessed to 5 more incidences than I expected them to.
I definitely agree that there might be other incidents that come to light. I still disagree that the presence of at least 5 incidents is much of an update that Time is underselling things.
You said it was a “one-off” incident, and that he “never otherwise does creepy things”. The fact that he confessed to four extra counts of innapropriate behavior proves that it was not a one-off incident, and that he did “otherwise do creepy things”. Both parts of the sentence are factually untrue.
Is English your native language? If not, I sometimes have trouble reading Mandarin texts and I found Google Translate to be okay. There might be better AI translation in the coming years as well.
I don’t know if you meant it like that, but this comment reads to me as very sarcastic towards someone who obviously just misunderstood you :/
Edit: especially as your original comment was clear and I don’t think anyone would read this thread and come out with the implied false beliefs about you.
Thanks, appreciate the feedback. I didn’t mean my comment as sarcastic and have retracted the comment. I had an even less charitable comment prepared but realized that “non-native speaker misunderstood what I said” is also a pretty plausible explanation given the international nature of this forum.
I might’ve been overly sensitive here, because the degree of misunderstanding and the sensitive nature of the topic feels reminiscent of patterns I’ve observed before on other platforms. This is one of the reasons why I no longer have a public Twitter.
I was also surprised by your somewhat strong reaction. To me it seems reasonable to assume that the other reader just missed the “not” in your comment, or accidentally misread it, whether they are a native speaker or not
Yeah, I mean I don’t disagree with a lot of what you wrote.
That makes sense to me now after re-reading your initial comment! I think I was thrown off by various aspects of the comparison to FTX and then didn’t read the last two thirds of your comment closely enough to notice that you made a different point than the one I was expecting. I ended up making a different point that doesn’t have much to do with yours. Sorry for the confusion!
My honest reaction was: This is finally being taken sort of seriously. If an EVF board member acted badly then the community can’t just pretend the Time article is about people totally peripheral to the community. At least we got some kind of accountability beyond “the same team that has failed to take sufficient action in the past is looking into things.”
It honestly does feel like the dialogue is finally moving in a good direction. I already knew powerful people in EA acted very badly. So it’s honestly a relief it seems like we might get real change.
I just want to say that I agree. I am angry not only at Owen’s behavior, but also at the people and processes that enabled him to stay in a position of power for years after this pattern of behavior became apparent.
I feel there’s a bit of a “missing mood” in some of the comments here, so I want to say:
I felt shocked, hurt, and betrayed at reading this. I never expected the Oxford incident to involve someone so central and well-regarded in the community, and certainly not Owen. Other EAs I know who knew Owen and the Oxford scene better are even more deeply hurt and surprised by this. (As other commenters here have already attested, tears have not been uncommon.)
Despite the length and thoughtfulness of the apology, it’s difficult for me to see how someone who was already in a position of power and status in EA—a community many of us see as key to the future of humanity—behaved in a way that seems so inappropriate and destructive. I’m angry not only at the harm that was done to women trying to do good in the world, but also to the health, reputation, and credibility of our community. We deserve better from our leaders.
I really sympathize with all the EAs—especially women—who feel betrayed and undermined by this news. To all of you who’ve had bad experiences like this in EA—I’m really sorry. I hope we can do better. I think we can do better—I think we already have the seeds of something better—but first we need to look hard at what we’re not doing well.
(Also: I think this apology was necessary, and was also unusually well-done, but I disagree with another highly upvoted commenter about it being “healing”. The revelation that Owen Cotton-Barratt did this feels very damaging to my relationship with the UK EA community—which typically does so much better than the Bay Area community on metrics like this! I hope that healing and a degree of rehabilitation can come in time, but I personally feel that talk about healing, redemption, etc, is somewhat premature, and that now is the time to pause for people’s hurt and grief.)
I appreciate you writing this. To me, this clarifies something. (I’m sorry there’s a rant incoming and if this comunity needs its hand held through these particular revelations, I’m not the one):
It seems like many EAs still (despite SBF) didn’t put significant probability on the person from that particular Time incident being a very well-known and trusted man in EA, such as Owen. This despite the SBF scandal and despite (to me) this incident being the most troubling incident in the Time piece by far which definitely sounded to be attached to a “real” EA more than any of the others (I say as someone who still has significant problems with the Time piece). Some of us had already put decent odds on the probability that this was an important figure doing something that was at least thoughtless and ended up damaging the EA movement… I mean the woman who reported him literally tried to convey that he was very well-connected and important.
It seems like the community still has a lot to learn from the surprise of SBF about problematic incidents and leaders in general: No one expects their friends or leaders are gonna be the ones who do problematic things. That includes us. Update now.
Some EAs think that a public reckoning in the comments is what is needed but honestly, if I was a victim looking in, such a show of shock and pearl-clutching just looks naive and frankly some of the responses would frustrate me a bit. Like “do you guys think you are a community of angels [or robots] or something?” I hypothesize that many of the people who are reacting kindly to Owen already got our surprise and despair out of our systems before now. Like I already mourned this, both that leaders can do dumb stuff that puts their own movement at risk and that the men I know and respect can do sexually problematic and power-naive things. And I’ve mourned it many times before now too, inside and outside of EA, when finding out that friends of mine or even partners have sexually problematic or manipulative pasts, or even been the one on the receiving end of sexual misconduct or worse from the people I love and trust the most. [I’ve also mourned my own professional stupidity plenty so I know deep in my bones that people who usually try pretty hard to do good can make major fuckups.]
I don’t want this message to be taken as dramatically proclaiming something like “men suck” or “reject all gods” or something.… I don’t think either of those are useful scripts. But honestly.… this community needs to come to terms that sexual harrassment or professional misconduct can be done by anyone. Sexual-assault-awareness advocates have been trumpeting that for decades now. Frankly the surprise this community is displaying is more concerning to me than Owen’s behavior itself. Like.… this is almost exactly what we should expect this to look like? Men have been disrespecting women or just not noticing the perspectives of women for most of human history, only improving sharply on a sociological level a few years ago, which is after most of the men in this community reached adulthood. The decent men with past fuckups are trying to atone for their past sins or mistakes, and I guarantee we all are connected to at least some of those men. You don’t realize who they are, but you should factor in that you are already close to a couple of them. So just like you shouldn’t be surprised when a woman tells you she has sexual abuse in her past or is uncomfortable, don’t be so surprised when a man tells you he has done something intentionally or accidentally problematic. Like, start integrating these social justice and human lessons, please. I feel this should be a relatively quick update to make, you should have downloaded almost the entire package already -_-
Again thank you for writing, it really did help me clarify a lot about this community’s reaction vs. my own, I think.
[Edit: I want to add that from a personal development perspective, I know mistakes happen, including moral mistakes and professional or social mistakes. I’ve done them and so has every person I’ve ever become close enough with to discuss such things with. That is one reason I want to treat both the women and Owen kindly. It could be you or your loved one or your child next time, trying to present a truthful situation that everyone views as outlandish but which you’d have found troubling in their shoes. Likewise, it could be you, or your loved one or your child next time being caught up after doing something everyone else thinks (and which you now humiliatingly agree) is egregious. From behind the veil of ignorance, how would you want the world to treat your or your child’s incident report or apology letter?]
These cases seem very different to me. One big update from the FTX situation was “in case you didn’t already notice, dark triad traits can be really bad.” By contrast, while I’m still processing the update from Owen’s case, I think it’s gonna be something more like, “probably there really is something unusually bad/unwelcoming with aspects of EA culture even outside the Bay area, sorry I didn’t see this earlier.” I don’t see how I could’ve made that update just from the FTX scandal.
For what it’s worth, I did have significant probability mass on the influential EA figure mentioned in the TIME article being someone who is indeed still influential within EA, despite the fact that the TIME article misrepresented the degree of involvement and centrality of one of accused in one of the other incidents they described. So, it’s not like I thought “no way this could happen to EA.” The main thing I was taken aback by is that it ended up being someone who was not only very influential within EA, but also someone to whom the adjective “trusted” applied to a very high degree. In my view, SBF was never “trusted” in the same way Owen was, even though he was even more influential and better known. (I still agree that “by far most EAs trusted SBF” is an accurate statement overall. I just want to highlight that there’s a difference between “minimum degree of trust required for someone to hold influential positions” and “would trust this person so much that they’d be among the very last people I’d expect to cause some kind of scandal.”)
I want to distinguish here between types of sexual assault or professional misconduct that are very rare for anyone who isn’t high on dark tetrad traits and types of it that also frequently happen with people without dark tetrad traits. Both are bad, but if someone is a serial predator high on dark tetrad traits, you’ll potentially end up with several dozens of victims and there can be violence or very explicit and agentic threats to physical safety and ruining someone’s reputation, as opposed to just contextually having to worry that one’s reputation might suffer as a consequence of speaking up. Owen’s case was nothing remotely like the former, so it seems super important to still have a category that is qualitatively different and a lot worse (and that’s the category SBF was in, with respect to financial/regulatory misconduct rather than sexual misconduct).
The difference is easy to pin down.* Ask the question: “Does someone genuinely care about not messing up, not harming others or making them uncomfortable (or breaking laws/regulations/moral conventions), etc.? Yes or no?” If the answer is “yes,” then you’re in a different regime than if it’s “no.”
*Edit: actually, it’s probably a bit harder to pin this down. I think some bad actors may consciously care about not harming others, but their mind might have anti-social patterns of underlying emotions and self-deception and so on, which can trick highly-empathetic people into wanting to give them second and third chances because it convincingly seems as though they “mean well.” So, maybe instead of asking “do they care (conscious intent)?,” we have to also ask if they have a mind that’s sufficiently conducive to genuinely caring.
Yeah, I mean I don’t disagree with a lot of what you wrote. Maybe my comment was complicated by me trying to word it in such a way that anyone can “get it” whether they believe Owen did a anything “bad”, from a minor faux pas (socially bad, not ill-intentioned) to actual SA (morally bad, or creepy and otherwise badly and selfishly-intentioned)
At the end of the day what I’m trying to get at is something like:
“Not every scandal/negative incident is a black swan event. Everything relevant to this situation from ‘your supposedly-sage leaders do PR-risky professional misconduct’ to ‘your trusted friends and idols do SA within your community’ should be in your model of the world already.
On the other side of the coin, just because an incident is not a black swan event, doesn’t mean you think you should have been able to predict it. Surprises exist. The community shouldn’t feel a need to do a lot of handwringing about the community, society, and what happened. At least not if having these types of surprises (SAs or professional misconduct, including by leaders) were factored in. Why suddenly do a lot of self-flagellation in response?
That the incident is confirmed and by a leader doesn’t mean there are necessarily deep underlying structural problems (some cracks I’d like to see sealed, sure!). In particular I’m pretty upset about the amount of pushback Julia and the CH team is getting. Mistakes happen. We are all learning. Factor in that, sometimes, mistakes (as by Julia) will line up with other mistakes (as by Owen) and/or bad-intentioned acts (as by the journalist or Owen depending on your perspective) and create a bigger mishap. Roll the dice enough and it happens. And also, frankly, we should expect to see this happen in a way that brings up gender issues and SA, or just straight up is it, because that’s how the world goes [this is what my above comment might have appeared to focus on, but I also want to make the more complex point about expecting mishaps in general]
Also, that this incident is confirmed and by Owen doesn’t mean we should be updating that the community has a horrible problem out of scale with other (neurodivergent-heavy in cases of faux pas or male-heavy in cases of SA) communities, or that the Time piece was otherwise honest or something. I’d say it’s more clear than ever that the journalist had an intention to create a salacious narrative even if they stated facts as they knew them. And if anyone had significant suspicion before Owen’s post that the Time piece was overblown.. well this is exactly what they should have been imagining. This is what you’d expect a piece written by a bad-actor, lying journalist to look like.… nuggets of truth slanted in such a way that truth is on the back-burner and scandal put front and center.
So idk, if ppl are updating much now (which the handwringing implies) I kinda think EAs just did a bad job in the beginning? Sorry to rub it in to those who are shocked, but that’s actually a problem cuz that’s what EA is supposed to be good at..?
As someone who has herself “reported” men doing problematic stuff in EA ~twice (one for a faux pas, one for being an actual danger, and also a third man this year but I don’t want to count it because it’s more complicated), and gone through a lot of garbage in my own life, including my own faux pas, idk Owen’s piece hardly updates me at all. It fit in my pre-existing model perfectly? Sometimes these things just happen. It’s a bug of the world. Mistakes happen. Crappy people get into good places and do crappy things. We will never catch all of these people. Also, good people do crappy or dumb things. We will never prevent all the stupid acts. In both cases, we should also expect it will disproportionately fall onto women in a male-heavy community. We should keep trying to do better, but I don’t think we need a show of handwringing about it because it is inevitable even in the best communities (before AGI anyway) that things like this happen eventually and that you will be the one witnessing it eventually if you are paying attention.
I therefore think the shock shows EA’s naivete tbh, and it is ironically making me less confident that EAs will notice when things are going awry (than I was before) , because people still seem to have protected categories in their head (leaders and friends and EA itself). Like, I’m shocked too, but I’m shocked that the majority community reaction sounds to be anything other than ‘Welp this sucks. Guess getting one of the more-disappointing-but-still-not-too-surprising outcomes is how the cookie crumbled here.’ But maybe this is the area I needed to update on? EAs’ naivete (around SA and/or social risks) and automatic self-flagellation (or other-flagellation) tendencies? Which is why I was thankful for that comment.”
I feel like I’m beating a dead horse and saying things redundantly, but I hope it makes this perspective more clear.
[There was a paragraph here I deleted. I decided I didn’t agree with it myself without leagues more caveats or something. I suspect need for caveats is why I got disagrees, but it was off-topic and not important enough to save]
I find this characterization of the journalist to be wildly uncharitable, overblown and exaggerated. I’ll explain why in detail with reference to this incident, which is the only one where we know anything close to the full story.
Here is the passage from the article:
“influential figure in EA”: 100% correct.
″ whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs”: Slightly incorrect in that he did not hold the role officially at the time. However he did appear to be doing the role unofficially, to the point where he said it it “makes sense to me that this was her perception”
“After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview” : Presumably correct (he recommended her for the job and was in contact with the organization), although not explicitly confirmed.
“she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel”: 100% correct as relayed by Owen himself.
“When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.””: presumably correct as Owen never denied the claim.
There was also some context that was not mentioned:
Context that makes Owen look better: Owen and the woman were friends at the time, Owen and the woman had talked about sex and masturbation before, so the comments were less out of the blue. Owen felt bad about what he did and claims to be trying to reform. (there was also the aforementioned misunderstanding about his role).
Context that makes Owen look worse: The woman only learned about this accommodation on the exact day of the flying out, making her alternative options limited, thus making it hard for her to say no to staying with him. Owen self-admittedly went on to make other innapropriate comments to people on 4 other occasions (although they were self-judged to be less egregious).
So the final score is 4⁄5 statements true, 1⁄5 misleading due to an understandable mistake. Some missing context made Owen look better, some missing context made Owen look worse.
Overall I see a flattening of context that made Owen look somewhat worse than he actually was, but not by a significant degree. I see nothing to justify these accusations of outright lying you claim occurred here.
Other context (reader decide importance):
Owen is married, lives with his wife, and offered their spare bedroom in their home
[IDK if his wife was out of town or not, but if in town I’d consider it important context that a woman/his wife were there]
She stayed in a hotel all but one night
The people running the recruitment talked to him in a “this is your friend you recommended, could you help out?” way, before he offered the room
Regardless, I think that counting facts is not fully the right approach here. Like I say, I think a mal-intentioned journalist is going to use nuggets of truth, but put the whole truth on the backburner and a scandalous narrative upfront. When evaluating the intention of the journalism, it’s the comparison of the facts to the words surrounding the facts that matters. You don’t have to call it lying exactly if that term implies too much forethought to you. But the journalist definitely seemed to be acting in service of a narrative about EA not of the truth.
[I’ve also discussed this (what I and many would call “lying”) being an unsurprising human tendency here, using veganism as an example EAs might “get” more. I also discuss two groups I think are necessary to false narratives spreading. Who knows, maybe one day the journalist will apologize and we will see they are kind of in the second group rather than a “liar” themself. But either way, I think no way we can put favorable odds on “the journalist put truth before salacious story for the piece”]
I’ve had several experiences where I think men used their relationship status as a shield/to get me to let my guard down/to push my boundaries. Like, they would engage in behavior that I would have otherwise interpreted as them hitting on me, but I would instead assume I was misreading the situation. If I’m confident someone is hitting on me, I can shut them down, but the more unsure I am, the more presumptuous/awkward it is to do this. So, if the woman in this situation knew he was married, but didn’t know he was poly (which she might not have, since he says his marriage was “in practice… monogamous”), that makes things worse, not better, imo.
Yes I agree that that is a possibility, albeit a slimmer one as we are travelling down the chain of qualifiers now. You are right that it is worthy context whether she knew he was trying poly or not [or interested in this woman]
Yeah, for sure! I mainly made this point because this is a mistake I’ve made several times (letting my guard down on the basis of relationship status), and I didn’t want others to make the same mistake (“reader decide importance”).
This is more than a mere “nugget of truth”. It’s majority truth , with some context missing. (I don’t think your added context adds much, given that Owen was polyamorous and self-admittedly attracted to the woman. Also, he could have pushed the org to pay for a hotel room but didn’t)
As for the larger picture, this anecdote was used to prove the point that there was “sexual misconduct” in EA. This absolutely fits that description.
As for the wider point, the article title implies that there is a “toxic culture of sexual harrassment and abuse” in EA. (It only explicitly claims that “these women” say that, but in general it sides with the idea that this is true).
The victim in this case (who again, was 100% honest in her account) claims that there are “systemic issues” in EA. Owen himself claims that the culture of EA contributed to his sexual misconduct. We also now know that a third party in EA (the org hiring) failed to see the problems in her situation, and was not willing to pay for a hotel room to avoid it.
Does this prove, on it’s own, that EA has a “toxic culture”? Certainly not on it’s own. But it is evidence in it’s favor, and this is only one anecdote. You can disagree with the conclusion if you want (I don’t think it’s entirely fair), but no part of this was “lying” or dishonesty.
Regardless of my own views about which are the largest cultural problems in EA, what’s your prior that people who do wrongdoing are accurate in their public assessment of factors that diminish their moral responsibility and/or make themselves look better? Your italicized bolding implies that you think this is an unusually reliable source of truth, whereas I pretty straightforwardly think it’s unusually bad evidence.
“As for the wider point, the article title implies that there is a ‘toxic culture of sexual harrassment and abuse’ in EA.”
But this is the part I don’t agree with and I think the journalist could have found that the alarm-ringing they chose to go with was easily downgradable in many senses.
You can even tell from the title that put salaciousness before accuracy and in implication, which I consider a bad-faith move:
Title: “Effective Altruism has Sexual Harassment Problem, Women Say”
Better title: “Some Women Say Effective Altruism has Neglected a Toxic Culture Toward Women”
I realize the person who wrote the title is likely not the journalist, but surely you can see how their actual piece prioritizes the scandalous first narrative while putting the second (a truth many more can get behind) on the backburner? It’s messed up tbh. [I realize this is normal in journalism but that’s why many people find it to be a messed-up field til proven otherwise, and “normal practice” does not mean “okay practice” or “epistemically honest practice”]
And I think all groups have a toxic culture and “systemic issues” around gendered experience. I don’t think EA has more of either than the world or tech at large. I actually I think it has way less of them.
[Edit: I also think that saying that the wife not being present doesn’t mean much because of poly shows a fundamental misunderstanding of poly and how primary poly relationships tend to function. If you want to throw it out as a useless factoid, I recommend you throw it out cuz you don’t expect wives to stand up for other women to their husbands or something? (obviously that has it’s own problems). But not because you think established people in poly relationships would uniquely allow bad behavior they notice or something. Sigh.]
Okay, so you think that EA does have a toxic culture around women, you just don’t think it’s worse than tech at large. (as a sidenote, what mostly matters is whether there is room for improvement, which I think is undeniable at this point). Your perspective is included in the article with the quotes from Julia Wise: “it’s hard to gauge how common such issues are within EA compared to broader society”.
But the women they are interviewing disagree with that. They think it’s “particularly acute”, and are presenting evidence in favor of that proposition. Do you think they should have refrained from stating their honest opinion? That the reporter should not have reported their honest opinion?
I also think the language could have been downgraded somewhat, but this is way below the level of “lying bad-actor”.
I think it’s better than tech at large or basically anywhere else I’ve found. [Edit: Nobody just writes a Time piece about a community that needs the same level of improvement as other places. Come on.. the world knows this and let’s not pretend otherwise. The world therefore should not be happy and shrug its shoulders and allow its attention to be collectively wasted in such a way? Readers should be able to trust that if something is published in Time that it is important and actually noteworthy. To publish something non-noteworthy in there is inherently espistemic dishonesty. So no, that “improvement is needed” is not the only thing that matters when it comes to the question of whether the journalist was dishonest, mal-intentioned, etc]
And I think an investigative journalist absolutely could have found more claims to the actual contrary, yeah, and actually should have before blasting a narrative on a nation-wide scale. I see them as basically paying lip service to neutrality by quoting Julia there (if they were truly neutral, they could have just said that themselves, as I see similar qualifying sentiments in Kelsey Piper’s journalism). And paying lip service to neutrality allows them to avoid accusations that they didn’t show both sides (like severely overweighting one side is so much better?). It also allows them to dodge any claims from normies and colleagues that they aren’t following journalistic integrity. But the bare-minimum journalistic integrity doesn’t hold a candle to unqualified, every-man integrity, and I think that’s closer to what the journalist’s presentation lacked.
Time has no way of determining if the rate is higher in EA than in other places. Sexual harassment is hidden by nature, and EA is a niche group. Are you expecting them to conduct a survey or something? That’s our job.
The only way of determining the rate of sexual harassment is to raise awareness of the cases that you do know about, so that others feel safe to speak out. I for one am incredibly glad that these cases have come to light. I do not think the world would be a better place if this honest woman had remained silent.
I realized I neglected your question above about how I feel about the women. Sorry about that:
Actually I am very glad the women came forward and even glad they tried a new method than the CH team (those who had reported already but weren’t happy with the outcome). And I respect them for doing so. [My impression is that women were and are still bouncing off EA because of mismatch in professional and cultural expectations so this needed addressing. And I believe it is important for anyone who suspects they might view something awry with our culture to try to raise alarm bells so it can be fixed.]
I am much less happy that the method chosen was to speak to Time. Is any EA happy about this reality specifically? Are the women? I think other methods, like posting anonymous incident reports on the Forum or something with actual usable details (which still no woman has done), could have led to faster resolution, including outcomes like OCB stepping down from the board and prompting a period of reflection where he and other men figure out why he/they’d been so slow to improve and notice perspectives of women before (in other words, both tangible and intangible systemic improvements).
BUT I simultaneously do not blame the women or hold it against them or think they acted immorally or dishonestly or something by speaking to TIME. My respect for them stands.
Firstly I imagine that most if not all were sought out by the journalist for their takes, and responding to and and trusting journalists is very normal thing to do. I claim it’s a risky move to talk to journalists without further caveats [but I don’t expect anyone else to believe this and I myself would not have even have held back from talking to journalists up til say a year ago. In other words, I have an inkling they did as I would have done just a couple years ago if a journalist asked me for my perspective. If a Time journalist reaches out to a normal conscientious person, they are going to assume it is an important reason and do their part.]
It also makes total sense that the women would be worried about SA and toxicity-to-women in EA because, from the POV of experiencing it, and feeling anxiety that something has gone awry, they can’t really tell if the experiences that made them uncomfortable are a sign of something bigger or if they had a bad dice roll. Actually from the POV of experiencing worse in EA than elsewhere, without knowing anyone else’s experiences, it should update the women that there is a significant problem in EA.
Also, in any of the cases where there were misunderstandings, I get it and don’t think this is itself a reason that we should expect people to be quiet about their discomfort. Where someone is feeling uncomfortable, they may also be new, so it’s understandable that they would struggle to tell who is vs isn’t a self-described EA, or EA vs rationalist, or EA-adjacent vs EA-central, or coincidental invite vs actual ingroup, or anomaly vs norm, or awkwardness vs sexually or selfishly-motivated etc. It falls on the journalist to put together the right narrative, much more than the women.
Of course it’s possible that one or more of the women were intentionally scandal-promoting in their own telling, but that would not be the majority of women and anyway the buck is supposed to stop at the journalist (they are supposed to be able to find bad actors pushing a self-interested narrative), so I am not even entertaining the possibility in this moment. I don’t think it meaningfully changes the conclusions about the journalist.
Sorry to always write so much but I just don’t have any simple one-line opinions about anything about this situation.
I agree that surveys are the community’s job. And that option has been considered since the November SA post (I know cuz I talked to Catherine about it) and is now moving forward. Tbh I chalk it up to bad timing that concerns about gendered experiences in EA weren’t handled immediately with such a survey back in November. That would have been really in character for the community before then. But the major post about SA came right after the FTX crisis, and the community had just lost a lot of slack to start new projects. Everyone’s workload at CEA grew, and I doubt they could even do much hiring due to concerns about financial investigations. It seems to me that a truth-intentioned (and skilled) journalist could have shown how EA was struggling right then and portrayed things in a nuanced and better light (again like Kelsey did here in a response to that very Time piece). Normally it’s correct to assume incompetence rather than mal-intent/ulterior motives, but we have to assume a Time Magazine journalist is about as skilled as they come, so I think not-well-intentioned, or not-well-enough-intentioned when it comes to prioritizing truth over scandal, holds water.
Regardless of surveys, some of these incidents were easily-noted to be (accidental on the part of the women I assume) red herrings when it came to the claim that EA (not rationality, not bay area group houses, not tech, but EA) has an acute sexual harassment problem or toxicity problem, and it is the role of the truth-focused journalist to figure out which is which. Just read these details which have since come out about the Time incidents. I think all those details would have been trivially easy for a truth-focused journalist to figure out, if they had made it known to Julia or Catherine that they wanted them. And I think they should have wanted them before blasting something on the national stage.
Of course, the problem from a journalist’s perspective with getting more details and a more nuanced view is that they can make the piece no longer important-seeming enough to be worthy of Time Magazine. And then all your investigation will have to go on the chopping block and never be seen really. So incentives align for them to blow things out of proportion, both intentionally and self-servingly/unconsciously. [I’d even guess there is a selection effect that journalists who get enough clout to work at Time are adapted to do this].
So yes it seems like the journalist jumped on this with little to no good faith assumptions or curiosity as to other hypotheses for how a narrative could come to them which might look real but actually be false. And that’s the very generous way of putting it that I don’t necessarily put as high odds on as a simpler narrative about outright dishonesty and willful ignorance.
I think I can’t keep responding to this thread but you should feel free to write a response if you like.
If you want some further perspective on what I think about journalists vs the women, you might grok it from this post reflecting on different levels of comms or this comment thread (including the responses, but starting there). Have a good one.
I’m happy to leave it here too. I hope I did not get too argumentative in this conversation, I respect your opinion and I appreciate that you are willing to write a lot of detail on it, especially considering the heated topic matter.
As my last word, I’ll just point out that the some of the women did try going through EA channels like the community team and making posts on this forum, but were unhappy with the results, feeling ignored and belittled. Whereas it seems like the article has caused at least some positive change.
If we want to discourage future articles from coming out, we need to ensure that the people coming forward are treated with the kindness and respect they deserve, and that their reports and concerns are taken seriously.
Sorry, what was your prior belief here? Upon reading that section in the Time article, I definitely did not interpret (paraphrased) “telling a job interviewee staying at your house about your masturbation habits” as a one-off incident by someone who never otherwise does creepy things, and I doubt the average Time reader did.
EDIT: I’m confused about the disagree-votes. Did other people reading the Time article assume that it was a one-off incident before Owen’s apology?
EDIT2: Fwiw I thought the rest of the comment that I replied to was a good contribution to the discourse, and I upvoted it before my comment.
He confessed to doing creepy things on four other occasions. This statement is false.
???? I don’t understand what your comment is trying to imply.
Let me be more explicit:
Upon reading the Time article, I immediately assumed that whoever the article was talking about did other creepy things. Assuming the Time article did not misrepresent things hugely, the idea that the person (who we now know is Owen) has not done any other creepy things did not even cross my mind. I feel like this is an extremely normal, even boring, within-context reading.
On the other hand, when you said that “Context that makes Owen look worse” includes “Owen self-admittedly went on to make other inappropriate comments to people on 4 other occasions” this implies to me that your prior belief before reading Owen’s statement was that whoever the Time article was referring to did not do other bad things, or at least did less bad things than say 4 other inappropriate comments of similar magnitude.
Because your reading appears to have differed so much from my own, I’m remarking on how this seems like a pretty odd prior to have, from my perspective.
We don’t actually know that there were only 4 other incidents. The only evidence we have for that is that Owen said so, and that other incidents have not currently come to light. We only know that there were at least 4 other incidents. So they’ve confessed to 5 more incidences than I expected them to.
I definitely agree that there might be other incidents that come to light. I still disagree that the presence of at least 5 incidents is much of an update that Time is underselling things.
You said it was a “one-off” incident, and that he “never otherwise does creepy things”. The fact that he confessed to four extra counts of innapropriate behavior proves that it was not a one-off incident, and that he did “otherwise do creepy things”. Both parts of the sentence are factually untrue.
Sorry, I’m on your side here, but read Linch’s comment again. He wrote the opposite of what you’re saying he did.
Thank you. I acknowledge I misinterpreted the comment, and have retracted my previous comments on it.
Thanks, appreciate the update! <3
Is English your native language? If not, I sometimes have trouble reading Mandarin texts and I found Google Translate to be okay. There might be better AI translation in the coming years as well.
I don’t know if you meant it like that, but this comment reads to me as very sarcastic towards someone who obviously just misunderstood you :/
Edit: especially as your original comment was clear and I don’t think anyone would read this thread and come out with the implied false beliefs about you.
Thanks, appreciate the feedback. I didn’t mean my comment as sarcastic and have retracted the comment. I had an even less charitable comment prepared but realized that “non-native speaker misunderstood what I said” is also a pretty plausible explanation given the international nature of this forum.
I might’ve been overly sensitive here, because the degree of misunderstanding and the sensitive nature of the topic feels reminiscent of patterns I’ve observed before on other platforms. This is one of the reasons why I no longer have a public Twitter.
I was also surprised by your somewhat strong reaction. To me it seems reasonable to assume that the other reader just missed the “not” in your comment, or accidentally misread it, whether they are a native speaker or not
That makes sense to me now after re-reading your initial comment! I think I was thrown off by various aspects of the comparison to FTX and then didn’t read the last two thirds of your comment closely enough to notice that you made a different point than the one I was expecting. I ended up making a different point that doesn’t have much to do with yours. Sorry for the confusion!
No worries! 👋
My honest reaction was: This is finally being taken sort of seriously. If an EVF board member acted badly then the community can’t just pretend the Time article is about people totally peripheral to the community. At least we got some kind of accountability beyond “the same team that has failed to take sufficient action in the past is looking into things.”
It honestly does feel like the dialogue is finally moving in a good direction. I already knew powerful people in EA acted very badly. So it’s honestly a relief it seems like we might get real change.
Thanks for writing this <3
I just want to say that I agree. I am angry not only at Owen’s behavior, but also at the people and processes that enabled him to stay in a position of power for years after this pattern of behavior became apparent.