Largely in response to the final paragraph of Ivy’s comment: FWIW, as a woman in EA, I do not feel “healed” by Owen’s post. I feel *very* annoyed and sorry for the person who was affected by Owen’s behavior. In response to the final sentence (“extra obligations like board responsibilities on hold til you have things sorted”), I would be concerned if Owen was in a board position in EA because he has clearly proved himself incapable of doing so in a way that doesn’t discredit legitimate actors in the space and cause harm. I’m surprised, and again really annoyed, this is already a topic of discussion.
I agree with everything you wrote. I guess I think some things are so obvious they don’t need to be said. The intention of my comment was to make overt things which were probably not obvious.
Given that you wrote “I think I speak for a lot of EA women when I say that I found reading this document somewhat healing,” I’m struggling to see how you can agree with the statement “as a woman in EA, I do not feel ‘healed’ by Owen’s post.”
For their assessments of the situation, like their reasoning for concern and OCB’s suitability for board membership, I agree.
For their feelings, such as “not feeling healed” I agree they are valid and not surprising or wrong on the slightest. Like probably that is the right response for them. [Edit: I also personally feel a lot of annoyance and concern so those are more accurate agreement.]
[Edit: This comment feels like it is trying to be a gotcha moment. This is the kind of response that really disincentivizes people from participating in EA forum discussion.]
I am also a woman in EA, and do not feel “healed” by this post. That comment really rubbed me the wrong way, and I’m confused why the OP assumed to speak for many women in EA.
I also wish the empathy that is evident in that comment was directed towards the person on the receiving end of his behaviour rather than him.
I think my sentiments are not only my own though? Just as I’m sure your sentiments are not only your own and it is important that you say them. I never said I speak for all. I also never said I was fully healed nor that anyone should be fully healed by reading this piece.
I do have empathy toward that person too. I think that went without saying. In future I really hope that others will not try to map any particular women like me and other women who do feel healed and/or hopeful about moving forward to any particular side of any fence.
Same and I’m also annoyed that the comments here are so fluffy versus the blistering skepticism against women who do post when they’ve had a bad experience. I’m not advocating being unkind to Owen but I am wondering why the chasm-like discrepancy.
For my part, I’m not sure who disagrees with Owen’s current position, or what that would change going forward. Ritually chanting “You Did Wrong” around him doesn’t seem useful to me. I don’t know what I want him to do differently now. Some of that is that it’s harder to talk about an individual that I don’t know than the policies a team should take.
What he did was unacceptable. The existence of repeated incidents of this sort is more concerning.
Right now, I have not been able to discern any plan from the Community Health team more extensive than “Julia screwed up and will try not to do that again.”
I’m not saying that they acted less badly. I have more opinions on what they should do differently going forward. I suspect that that is fairly common.
There is absolutely a point to “ritually chanting you did wrong at Owen.” It’s the same point underlying why a lot of EA leaders issued statements condemning FTX and it’s the reason I’m commenting on this post at all: There are a lot of people, particularly women, who are viewing the comment section of this post to see how we as a community respond to allegations like these and deciding whether this is a safe and welcoming space for them. I know because I spent most of my workday yesterday speaking to at least 6 of them, 1 of whom was in floods of tears. For most of yesterday, the 2nd to top comment thanked Owen and essentially told him to take a break before coming back and running boards again) and the top thanked him for doing the right thing. I have to say that undermined my ability to emphasize the community doesn’t condone this type of behavior. I’m not into retributive justice (I think it’s pretty gross actually) but there are very good reasons to send a solid signal here and people are watching to see if we do.
FWIW I was assaulted (not in EA). It was not obvious to me at the time that people either believed me or took it seriously. Some people go into these conversations with a different sense of what is obvious than others.*
*Please read my tone here as sad/wistful not angry/preachy.
> Right now, I have not been able to discern any plan from the Community Health team more extensive than “Julia screwed up and will try not to do that again.”
(Note that I’m speaking as interim head of the Community Health team)
I’m planning on spending significant time over the next several weeks on the plan I laid out in this comment (which is on a different top-level post, so you might have missed it if you are only reading this post’s discussion).
There will also be an internal reflection process. Julia and Nicole are going to do retrospectives on this situation, which will then get discussed with me, Ben West (as transition coordinator at CEA), and some senior management and/or trustees of the EV entities, possibly looping in others at CEA or EV as well.
Further steps are yet to be decided (and some will depend on the information we learn), but could include having other members of the team do assessments of the process and decision-making in this situation and getting opinions on this situation and our approach generally from other people who do similar or analogous work, in and out of EA.
Discussing retrospectives with senior management, plus whatever other steps are most appropriate, are all ways of feeding into decisions about what we should do going forward, for instance if we should have different processes or approaches to cases, or certain kinds of cases.
I guess because noone has written a comment saying “this was bad”. Similar to the Bostrom stuff I think that a lot of agreement goes unsaid. I think there is widespread agreement that Owen has behaved badly here and worse than the CH team.
Thanks for pointing this out; I agree. I feel like the TIME article was held to a standard of scrutiny that was unusual and unwarranted, and that was frustrating and felt bad.
[Edit: My reaction was informed by the “People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You” post having 330 upvotes, and the comments there suggesting many people were reluctant to update much/at all in the direction of “EA has a problem with sexual harassment” on the basis of the TIME article. Unless people had good reasons to strongly hold the prior that EA doesn’t have a problem with sexual harassment—which some may—this seemed misguided to me, given the reporter had spoken with 30 EAs who shared anecdotes that ranged from “ambiguous but worrisome” to “clearly bad.” That is relatively good evidence in the context of the kind of evidence we generally get about sexual harassment, which is notoriously difficult to study and report on, and in the absence of much other evidence about sexual harassment in EA, seemed worth taking seriously. But I also understand why some people felt differently.]
Hmmm, I thought people were pretty supportive of the Time article and looking back most of the top comments are supportive. I guess you mean the article that was taken down? I guess there is a bit of a double standard here though even before we knew who this story was about the reaction has generally been horror.
Agree-also, do we have any indication that Owen is doing this because of “transparency and accountability”, rather than a forced response because this was information that was going to come out anyway?
Even the claims about him volunteering his own mistakes to Julia, which normally seems like a commendable action, could be interpreted as him trying to get ahead of any reports to a sympathetic ear inside the system. Given the community health team’s relative inaction about this case until the TIME article’s publication, it’s hard to discount this possibility without other information.
EVF UK is under statutory inquiry for conflict of interest concerns among other things, and I think it is reasonably likely the CC would have asked about the Time article. I would not want to be in a position of explaining to the CC why the board hadn’t sacked Owen over this.
In other words, I don’t think there was any viable universe in which Owen wasn’t leaving the board. So one might weigh that in evaluating transparency and accountability vs. a forced response.
Even the claims about him volunteering his own mistakes to Julia, which normally seems like a commendable action, could be interpreted as him trying to get ahead of any reports to a sympathetic ear inside the system. Given the community health team’s relative inaction about this case until the TIME article’s publication, it’s hard to discount this possibility without other information.
My impression is that many bad actors* are literally incapable of doing this. They never volunteer this sort of information. It’s bizarre – I don’t know why they don’t do it.** It would probably make them more credible if they occasionally disclosed extra information or admitted to having made mistakes you don’t already know about. In any case, because many bad actors are psychologically weird in this regard and seem incapable of admitting anything that makes them look worse than you already suspected, it still counts as evidence that someone is high on integrity if they proactively share information that had a good chance of not coming to light. I think this an instance where it makes sense, incentives-wise as well as epistemically, to give a person significant credit for disclosing things.
(Obviously don’t treat this as any sort of reliable test.)
*By “bad actors,” I mean people who don’t care about making others uncomfortable. I think it’s also bad if people repeatedly make others uncomfortable by mistake, but I want to treat these cases differently.
**One hypothesis is that maybe in the case of “bad actors,” the information that could potentially come to light would be so damning that they can’t risk admitting smaller mistakes that would have people look into these directions, where they might find out more. I don’t feel like this explains everything, though.
it still counts as evidence that someone is high on integrity if they proactively share information that had a good chance of not coming to light.
It might be reasonable for you to think that it wouldn’t have come to light but it would also be reasonable to think that it would. This really depends on how bad the case was, and how the interactions between OCB and the victim a few months ago went. Unless you have nonpublic information, we don’t know what the truth is here, and it feels weird to say that it “makes sense” to give him credit for this given these uncertainties.
Also, it’s possible that something has a good chance of not coming to light but that this still does not count as evidence that someone is high on integrity. For example: Owen sees Julia as someone who at least empirically has protected his interests. Or perhaps he thinks the case a few months ago was “less bad” than the masturbation case. Whatever the reason, he feels comfortable that sharing will be unlikely to lead to a bad outcome for him, and in fact may have a chance of reducing the risk of a bad outcome by getting in first with his version of events. If true, I don’t see why I should reward this behavior. The continued inaction of the community health team, and the fact the OCB did not suffer any meaningful negative consequences as a result of his actions prior to the TIME article could also support this hypothesis. I’m not claiming that this is what’s happening, but given this is a live possibility, I think you’re being too charitable here.
I agree that we should give no credit if there was a high chance of something further coming to light.
I guess I also agree that we don’t actually know what the status is of these other cases. (I don’t have non-public information.)
Owen’s account is here:
Was this incident an isolated case? Yes and no. I think this was by some way my most egregious mistake of this type. However, in my time in EA there have been four other occasions on which I expressed feelings of attraction towards someone in a way that — in retrospect as I’ve developed a more nuanced understanding of power dynamics — I regret. (In most of these cases I’m still on very good terms with the person.) I’ve slowly been improving my implicit models (so I never quite make the same mistake twice), but honestly it’s gone more slowly than I think it should have done.
I feel like saying “in most of these cases I’m still on very good terms with the person” isn’t the sort of thing that’s easy to lie about. If several future accusations were to come out, it’ll become clear that this was wrong, which would defeat the purpose of preemptively saying something.
Of course, for anyone who just hears the story itself and doesn’t have favorable priors about Owen from knowing him in other contexts, it makes sense for them to remain more cynical. (There’s also a bit of ambiguity about not being on very good terms with at least one person.) I approve of you pushing for that point!
One other thing is that, in my view, the way the apology is written provides some evidence that distinguishes whatever we want to call what Owen did from “common pattern of predatory sociopath.” (This is somewhat subjective, but I have another EA’s apology in mind from a situation that looks superficially similar, where the wording in that other apology was just so much more evasive and deliberately vague that this feels like night and day.)
There’s always the chance that my people judgment is wrong. I’m pretty sure I’m not the type of person who’s insufficiently cynical, but maybe I have a blind spot for a particular type of bad actor.
Was this incident an isolated case? Yes and no. I think this was by some way my most egregious mistake of this type.
Right-given his claim that this was by some way much less egregious than the TIME case, this should be an update that he would feel similarly confident that he’d take on very minimal risk from disclosing to Julia.
I can see where the predatory sociopath etc is coming from, but to be clear, all I am suggesting here is that just because something might have a good chance of not coming to light, this isn’t necessarily good evidence for a person being high integrity. The “coming to light” part is a proxy for “negative consequences”, so if Owen is sufficiently confident that there will be minimal risks of negative consequences of disclosure (indeed, because previous experience with a much more egregious case suggests this), and some indication that disclosing may be helpful for him in some way, this can be done in a self-interested way not indicative of high integrity. Importantly, doing this does not require Owen being a “predatory sociopath”, or ill intentions from him.
but I have another EA’s apology in mind from a situation that looks superficially similar, where the wording in that other apology was just so much more evasive and deliberately vague that this feels like night and day.
Just to be clear, you are not talking about Bostrom’s apology? I think I know what you’re referring to if not, and I’m not asking you to share it, but just thought I’d check as iirc we had a brief exchange about the Bostrom apology, and it would be useful for onlookers to know that you’re not referring to that if they don’t have context here.
“In most of these cases I’m still on very good terms with the person” is a hard statement to falsify. Unless Owen somehow pre-commits to who the individuals are in a way that could be revealed if necessary, we wouldn’t know if someone who came forward was one of the four. More importantly, it may be logistically and emotionally difficult for these four people to come forward in a way that protects their anonymity and allows us assurance that they are who they claim to be.
It takes just two people coming forward to falsify the statement instead of more than four, so the statement is more falsifiable than it could be.
(Another way in which it’s more falsifiable than it could be is because it makes claims about him still being on good terms with several people he has expressed interest in, which is falsifiable if the community health team or investigators were to ask him to mention the names of these people and then go talk to them. I’m not saying they need to do this – I’m just saying it’s good if people open themselves up to potential falsifiability.)
My experience is that people who habitually lie and deceive rarely constrain their options unnecessarily in this way. I want to emphasize that I see this as quite a strong pattern.”Keeping your cards hidden” is something I see really a lot in people I’d classify as bad actors. I’ve seen other apologies in similar context where this difference is like day and night.
This isn’t to say that signals like that can never be faked. It’s perfectly possible to hold both of the following views at once: (1) Some aspects of the apology are reassuring signals. (2) No matter how reassuring an apology is by itself, it makes sense to look into things a lot more, especially if there’s the possibility of a pattern.
Yeah I regret that. In future, I’ll probably comment on a post twice when I’ve got both something neutrally educational to share and a personal response.
As it is the best I can do is edit my original comment to add clarity which I’ve done.
Largely in response to the final paragraph of Ivy’s comment: FWIW, as a woman in EA, I do not feel “healed” by Owen’s post. I feel *very* annoyed and sorry for the person who was affected by Owen’s behavior. In response to the final sentence (“extra obligations like board responsibilities on hold til you have things sorted”), I would be concerned if Owen was in a board position in EA because he has clearly proved himself incapable of doing so in a way that doesn’t discredit legitimate actors in the space and cause harm. I’m surprised, and again really annoyed, this is already a topic of discussion.
I agree with everything you wrote. I guess I think some things are so obvious they don’t need to be said. The intention of my comment was to make overt things which were probably not obvious.
Okay, Ivy. I did really like your other point about shame. Thank you.
Thank you, I didn’t really expect it to get upvoted much tbh but glad it helped
Given that you wrote “I think I speak for a lot of EA women when I say that I found reading this document somewhat healing,” I’m struggling to see how you can agree with the statement “as a woman in EA, I do not feel ‘healed’ by Owen’s post.”
For their assessments of the situation, like their reasoning for concern and OCB’s suitability for board membership, I agree.
For their feelings, such as “not feeling healed” I agree they are valid and not surprising or wrong on the slightest. Like probably that is the right response for them. [Edit: I also personally feel a lot of annoyance and concern so those are more accurate agreement.]
[Edit: This comment feels like it is trying to be a gotcha moment. This is the kind of response that really disincentivizes people from participating in EA forum discussion.]
You’re right, I was feeling frustrated and commented uncharitably. I apologise.
Thank you for that response. No worries 👍
I am also a woman in EA, and do not feel “healed” by this post. That comment really rubbed me the wrong way, and I’m confused why the OP assumed to speak for many women in EA.
I also wish the empathy that is evident in that comment was directed towards the person on the receiving end of his behaviour rather than him.
I think my sentiments are not only my own though? Just as I’m sure your sentiments are not only your own and it is important that you say them. I never said I speak for all. I also never said I was fully healed nor that anyone should be fully healed by reading this piece.
I do have empathy toward that person too. I think that went without saying. In future I really hope that others will not try to map any particular women like me and other women who do feel healed and/or hopeful about moving forward to any particular side of any fence.
Same and I’m also annoyed that the comments here are so fluffy versus the blistering skepticism against women who do post when they’ve had a bad experience. I’m not advocating being unkind to Owen but I am wondering why the chasm-like discrepancy.
Also while I am collecting downvotes instead of doing my actual job: Why is the community health team getting more criticism than Owen himself?
For my part, I’m not sure who disagrees with Owen’s current position, or what that would change going forward. Ritually chanting “You Did Wrong” around him doesn’t seem useful to me. I don’t know what I want him to do differently now. Some of that is that it’s harder to talk about an individual that I don’t know than the policies a team should take.
What he did was unacceptable. The existence of repeated incidents of this sort is more concerning.
Right now, I have not been able to discern any plan from the Community Health team more extensive than “Julia screwed up and will try not to do that again.”
I’m not saying that they acted less badly. I have more opinions on what they should do differently going forward. I suspect that that is fairly common.
There is absolutely a point to “ritually chanting you did wrong at Owen.” It’s the same point underlying why a lot of EA leaders issued statements condemning FTX and it’s the reason I’m commenting on this post at all: There are a lot of people, particularly women, who are viewing the comment section of this post to see how we as a community respond to allegations like these and deciding whether this is a safe and welcoming space for them. I know because I spent most of my workday yesterday speaking to at least 6 of them, 1 of whom was in floods of tears. For most of yesterday, the 2nd to top comment thanked Owen and essentially told him to take a break before coming back and running boards again) and the top thanked him for doing the right thing. I have to say that undermined my ability to emphasize the community doesn’t condone this type of behavior. I’m not into retributive justice (I think it’s pretty gross actually) but there are very good reasons to send a solid signal here and people are watching to see if we do.
Thank you. It’s hard for me (and I think for many people) to remember to say what feels obvious to them.
FWIW I was assaulted (not in EA). It was not obvious to me at the time that people either believed me or took it seriously. Some people go into these conversations with a different sense of what is obvious than others.*
*Please read my tone here as sad/wistful not angry/preachy.
I would like to see the top comments say things we all agree with about the object level but I don’t really feel like writing it.
Hi Keller -
Regarding
> Right now, I have not been able to discern any plan from the Community Health team more extensive than “Julia screwed up and will try not to do that again.”
(Note that I’m speaking as interim head of the Community Health team)
I’m planning on spending significant time over the next several weeks on the plan I laid out in this comment (which is on a different top-level post, so you might have missed it if you are only reading this post’s discussion).
Discussing retrospectives with senior management, plus whatever other steps are most appropriate, are all ways of feeding into decisions about what we should do going forward, for instance if we should have different processes or approaches to cases, or certain kinds of cases.
I guess because noone has written a comment saying “this was bad”. Similar to the Bostrom stuff I think that a lot of agreement goes unsaid. I think there is widespread agreement that Owen has behaved badly here and worse than the CH team.
Thanks for pointing this out; I agree. I feel like the TIME article was held to a standard of scrutiny that was unusual and unwarranted, and that was frustrating and felt bad.
[Edit: My reaction was informed by the “People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You” post having 330 upvotes, and the comments there suggesting many people were reluctant to update much/at all in the direction of “EA has a problem with sexual harassment” on the basis of the TIME article. Unless people had good reasons to strongly hold the prior that EA doesn’t have a problem with sexual harassment—which some may—this seemed misguided to me, given the reporter had spoken with 30 EAs who shared anecdotes that ranged from “ambiguous but worrisome” to “clearly bad.” That is relatively good evidence in the context of the kind of evidence we generally get about sexual harassment, which is notoriously difficult to study and report on, and in the absence of much other evidence about sexual harassment in EA, seemed worth taking seriously. But I also understand why some people felt differently.]
Hmmm, I thought people were pretty supportive of the Time article and looking back most of the top comments are supportive. I guess you mean the article that was taken down? I guess there is a bit of a double standard here though even before we knew who this story was about the reaction has generally been horror.
I had the same sense. I wasn’t sure how to word it, so thank you for saying this.
Agree-also, do we have any indication that Owen is doing this because of “transparency and accountability”, rather than a forced response because this was information that was going to come out anyway?
Even the claims about him volunteering his own mistakes to Julia, which normally seems like a commendable action, could be interpreted as him trying to get ahead of any reports to a sympathetic ear inside the system. Given the community health team’s relative inaction about this case until the TIME article’s publication, it’s hard to discount this possibility without other information.
EVF UK is under statutory inquiry for conflict of interest concerns among other things, and I think it is reasonably likely the CC would have asked about the Time article. I would not want to be in a position of explaining to the CC why the board hadn’t sacked Owen over this.
In other words, I don’t think there was any viable universe in which Owen wasn’t leaving the board. So one might weigh that in evaluating transparency and accountability vs. a forced response.
What’s ‘CC’? Edit: found elsewhere, Charity Commission
My impression is that many bad actors* are literally incapable of doing this. They never volunteer this sort of information. It’s bizarre – I don’t know why they don’t do it.** It would probably make them more credible if they occasionally disclosed extra information or admitted to having made mistakes you don’t already know about. In any case, because many bad actors are psychologically weird in this regard and seem incapable of admitting anything that makes them look worse than you already suspected, it still counts as evidence that someone is high on integrity if they proactively share information that had a good chance of not coming to light. I think this an instance where it makes sense, incentives-wise as well as epistemically, to give a person significant credit for disclosing things.
(Obviously don’t treat this as any sort of reliable test.)
*By “bad actors,” I mean people who don’t care about making others uncomfortable. I think it’s also bad if people repeatedly make others uncomfortable by mistake, but I want to treat these cases differently.
**One hypothesis is that maybe in the case of “bad actors,” the information that could potentially come to light would be so damning that they can’t risk admitting smaller mistakes that would have people look into these directions, where they might find out more. I don’t feel like this explains everything, though.
It might be reasonable for you to think that it wouldn’t have come to light but it would also be reasonable to think that it would. This really depends on how bad the case was, and how the interactions between OCB and the victim a few months ago went. Unless you have nonpublic information, we don’t know what the truth is here, and it feels weird to say that it “makes sense” to give him credit for this given these uncertainties.
Also, it’s possible that something has a good chance of not coming to light but that this still does not count as evidence that someone is high on integrity. For example: Owen sees Julia as someone who at least empirically has protected his interests. Or perhaps he thinks the case a few months ago was “less bad” than the masturbation case. Whatever the reason, he feels comfortable that sharing will be unlikely to lead to a bad outcome for him, and in fact may have a chance of reducing the risk of a bad outcome by getting in first with his version of events. If true, I don’t see why I should reward this behavior. The continued inaction of the community health team, and the fact the OCB did not suffer any meaningful negative consequences as a result of his actions prior to the TIME article could also support this hypothesis. I’m not claiming that this is what’s happening, but given this is a live possibility, I think you’re being too charitable here.
I agree that we should give no credit if there was a high chance of something further coming to light.
I guess I also agree that we don’t actually know what the status is of these other cases. (I don’t have non-public information.)
Owen’s account is here:
I feel like saying “in most of these cases I’m still on very good terms with the person” isn’t the sort of thing that’s easy to lie about. If several future accusations were to come out, it’ll become clear that this was wrong, which would defeat the purpose of preemptively saying something.
Of course, for anyone who just hears the story itself and doesn’t have favorable priors about Owen from knowing him in other contexts, it makes sense for them to remain more cynical. (There’s also a bit of ambiguity about not being on very good terms with at least one person.) I approve of you pushing for that point!
One other thing is that, in my view, the way the apology is written provides some evidence that distinguishes whatever we want to call what Owen did from “common pattern of predatory sociopath.” (This is somewhat subjective, but I have another EA’s apology in mind from a situation that looks superficially similar, where the wording in that other apology was just so much more evasive and deliberately vague that this feels like night and day.)
There’s always the chance that my people judgment is wrong. I’m pretty sure I’m not the type of person who’s insufficiently cynical, but maybe I have a blind spot for a particular type of bad actor.
Right-given his claim that this was by some way much less egregious than the TIME case, this should be an update that he would feel similarly confident that he’d take on very minimal risk from disclosing to Julia.
I can see where the predatory sociopath etc is coming from, but to be clear, all I am suggesting here is that just because something might have a good chance of not coming to light, this isn’t necessarily good evidence for a person being high integrity. The “coming to light” part is a proxy for “negative consequences”, so if Owen is sufficiently confident that there will be minimal risks of negative consequences of disclosure (indeed, because previous experience with a much more egregious case suggests this), and some indication that disclosing may be helpful for him in some way, this can be done in a self-interested way not indicative of high integrity. Importantly, doing this does not require Owen being a “predatory sociopath”, or ill intentions from him.
Just to be clear, you are not talking about Bostrom’s apology? I think I know what you’re referring to if not, and I’m not asking you to share it, but just thought I’d check as iirc we had a brief exchange about the Bostrom apology, and it would be useful for onlookers to know that you’re not referring to that if they don’t have context here.
“In most of these cases I’m still on very good terms with the person” is a hard statement to falsify. Unless Owen somehow pre-commits to who the individuals are in a way that could be revealed if necessary, we wouldn’t know if someone who came forward was one of the four. More importantly, it may be logistically and emotionally difficult for these four people to come forward in a way that protects their anonymity and allows us assurance that they are who they claim to be.
It takes just two people coming forward to falsify the statement instead of more than four, so the statement is more falsifiable than it could be.
(Another way in which it’s more falsifiable than it could be is because it makes claims about him still being on good terms with several people he has expressed interest in, which is falsifiable if the community health team or investigators were to ask him to mention the names of these people and then go talk to them. I’m not saying they need to do this – I’m just saying it’s good if people open themselves up to potential falsifiability.)
My experience is that people who habitually lie and deceive rarely constrain their options unnecessarily in this way. I want to emphasize that I see this as quite a strong pattern.”Keeping your cards hidden” is something I see really a lot in people I’d classify as bad actors. I’ve seen other apologies in similar context where this difference is like day and night.
This isn’t to say that signals like that can never be faked. It’s perfectly possible to hold both of the following views at once: (1) Some aspects of the apology are reassuring signals. (2) No matter how reassuring an apology is by itself, it makes sense to look into things a lot more, especially if there’s the possibility of a pattern.
It does seem pretty unfortunate that the last paragraph of the top-level comment was in the same comment as the rest of it.
Yeah I regret that. In future, I’ll probably comment on a post twice when I’ve got both something neutrally educational to share and a personal response.
As it is the best I can do is edit my original comment to add clarity which I’ve done.