A statement and an apology

[Owen Cotton-Barratt]

December 2023 edit:

I’ve done a lot of reflection since February and my perspective on many things has shifted. You can see a statement update here. I’ve left my original statement unedited (except in one place where noted) below:

Original post

Since the Time article on sexual harassment came out, people have been asking for information about one paragraph of it, about an “influential figure in EA”. I wanted to respond to that.

This is talking about me, more than five years ago. I think I made significant mistakes; I regret them a lot; and I’m sorry.

[March 2024 edited to add:] I’ve recently discovered that some people had interpreted the act in question to have occurred after she arrived at my house. I want to clarify that it happened before she arrived (I wanted to reduce the extent to which attraction was a significant part of my experience when she was there), but disclosing that to her (which I now think was extremely poorly judged) happened afterwards.

Context

I think the actual mistakes I made look different from what many readers may take away from the article, so I first wanted to provide a bit more context (some of this is straightforwardly factual; other parts should be understood as my interpretation):

• We had what I perceived as a preexisting friendship where we were experimenting with being unusually direct and honest (/​“edgy”)

  • Including about sexual matters

    • There was what would commonly be regarded as oversharing from both sides (this wasn’t the first time I’d mentioned masturbation)

  • Our friendship continued in an active way for several months afterwards

  • I should however note that:

    • We had met via EA and spent a good fraction of conversation time talking about EA-relevant topics

    • I was older and more central in the EA community

    • On other occasions, including early in our friendship, we had some professional interactions, and I wasn’t clear about how I was handling the personal/​professional boundary

• I was employed as a researcher at that time

  • My role didn’t develop to connecting people with different positions until later, and this wasn’t part of my self-conception at the time

  • (However it makes sense to me that this was her perception)

• I was not affiliated with the org she was interviewing at

  • I’d suggested her as a candidate earlier in the application process, but was not part of their decision-making process

On the other hand I think that a lot of what was problematic about my behaviour with respect to this person was not about this incident in particular, but the broad dynamic where:

• I in fact had significant amounts of power

  • This was not very salient to me but very salient to her

• She consequently felt pressure to match my vibe

  • e.g. in an earlier draft of this post, before fact-checking it with her, I said that we talked about “feelings of mutual attraction”

    • This was not her experience

    • I drafted it like that because we’d had what I’d interpreted as conversations where this was stated explicitly

    • (I think this is just another central example of the point I’m making in this set of bullets)

  • Similarly at some point she volunteered to me that she was enjoying the dynamic between us (but I probably interpreted this much more broadly than she intended)

• She was in a structural position where it was (I now believe) unreasonable to expect honesty about her experience

• As the person with power it was on me to notice and head off these dynamics, and I failed to do that

(Sorry, I know that’s all pretty light on detail, but I don’t want to risk accidentally de-anonymising the other person. I want to stress that I’m not claiming she provided any inaccurate information to the journalist who wrote the story; just that I think the extra context may be helpful for people seeking to evaluate or understand my conduct.)

My mistakes

In any case, I think my actions were poorly judged and fell well short of the high standards I would like to live up to, and that I think we should ask from people in positions of leadership. Afterwards, I felt vaguely like the whole friendship wasn’t well done and I wished I had approached things differently. Then when I found out that I’d made the person feel uncomfortable(/​disempowered/​pressured), I was horrified (not putting pressure on people is something like a core value of mine). I have apologized to the person in question, but I also feel like I’ve let the whole community down, and I would like to apologize unreservedly. It’s extremely important to me that our community is a welcoming place for everyone, and I feel dismayed that I have contributed to it not being so. If there’s anyone else whom I’ve ever made feel uncomfortable or pressured, I’d love to hear about it — I think I might benefit most from a conversation, but I’d also welcome anonymous feedback.

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.

There were several intertwined mistakes here:

• I was not attendant to implicit power dynamics

  • I was aware that hard power (like employer relationships or grantmaking) mattered, but I was pretty blind to the implications of the soft power that came from being older and more central in the community

• I entangled personal and professional (without being clear about how I was handling that)

  • I was aware that it was important not to let personal relationships cloud professional judgements, but I didn’t understand the point as deeply as I do today; moreover I was not properly alive to the importance of keeping these legibly-to-others separate (& I didn’t discuss how I was approaching it with this person)

• I didn’t respect normal societal standards about what’s oversharing, or what conversational implicature might be, especially re. anything sexual

  • I think this meant that misunderstandings were especially likely; I think it was particularly egregious when combined with the above issues

• I made decisions about how to communicate while flinching internally

  • I should have been more conscious that I was feeling a lot of shame (over all kinds of things, including the fact of being attracted to people!), and that this meant I would think less well than normal. I should consequently have taken steps sooner to address this

(How could I have come to make these mistakes? I was leaning into my own view-at-the-time about what good conduct looked like, and interested in experimenting to find ways to build a better culture than society-at-large has. I was newly open to polyamory, and newly exposed to circling and saw something powerful and good about speaking truths even when they were uncomfortable. And I was naively optimistic that we could ~do away with interpersonal power dynamics, so that of course someone would tell me if they were ever uncomfortable. (I now think that this kind of power differential represents exactly the circumstances in which it’s unfair to expect the disempowered person to be able to correct conversational dynamics which are off.) And then I was making decisions quickly without reflecting appropriately — and I was slow to correct mistakes after the fact — because shame impeded my metacognition from looking closely at what was going on.)

What can you expect from me going forward?

Some updates I’d already made (simplified):

• Before 2020:

  • Don’t be edgy

  • Make sure that anything intimate comes up only in relationships where there’s a good existing foundation of trust

  • Don’t consider romantic engagements in cases where there’s a big age gap

  • It’s good to make handling of personal/​professional matters legible to others

• 2021:

  • Attend significantly to implicit power dynamics for anything relating to attraction/​romance

  • You won’t always know if someone is uncomfortable, or is feeling pressure in some direction

• 2022:

  • Attend significantly to implicit power dynamics even for things that aren’t romantic

  • Avoid communicating while triggered

  • Consider not being open to polyamory (NB I’ve been in a relationship with my wife for 17 years, which has in practice been monogamous, but for the last few years we’ve been open to the possibility of polyamory)

  • Shame is a big problem for me

    • Talk to a therapist to sort it out (this plan actually got interrupted by the FTX crisis)

    • Don’t express feelings of attraction towards anyone (except my wife) until I’ve sorted this out

What’s the right thing to do now? First, I want to ensure never to repeat these mistakes. I won’t know what my final personal policy updates are for a while longer — some of them might be quite subtle, and I’ll continue to work on these with a therapist, but in the interim I’m planning to hold off on:

• Expressing feelings of attraction to anyone

  • (this is a continuation of the 2022 policy update; it’s because I want to sort out what’s up with my dubious track record on this, not because I think that nobody should ever express attraction)

• Being open to polyamory

I don’t know whether I’ll be open to these again in the future. In any case the timeframe on which I might pick these back up will be decided in consultation with my therapist.

Second, I think it’s helpful if the community is able to process this with my visibly not being in any positions of power. Therefore I have resigned from the EV UK board, my most substantive position in the community, and am consequently no longer in an oversight role for any of its projects. (Although I’m still listed on the FHI website, I actually left FHI over a year ago.) Note that I’m not saying “I deserve to lose my positions of authority” — in this case that would ultimately be a decision for the rest of the board. Rather, I think it’s best if right now I give them and others as much space as I can to consider the most appropriate actions.

For right now, I am also pausing other activities which may give me power:

• Starting any new mentor relationships;

• Recommending funding for anything or connecting people with funders;

• Organizing events (in the immediate, I’ve stepped back from any decision-making for the Summit on Existential Security).

Again I’ll make decisions about when to resume these in consultation with my therapist.

(I don’t think I have a way of fully giving up soft power without committing not to be a part of the community in the future, something which doesn’t feel like the right move to me. Instead I will just share that I love it when people do the things that seem to them to be good and true, even when I disagree, or where the consequences might be bad for me personally.)

Third, I think it’s important to ask how the culture or structures we have could be different in ways that would reduce the risk of such harms. I know that this is also important to the person whose story appears in Time, who said in a recent email to me “I deliberately did not name you as I want to draw attention to [systemic issues]. We should expect individuals to make misjudgements over time.”. I don’t want to shirk responsibility here — I absolutely think that I could and should have made better judgements. But I also think that holding my flaws at a fixed level, I might not have made these errors in a different culture, and it’s generally good to look for multiple different levels on which things could have been fixed. I don’t think I should be the arbiter of what should be implemented here, but I think it’s possible I have access to helpful inside-view data, so I plan to continue reflecting on this. Topics that I especially want to think about:

• When is radical openness good, and what are the bounds on that?

• When is oversight important, and what types would meaningfully help?

• What tools could help people better track soft power, and its impacts?

• Are there mechanisms that could help to empower the voices of the disempowered?

I then plan to feed thoughts to the community, CEA’s Community Health team, or other parties as appropriate.

I’ll leave things there for now. I’m very happy to hear thoughts of other things I should be doing. (Though some of the conversations around this I won’t want to have in public, in order to protect people’s privacy.) But in closing let me say again: I’m so, so sorry to anyone whom I’ve ever made uncomfortable, and I’m so sorry to the broader community for having contributed to these dynamics.

[Hattie Carroll]

While I understand that people generally like Owen, I believe we need to ensure that we are not overlooking the substance of his message and giving him an overly favorable response.

Owen’s impropriety may be extensive. Just because one event was over 5 years ago, does not mean that the other >=3 events were (and if they were, one expects he would tell us). Relatedly, if it indeed was the most severe mistake of this nature, there may have been more severe mistakes of somewhat different kinds. There may yet be further events that haven’t yet been reported to, or disclosed by Owen, and indeed, on the outside view, most events would not be suchly reported.

What makes things worse is the kind of career Owen has pursued over the last 5+ years. Owen’s work centered on: i) advising orgs and funders, ii) hiring junior researchers, and iii) hosting workshops, often residential, and with junior researchers. If as Owen says, you know as of 2021-22 that you have deficiencies in dealing with power dynamics, and there have been a series of multiple events like this, then why are you still playing the roles described in (i-iii)? His medium term career trajectory, even relative to other EAs, is in the top 20% of pathways that would make these kinds of mistakes happen more, rather than less, often.

The fact that there has never been precisely the same mistake made twice should give little comfort, while the admission that mitigating these problems has gone “more slowly” than it should is worrying. Problems with sexual harassment usually have a lot to do with personality, so it should not be surprising that this behaviour has been hard to change with therapy.

Owen’s altered duties are somewhat underwhelming. His departure from the EV UK board is acknowledged as a temporary one, and while new mentoring connections are currently on hold, existing mentorship will carry on. The planning of events is currently suspended, but participation in them is permissible. Moreover, it is framed as a question of “when” he will resume these responsibilities, rather than “if”.

Owen attempts to insert himself into the conversation regarding governance measures. However, the act of a board member providing their opinions to the community health team could potentially disrupt efforts to uncover the truth of what occurred.

So I don’t believe that the apology was very reassuring. But what concerns me more is that from skimming the forum, one may think that forum readers are taking Owen’s side here. I think two things are going on. Firstly, few seem willing to speak against Owen due to his still considerable power in the EA community (that he indicates he intends to cling onto), so there is an imbalance in the comments. Secondly, people like Owen and his writing, and face cognitive dissonance in contemplating that he might be a bad guy, so there is an imbalance in the votes (e.g. between this post and the one from the EVF board). Understandable though this may be, it could have a chilling effect on those who have their own cases of sexual assault to report. I realise that we are a community who prize ourselves on thinking about the big issues, and striving to do the most good. But here I worry about our ability to handle the basics. For me, it’s a matter of decency—we should make righteous whistleblowers feel comfortable, rather than backing powerful members of own tribe.

[SoniaAlbrecht]

I want to make a small comment on your phrase “it could have a chilling effect on those who have their own cases of sexual assault to report.” Owen has not committed sexual assault, but sexual harassment. If this imperfect wording was an isolated incident, I wouldn’t have said anything, but in every sexual misconduct comment thread I’ve followed on the forum, people have said sexual assault when they mean sexual harassment, and/​or rape when they mean sexual assault. I was a victim of sexual abuse both growing up and as an adult, so I’m aware that there are big differences between the three, and feel it would be helpful to be mindful of our wording.

[SoniaAlbrecht]

As someone with a fairly upvoted comment expressing a different perspective than yours, I want to mention that personally I had never heard of Owen until this post except for the disturbing description in the Time article, and that personally I have no interest in advancing my career based on any of my political opinions, so his power is irrelevant to me. While I appreciate that the last section of your comment came from a place of wanting to be supportive towards early career people like me, I think it oversimplifies the issues and found it a bit condescending. I’m trying to encourage women in my position to speak up more because we have important things to say.

I think it’s likely that the difference in the replies to this post and the replies to the official statement by EV UK are from people not reading the link in the EV UK post, and so not getting the full context of the statement.

Edit: Also, if I was trying to impress Owen, wouldn’t I be agreeing with his current perspective instead of arguing that he had over-updated?

[Ivy Mazzola]

Seconding that it’s a bit condescending to imply that people who are not digging into Owen might just “like Owen” or “face cognitive dissonance”

I also find the concept in the last sentence that commentors might look like they are “backing” powerful community members, to be gross. It’s not a zero-sum situation. This might not be exactly what Hattie meant by “backing” but I think others night feel vindicated that that’s a good way to look at it. But Owen and the woman herself collaborated on the piece so I’d be surprised to find that anyone involved thinks of this situation as like...winner v loser going forward.

[Lukas_Gloor]

I agree with (edit: many parts of) this comment and I’ve made a mental note to stay extra vigilant in this regard and go out of my way to consider that I might be biased in Owen’s favor (I tend to really like people who seem unusually introspective and open about their exact motivations, potential flaws, etc).

Also, I want to emphasize that while I made comments here that tried to shift the balance more in one direction, I wouldn’t necessarily describe and condense this as”taking Owen’s side.” (I feel like the only comment that “took Owen’s side” without any caveats has more than 120 disagreement karma, which is a pretty clear statement.) And I want to say somewhere that this incident was a negative update for me not just in a social-implications sense (pattern of having made people uncomfortable in asymmetric power dynamics). It also affected my impression of the strength of Owen’s orientation and ability to overcome “self-serving traps.” Especially for the longtermist project where we can’t help but rely on the best judgment of a few expert researchers (because there aren’t really any short-and-unambiguously-relevant/​helpful feedback loops we can check instead), having people with strong orientations of this sort feels essential. If I learn about someone spending a lot of attention on sex or romance in contexts where EA impact is at stake, it updates me negatively about their potential to steer us towards actual impact.

[Linch]

There may yet be further events that haven’t yet been reported to, or disclosed by Owen, and indeed, on the outside view, most events would not be suchly reported.

I want to highlight this. The more general thing to flag is that this is only Cotton-Barratt’s side of the story, albeit apparently checked by several people. The prior is that at least some of this presentation to be slanted in his favor, subconsciously or otherwise.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to take either the facts or (especially) the framing of this story at face value without entertaining at least significant doubts, and I’m surprised at the number of commentators who appear to be doing this.

[SoniaAlbrecht]

I realized you’ve made a good point, and don’t feel as confident about my takes as I used to because of this. People may not have been comfortable being honest when they gave Owen feedback on this post because of the similar power dynamics at play that seem to have made them unwilling to be honest in the first place. Although the policies about sexual misconduct of “Big EA” seem to have evolved substantially since then, so I hope it wouldn’t have been quite as bad.

[Linch]

I agree with that. But also, I don’t think you necessarily need a model of bias or malfeasance by anybody else. If I was reading a statement/​apology by someone who has zero power remaining in this community, I still would have significant doubts about its accuracy.

[Jason]

The statement about pausing some exercises of soft power is rather indefinite:

For right now, I am also pausing other activities which may give me power:

• Starting any new mentor relationships;

• Recommending funding for anything or connecting people with funders;

• Organizing events (in the immediate, I’ve stepped back from any decision-making for the Summit on Existential Security).

Again I’ll make decisions about when to resume these in consultation with my therapist.

There’s no timeframe on that (could it be a month?). There’s no meaningful external accountability or oversight of the decision to unpause (only “consultation” with a therapist who is bound by confidentiality).

Much better would be: I will not conduct these activities for a minimum of A months, and will not conduct them unless and until [pick one: B and C leaders /​ a independent therapist psychologist or other professional chosen by EVF /​ a community consultation on the Forum /​ someone other than Owen himself or his therapist] agrees it is appropriate for me to resume.

(edited to: psychologist or other professional)

[Jonas V]

As a friend pointed out, relying on Owen’s own judgment regarding whether or when to restart mentorship, event organizing, and funding recommendations seems a really bad idea given that the problematic cases happened in the first place due to errors in Owen’s judgment. I think it should go without saying that these decisions should be made by a separate body.

(I don’t think these two types of judgments are perfectly correlated, but they seem somewhat correlated. Also I don’t mean to take a stance on whether/​how Owen should be involved in the future; I think it’s good to consider the full range of options.)

[Jason]

Of course, funders and event organizers can collectively decide how long Owen’s pause from influence in those areas last. I’m wondering if it would be healthy for them to declare him essentially persona non grata for a period of time and until conditions were met. That would mean his recommendations made after last week would go unread, his attempts at connection would be ignored, and no one would ask him to organize events until the appointed time had passed and conditions had been met.

[Jason]

No one needs to justify their disagreevotes, but I’d be curious if anyone had another idea besides “Owen decides for himself how long the pause needs to be” and “funders/​organizers who give him his soft power decide.”

There isn’t an EA Supreme Court to decide these questions.

[Jonas V]

Personally, I think it’s useful if this decision is made by people who competently investigate the case and gather all the information, not by people acting primarily based on public information like this post. Even though I know Owen well, I personally find it hard to say how likely Owen is to make mistakes again; it seems plausible to me that he can learn from his mistakes and continue to be highly involved in the community without causing any further issues, and it also seems possible that he would continue to make similar mistakes. It seems to me that the main way to find out would be by seeking out conversations and investigating.

I personally think the community health team (after implementing some improvements) would be suitable for deciding his future involvement. Even though they didn’t deal with this particular case well, I think overall their track record seems strong, and I think they can learn from this case. They have a lot more relevant context than external investigators.

[Jason]

Sure, you could add non-disqualified CH staff to the “pick one” I described upthread on who could clear his return. My point was that if Owen doesn’t propose an acceptable return-to-influence plan, it is ultimately the responsibility of those who give him that power to satisfy themselves that returning it is warranted.

[FC]

I feel most confused why the therapist is important here. The therapist recs might be a necessary condition but clearly not sufficient. Therapist are not trained in this (it might be that his therapist is an expert in dealing with such situations, but then I expect he would have mentioned this).

[Jason]

Edited my comment to: psychologist or other professional chosen by EVF. Thanks!

At least in the US, some mental health professionals have relevant training in assessment, generally those are doctoral-level psychologists.

[Will Bradshaw]

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.)

[Ivy Mazzola]

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?]

[Lukas_Gloor]

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 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.

[Ivy Mazzola]

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]

[titotal]

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.

[Ivy Mazzola]

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”]

[lilly]

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.

[Ivy Mazzola]

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]

[lilly]

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”).

[titotal]

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.

[Linch]

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.

[Ivy Mazzola]

“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.]

[titotal]

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”.

[Ivy Mazzola]

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.

[titotal]

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.

[Ivy Mazzola]

I realized I neglected your question above about how I feel about the women. Sorry about that:

1. 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.]

2. 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).

3. 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.

4. 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.]

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

[titotal]

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.

[Linch]

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.

[titotal]

one-off incident by someone who never otherwise does creepy things

He confessed to doing creepy things on four other occasions. This statement is false.

[Linch]

???? I don’t understand what your comment is trying to imply.

[Linch]

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.

[titotal]

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.

[Linch]

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.

[titotal]

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.

[Guy Raveh]

Sorry, I’m on your side here, but read Linch’s comment again. He wrote the opposite of what you’re saying he did.

[titotal]

Thank you. I acknowledge I misinterpreted the comment, and have retracted my previous comments on it.

[Linch]

Thanks, appreciate the update! <3

[Linch]

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.

[Guy Raveh]

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.

[Linch]

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.

[Lorenzo Buonanno]

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

[Lukas_Gloor]

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!

[Ivy Mazzola]

No worries! 👋

[sapphire]

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.

[Habiba Banu]

Thanks for writing this <3

[MHR]

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.

[SoniaAlbrecht]

Thanks for everyone’s contributions. I am learning a lot. I see that the author made significant mistakes and am glad he is taking action to correct them and that the community is taking them seriously, but I want to make a small comment on the sentence “She was in a structural position where it was (I now believe) unreasonable to expect honesty about her experience.” I don’t know enough about the specific relationship in the post to comment on it directly, but felt it could describe enough dynamics that it could use a diverse array of perspectives from women in the structural positions described.

I want to encourage other women in early stages of their careers like myself to continue striving to overcome shyness. I don’t think it’s too much to expect us to be honest if we dislike a higher status man flirting with us who doesn’t have direct power over us, or if we dislike any other thing they do. I hope this post encourages shy lower status women to feel like they would be heard if they were assertive about behaviors they don’t like, that one way of making the behaviors stop could be to be more direct.

I also think in general the Ask Culture norm prevalent in EA is very helpful, and that we should all work to ensure it continues. Cultural norms are so diverse that Guess Culture doesn’t really work in cross-cultural environments like EA.

Lastly, I want to defend dating within EA between people who don’t have professional interactions that produce conflicts of interest, but do have different statuses within the movement. EAs are often so unique that building a life with someone in the movement can be very high impact, and we will never all be the same status at the same time. If there was mutual attraction between myself and a man who happened to be higher status in EA than me, but he didn’t pursue a relationship because he felt he couldn’t trust lower status women to be honest based on this post, I would feel insulted. Outside a work environment, I want to be viewed as an equal able to speak my mind.

I don’t have enough upper class experience yet to be confident what norms would be best on net for EA. I come from a blue collar background where workplace gender relations are more catered to assertive women, and am open to being wrong about how much they could apply here. I just felt like this conversation was benefiting a lot from the voices of early-stage career women that are more shy than me, and that voices like mine have been underrepresented so far.

[Lauren Maria]

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I think it’s good to have a diversity of views and that the forum is better for it. I think your view is empowering, but one thing I want to say is that I don’t think we should describe this as “shyness”. The point is that when there are power-dynamics at play, such as the one described, people are less likely to say how they feel since a lot may be on the line, such as their livelihood. This isn’t just general shyness, because the same person may feel confident to say how they feel in other settings where the same power dynamics don’t exist.

[SoniaAlbrecht]

Thank you for your contributions Rebecca and Lauren. My career is the most important thing in the world to me, so I have empathy for women who would take actions that feel drastic to me to protect theirs. I’ve worked hard to see things from your perspectives, but in thinking about them I actually came away more confident that women should feel comfortable standing up to powerful men.

It dawned on me that until I changed my career plans this month, most of my male friends held positions of power in my field very similar to the power gap that I think the post described. They had no direct power over me, but a word from them would have been extremely helpful in getting an interview or a job. I criticize them freely about all sorts of things, and think this is the best way of engaging in these friendships that honestly feel more like peer relationships than relationships of different status to me. The idea of trying to be strategic by not being honest if one of them flirted with me and I didn’t like it makes me even more uncomfortable than not being honest with them in general would. Wouldn’t that mean I was trying to get ahead based on something other than the quality of my work? I’m not suggesting a woman who would feel pressured to do this is doing something unsavory, but rather that a society that tells her she should feel pressured is reducing her to her gender and devaluing her work. I came away thinking the problem may be less about shyness in general than imposter syndrome specifically. Victims of it require our support not judgement (and I certainly feel it myself coming from a very different class than EAs typically do, and honestly being below average in my community in career prowess), but it requires different interventions than the problems you’ve described.

I can’t help but thinking if more women were as comfortable criticizing friends with very different statuses in their field as I am, they would discover that high status EA men typically welcome criticism (my local EA community is the EA hub of the San Francisco bay area, so my experiences probably generalize better than they otherwise would). Importantly, I have this experience even when they are just acquaintances, so it doesn’t seem to be a result of something hard to develop. We’ve just learned that possibly the worst example in the Time article was caused not by the man operating in bad faith in a way that would make him likely to retaliate by not supporting his friend’s career if she stood up to him, but by miscommunication (his severe miscommunication). His post seems to contain the passion for self-improvement I’ve witnessed time and time again in the men with these power differences from me when I’ve criticized them. I encourage more women to experiment with criticizing their male friends with power differences. It can start small! It’s so tragic to me that we are losing all these valuable female voices about things far beyond gender relations to what I think is likely to often be unnecessary imposter syndrome.

I’m discovering in this discourse that my perspective doesn’t seem to be typical for my gender and career stage, so please tell me what you think I may be missing!

[Lauren Maria]

Hi Sonia, thanks for your thoughtful response. Maybe this scenario will show an example of a more complex power dynamic than the one you describe having with your friends:

Jen gets a small grant from x and starts working with senior people at y company. She knows all of their names because they are well known people in z community, but doesn’t know them personally. She slowly gets to know them by working with them, and knows that having them as contacts, references, etc will be really important to the future of her career (perhaps she wants to even stay at this company longterm). She has spent a year working with them now, and her ability to get future career opportunities within this community, field of work, and/​or company is reliant on them being good references for her, or longterm co-workers. One of the senior males begins to get extra friendly with her. At first it seems like normal friendly banter that may push her professional boundaries a bit further than she’d like, but after a few months it is clear that he is interested in her sexually, and that the other senior people in the group know about this, and talk about it in a way that makes it seem as though they are comfortable with it too. You put up with it and think it might be better to just ignore his remarks and go on with your work, because it isn’t clear what will happen if you say anything negative about how he is acting. You question yourself- is this normal? everyone else here seems to think it is normal? am I the odd one? am I a prude? …this story can be continued but maybe you can see where I am going with this.

I think whether Jen would be comfortable telling the guy off is dependent on many things- one example would be the structures in place that make it safe for her to do so (is there an independent person for her to go to that will make sure that she doesn’t lose career opportunities because of her not accepting his advances?). Another example might be whether or not the co-workers say this isn’t normal and that there are norms in place that make sure there isn’t professional/​personal overlap at work.

Note: this is not a real story, and is not meant to be a reflection of the actual story in the OP, but just an example of how power dynamics can get messy.

[SoniaAlbrecht]

Oh yes, I agree this would be a very different scenario than the one in the OP and with my friends, and I would feel much the same way you do about it.

[Lauren Maria]

I think these points in the OP are similar though (though once again the story is not related):

I should however note that:

• We had met via EA and spent a good fraction of conversation time talking about EA-relevant topics

• I was older and more central in the EA community

• On other occasions, including early in our friendship, we had some professional interactions, and I wasn’t clear about how I was handling the personal/​professional boundary

• I in fact had significant amounts of power

  • This was not very salient to me but very salient to her

• She consequently felt pressure to match my vibe

[SoniaAlbrecht]

Thanks for sharing. I actually think that quote from the post describes my relationship with my friends very well except for the saliency and pressure part, although it’s vague enough that it’s possible it’s describing something different too.

I am updating that so many women seem to care so much more about power differentials than I do that norms that cater to them would probably be net positive because otherwise we would have far fewer women in the movement.

This isn’t really about sexual misconduct anymore for me, but a broader issue. If women don’t feel comfortable declining romantic interest from senior men outside the workplace, they must be abstaining from criticizing them in all sorts of other ways too. I’m very disturbed by the mass of knowledge we are missing out on if they are refraining from speaking up at the rate it seems like from the conversation around this post. Do you have any thoughts about how we can encourage women in EA to care less about power differentials outside of sexual misconduct problems?

[Lauren Maria]

I think the onus needs to be placed on the people who are abusing their power. There are ways to do this. If the community acknowledges that this isn’t ok, there can be a shift in the broader culture. People need to be aware these power dynamics exist and speak out against people who abuse them and I don’t mean the person on the receiving end of the abuse of power, but their colleagues.

Some concrete steps I can think of moving forward would be:

a) Workplace training on power dynamics and professional boundaries.
b) An external source where complaints can be made where the people receiving the complaints do not have connections to the EA community such as personal friendships/​collegial relationships.


I’m not sure if this answers your question at all, but I am enjoying this discussion and appreciate the way you are approaching our conversation. Thanks!

[SoniaAlbrecht]

Edit: I want to make it crystal clear here that I’m not talking about sexual misconduct at this point, or denying that actual power differentials are a huge problem in EA. I’m learning that the forum requires a clearer writing style that I’m still new at.

The concrete steps you mentioned make sense to me, although my weakly held view is that people with less power caring too much about power differentials is an even bigger problem than actual power differentials. Maybe more workshops about overcoming imposter syndrome would help? I think epistemics would be weaker in the community if we don’t make a large effort to encourage people to be as assertive as I am in the face of power imbalances, but maybe that’s a price I’m willing to pay if it means more diversity? A lot depends on how tractable different interventions are, and ultimately I just care about getting people’s voices heard. I also appreciate how you’ve approached this conversation! I hadn’t said anything controversial on the forum before this weekend, and this has been much less scary than I expected.

[Ivy Mazzola]

(Sorry you are getting downvotes as soon as you affirm that commenting on the forum is less scary than you expected. The irony is real and hopefully you can laugh at it.)

[SoniaAlbrecht]

Don’t worry I am. I imagine it was hard to tell I wasn’t denying that power differentials are a serious problem in their own right for someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time critiquing powerful men, or has and hasn’t had the positive response I have. I also think the fact that I was no longer talking about sexual misconduct specifically was lost in the comment thread. I’m glad I said it, because I found the feedback useful. Thanks for checking in!

[Lauren Maria]

I’m curious if the people who disagree voted my story could explain why? What is it that you disagree with?

[BadFaithActor]

This post is a few days old, but sure!

The main reason I disagree voted your story is the way that it frames women—as helpless children, with a character so weak and insubstantial that having a few other people imply a certain belief about whether a relationship would be appropriate or not is enough to render them helpless and unable to determine their own preferences. If Jen can be convinced that she is wrong to reject a male suitor because nobody else in the community thinks that there is anything wrong with him propositioning her, how can she possibly consent to any sexual activity that takes place in human society? If your story is accurate, you aren’t making a case for better norms around understanding power dynamics—you’re making the case that women are manifestly unsuitable for the workplace. If the mere inference that a business/​community thinks that a sexual approach is not by itself improper is enough to render a woman utterly unable to consent, then how can they meaningfully interact in a business environment, where they will be expected to interact with people of wildly differing status on a regular basis? How can a woman being paid to perform a job meaningfully consent to being given work to do by her manager? In the world you’ve presented in your story, they quite simply cannot.

[SoniaAlbrecht]

I’ve continued to work hard to see things from the perspective of women like you over the last couple days, and just had another surprising realization. I’ve actually experienced a conversation in EA that I think could have gone in the Time article (similar to some of the milder examples they gave like the man who expressed an interest in adult relationships with large age gaps to a young lower status woman, not the OP’s example). I will give no details because I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. I enjoyed the conversation and it took this intense dialogue for me to realize a different woman in my position might feel opressed by it. Not being able to have as many fun, edgy (to me) conversations like that anymore will decrease my quality of life. However, the pain that people are experiencing seems a lot more intense than the joy I get from edgy conversations. I’m really looking forward to the results of the polls EA is putting together about this. My sense is I’m in a minority for my gender and status, but I have no idea by how much.

[Lauren Maria]

Hey Sonia, I have been trying to see things from your perspective as well. I think it’s great you’re feeling empathetic for women who might feel differently than you in those situations. I think there’s probably still a lot of ways you can get joy having edgy conversations without contributing to this culture within EA itself. I kinda appreciate Will’s take on this here. I struggle between feeling like “policing” people’s relationships and whatnot is probably bad, while also knowing that not being firm the way I am about professional/​personal boundaries likely contributes to a culture where people are taken advantage of. In an ideal world, we could have both your preferences (and the preferences of many others) and a healthy culture, but I don’t actually know if that’s possible.

[bruce]

I’ve continued to work hard to see things from the perspective of women like you over the last couple days

Upvoted!

Not being able to have as many fun, edgy (to me) conversations like that anymore will decrease my quality of life. However, the pain that people are experiencing seems a lot more intense than the joy I get from edgy conversations.

I can see why this feels like a tradeoff, but I do think it’s worth thinking about these conversations in the context that they happened—I don’t think people are (or should be!) advocating for EAs to never talk about sex ever again. But clearly there are contexts where personal topics can be discussed safely, and contexts in which these discussions are inappropriate.

For example, is it important to you that you are able to have these conversations with anyone, in any context, or just that you are able to have these conversations when you feel comfortable to?

[SoniaAlbrecht]

Thank you for your contributions Lauren and Bruce.

Personally I get a lot out of being able to have these conversations with anyone no matter how high their status is in EA, as long as we don’t have a specific workplace relationship with a large power differential. For example, the man I’m referring to was one of the top people at an EA organization I wanted very much to work at at the time, but if I already worked there and it happened at work or in a private environment (this was a group conversation), I would have felt uncomfortable.

If I wasn’t allowed to have unique conversations that mention sex/​romance with higher status EAs anymore, I wouldn’t be able to have them at all at the moment, because I am in a very early stage of my career (I’m an undergraduate) and all my close friends are EAs. Not centering my social life around EA would be a very large sacrifice I am unwilling to make. However, Will’s post Lauren referred to seems like it might be a good compromise. I don’t personally sleep around, but it appears to be something easier to enjoy with less unique people than edgy conversations are.

I also think reducing global poverty and x-risks is so important that I would be willing to make a lot of sacrifices if it made a big difference to these causes. I’m already planning to donate most of my income to charity starting within a few years of graduation. Surely if my personal enjoyment is the only thing at stake, I can dramatically reduce the edgy conversations I have about sex with my friends. I’m only advocating for us to compromise to the extent that I think this is about broader epistemic quality within the movement.

I should clarify how I interpreted the example in the Time article I’m comparing my experience to, as people have different interpretations of the example they gave. I think I would have experienced it as an edgy conversation that involved bad wording that happened to have a large power differential, but didn’t involve pressure to engage in a relationship. This is because if the man in the Time article had done something concrete that would make someone with my personality feel pressured to be in a relationship with him like ask her on a date, I think the article would have mentioned it. Instead it referred to her feelings, which I think we are learning depend a lot on people’s personalities as well as objective facts. I am open to it just being bad writing and actually referring to something different than my experience though.

[Rebecca]

Yeah I’d say it’s not always confidence, rather sometimes a strategic/​rational decision, that determines whether someone pushes back in these circumstances

[titotal]

I’m sorry to be pushing on this when it seems like you are doing the right thing, but could you elaborate more on this sentence from the article?

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.

Why was she being put up in your house and not a hotel, if you weren’t affiliated with the group she was interviewing for? I think this is the part a lot of people were sketched out by, so more context would be helpful.

[Owen Cotton-Barratt]

Sorry I’m mostly trying to take a day away from the forum, but someone let me know that it would be helpful to chime in here. Essentially what happened:

• The org had arranged accommodation (not a hotel), but it didn’t cover the first night she’d be in the country

• The people running the recruitment talked to me in a “this is your friend you recommended, could you help out?” way

• We had a spare room so I offered that; they said yes so I communicated with her about that

• This was all arranged on the day of her flight (before she flew)

(I’m eliding details to reduce risk of leaking information about the person’s identity.)

[titotal]

This is a lot worse than I was expecting. This makes it clear that the woman was in a situation where it was extremely hard to refuse Owen’s offer of accommodation.

Firstly, the organization screwed up majorly. You should not be arranging accommodation for someone on the same day they fly to a foreign country. I know I would have been fairly distressed if this had happened to me.

Secondly, we need to remember that this was an organization she was interviewing for, and Owen was the one that recommended her, and was presumably on good terms with the org. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that making a fuss about staying at Owen’s house could hurt her chances with the org.

Thirdly, the power imbalances in their friendship might make her concerned about what would happen to her position if refusing accommodation hurt said friendship.

Fourthly, it’s often very expensive to get a last minute hotel. Refusing to stay with Owen could have occurred a large financial penalty.

This was not a case of “hey do you want to crash at mine when you fly over next month?”. This is a case of “no better options”. It’s extremely inappropriate to push boundaries on someone who is in this situation. I’m very saddened at the extreme lack of empathy and judgement that was shown here. I’m relieved that Owen is no longer in leadership positions in EA, and I deeply hope he has sincerely reformed since this encounter.

[Jason]

To clarify, do you think:

(1) Owen should have pushed the organization to find other housing for the interviewee?

(2) If the organization would or could not do so, Owen should not have agreed to host the interviewee for an evening (leaving her to find an expensive last-minute hotel?)

One potential concern with a yes to (2) is that—assuming it would have been OK to offer lodging in this situation to an older male to whom Owen wasn’t attracted—this could be seen as imposing extra costs on the woman for being young, female, and attractive to Owen.

(Personally, I would never make the hosting offer to any candidate.)

[titotal]

The most important thing he needed to do was to not mention masturbation or anything else sexual. The situation makes it significantly harder to for her to push back against unwanted behavior. (I think this would also have been wrong if she had agreed in advance to stay there, but the fact that it was foisted on her on the day makes it worse).

I absolutely agree with 1), I definitely think the org should have paid for a hotel, given how badly they screwed up it’s the least they can do. I’m not too sure about 2), I think an offer of lodging could be okay if it was the absolute last resort and kept strictly professional.

From the article, it sounds like her flights to the UK were paid for by the org (although it’s a little ambiguous, could read it as Owen paying, although that wouldn’t really make sense to me). If they can pay for flights, it seems reasonable that a hotel room is not an excessive extra cost.

[Eva]

I’ve stayed at a (non-EA) professional contact’s house before when they’d invited me to give a talk and later very apologetically realized they didn’t have the budget for a hotel. They likely felt obliged to offer; I felt like it would be awkward to decline. We were both at pains to be extremely, exceedingly, painstakingly polite given the circumstances and turn the formality up a notch.

I agree the org should have paid for a hotel, I’m only mentioning this because if baseline formality is a 5, I would think it would be more normal to kick it up to a 10 under the circumstances. It makes this situation all the more bizarre.

[Jason]

Thanks. I got (and agree) that the context makes the masturbation comment worse. Wasn’t sure on the other points, thanks for clarifying.

[JoshuaBlake]

Owen should have told the org this situation is unacceptable and that they should arrange accommodation at their own expense.

[Ivy Mazzola]

[Edit: I’ll redact this comment once someone who knows more actually clarifies it. My intent was to help provide a way to connect the concern to OP’s piece as-written. If you don’t want that and want perfect clarity instead, just skip this thread]

(I’ll throw my hat in the ring that this doesn’t surprise me, now seeing that he was pretty sure that he had a friendship with this woman. Personally If I arranged for a friend to have an interview at an effective nonprofit in my city, I would definitely ask them if they wanted to stay in my spare bedroom. I’d always offer because (1) I personally greatly prefer to stay in a place with a kitchen and some opportunity for social interaction over a hotel room, and (2) hotel costs are counterfactual donations and trades of this flavor have been going on in EA for a decade now.

It’s bad if he didn’t clarify first and give her the option of hotel or not. And possibly, due to perceived power dynamics, it would even be bad anyway to offer his space… like maybe it’s important that he had been totally hands-off with her entire work-related visit since their friendship was not actually so cemented. But this whole housing dynamic seems qualitatively similar to the type of mistakes and misunderstandings of power dynamics that he made elsewhere, and is now working on improving and addressing proactively in future. So I personally do not continue to be worried about the housing aspect although it was not named in this apology piece.)

[britomart]

“she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home” seems to preclude the notion that Cotton-Barratt asked her first, so I’m not sure why you’re writing as if we’re not clear whether they discussed it beforehand.

[Ivy Mazzola]

Sorry I’m on mobile and it’s hard for me to see exactly how my comment comes off in the scheme of larger discussion. I agree it sounds like he didn’t ask her first. My main intention with my comment was to say that his treatment of that situation seems qualitatively related to the idea that he needs to address power dynamics and find clarity more proactively.

[[Edit: That said I can come up with an exchange where he would consider himself to have asked. I don’t really want to theorize this as likely to have happened, but maybe it can illustrate why I try to speak hesitantly about the actions people might or might not have taken. Example dialogue:

Owen: So normally in this situation I’d just host the interviewee at my place rather than having people faff around with a hotel. Is that cool here?

Woman: (thinking: damn that’s expected huh? Im surprised) um I guess so

My second paragraph appears to go off on a tangent but I was actually thinking in response to a potential exchange like this and trying to get ahead of anyone who might think that asking would always be good enough. I’m not necessarily ensorsing asking as a singular plan though I’d probably do it myself in some situations. The only sure solution is the solution that Owen appears to be taking, more proactivity and avoid these dynamics when possible anyway]]

[titotal]

Yes, that is one possible explanation for the sentence. There are also other, more problematic possible explanations, such as if the org itself told her they had a place for her and then sprung the surprise that it was at Owen’s house.

I tried to avoid speculation like this with my original comment because we can just ask what happened. We don’t need to make up stories, we can just find out what actually happened from the OP and the woman and put the matter to rest.

[Ivy Mazzola]

Yes I agree and I do hope someone who knows chimes in. I waited hours to comment here hoping someone else would, but in the hours I waited the original comment got over 60 more upvotes. It seemed like a growing and urgent concern for people, and I was becoming less confident that Owen or the woman would chime in in a timely manner.

I commented in parentheses to try to imply I was just dropping in, but now I really regret not writing something like: “I’ll delete this comment once someone who knows more actually clarifies it”

[titotal]

Just letting you know that Owen has chimed in to give more context, see the reply above. I think the added context is much worse than speculated here, a key point being that this was only sprung on her one day in advance.

[Ivy Mazzola]

Ah, thanks! I’ve retracted my first 2 comments here.

[Pandora]

context: I’m relatively new to EA, mid 20s, and a polyamorous woman. Commenting anonymously because I am not yet totally “out” as polyamorous to everyone in my life.

I feel that this post risks conflating and/​or unfairly associating polyamory with poor handling of power dynamics and personal/​professional boundaries. Such issues can overlap with any relationship structure. Sexual misconduct exists throughout our society, and throughout both monogamous and non-monogamous spaces.

I’ve experienced a range of sexual misconduct prior to my involvement in EA, and so far have found my dating and professional interactions with men in EA to be high quality, relative to high personal standards. In particular, the openness to and active solicitation of feedback I’ve experienced is something I’ve never really experienced outside of polyamory within EA. Since I learned about EA thanks to polyamory (not the other way around), I think I have a pretty different experience than that shared by women in the Time article. Their experience is not a representation of what polyamory done well actually looks like.

Additionally, the Time article fosters skepticism about restorative justice approaches to repair following sexual misconduct, and fails to provide context on how broadly such approaches are being adopted in the Bay Area outside of polyamory/​EA, due to severe limitations of the legal system (I first encountered the term restorative justice in a racial justice context, before I knew anything about EA). I support restorative practices that balance accountability with growth and forgiveness. Therefore, I appreciate that Owen has shared this publicly, which helps others grow. Our society at large still has lots of room for progress on healing sexual and gender dynamics. I think that both the people directly involved (Owen and the woman who reported the incident in the Time article), and those indirectly involved (such as Julia at CEA), deserve compassion and support in learning and growing from this.

Trust is a fragile and important thing in relationships and in communities. Trust in a community happens when its individuals and institutions are living in accordance with their shared values. Transparency helps foster trust, so I think being open about this was an important step towards strengthening that trust.

[agunning]

So, also speaking as a poly person:

I feel like the heuristic missing here is “in situations where people are this sexually open it should always be possible for one person to run away screaming”
like, this should generally rarely happen if you’re not an asshole but it being part of the payoff matrix makes people feel a lot safer.

The thing is, I’m not sure how I’d have internalised this deeply without accidentally polyhacking myself?

like
”Q: aren’t you worried your partner is going to leave you for them?
A: that sounds like it would be a me problem”

I suppose monogamous people manage this by feeling more comfortable hewing to societal expectations?

[eta: in this particular case I took this as “the only person I will date in the immediate future is my wife” which is fair enough under the circumstances]

[Pandora]

Totally agree that Owen was mainly meaning to say “the only person I will date in the immediate future is my wife” and think that’s a smart decision for him while he works on himself.

I think the part that came in the zone of unfairly associating polyamory with poor handling of power dynamics and persona/​professional boundaries comes here:

“How could I have come to make these mistakes? I was leaning into my own view-at-the-time about what good conduct looked like, and interested in experimenting to find ways to build a better culture than society-at-large has. I was newly open to polyamory, and newly exposed to circling and saw something powerful and good about speaking truths even when they were uncomfortable.”

Here, Owen lists new openness/​exposure to polyamory/​circling almost as if they are reasons/​explanations for his mistakes. Which to me simply isn’t the issue, plenty of people explore polyamory/​circling without making such mistakes, because they come from a background of already having done work to understand their identities and social positions. To me the issue appears to be primarily a lack of a sufficiently formed critical lens for his own position of power (which could have clued him in to his actions being unacceptable). If I take at face value that he is being genuine in saying “Then when I found out that I’d made the person feel uncomfortable… I was horrified” then clearly the issue was also not of poor intentions, but really comes down to what he had not yet learned about gender/​power dynamics.

Then the question becomes, why had he not yet learned these things?

As far as I can tell, this incident probably took place several years before being reported to Julia in 2021. So lets estimate 2016-2018? Owen has been married for 17 years, so I’d estimate his current age at close to 40. So if he was in his early/​mid 30s when this happened, clearly he and/​or his bubbles were not paying sufficient attention to gender/​power dynamics (and probably DEI issues more broadly). The #metoo movement gained widespread attention in 2017. I’d definitely be curious to know if this incident happened before or after that. I think it’s important for us to all remember that even in the past 6 years, society has shifted in important ways towards improvements in handling gender/​power/​sexual dynamics. While we may seek to transcend the moral landscapes we are raised and embedded in, none of us are flawless or exempt.

I get the impression there is probably dramatic variation in how well members of the EA community or EA organizations have handled or currently handle the responsibility of educating themselves about social issues, identity, power dynamics, etc. But I hope that these sorts of posts and discussions help more people to see that understanding and shifting these dynamics is integral to EA’s mission.

[Oxford_anon1]

I knew Owen at university. The circles he moved in regularly had conversations about: gendered dynamics, power imbalances in relationships, rape culture. Metoo did not invent these ideas, feminists have been talking about them for decades & longer.

He has no excuse not to have learnt minimal human decency when dealing with other people.

[Ivy Mazzola]

Thank you for sharing. In particular, I find your mention of shame vs edginess interesting.. But I expect that at least one person reading your story will think “Uh sounds like you need more shame, dude, not less” so I’d like to share a perspective for any such readers:

If I understand Owen anyway, I’ll say that I relate in that I also have had some brazen periods of life, prompted by a sort of cultural rebirth and sex-positive idealism. An outsider might have labelled these brazen periods as a swinging of the pendulum in response to my strict religious upbringing, but that isn’t quite right.. It’s hard to notice how it is related to shame but in my case:

For a very shame-prone or shame-trained person, it can be very difficult to parse out “What is the actual harm here? What are the actual bad acts and why, when I know that most of these things I’m programmed to feel shame about simply are not wrong or shame-worthy?” This can lead to a sort of idealistically-motivated throwing out of all feelings that look like shame. Anxiety, hesitance, guilt, and self-criticality are examples of possibly-adaptive-feelings that can be mistakenly thrown out here. This, I think, can lead to social permissiveness and lack of boundaries (you might call it “edginess”) to a problematic extent. Ironically, I can see this happening more for the people who have been most shame-prone because those are the people for whom shame has been such an omnipresent guide that “feeling something similar to shame” actually loses most of it’s compass potential without highly tuned emotional intelligence. Additionally, when such people throw shame out as a compass, they might find that other social-guiding inclinations (social skills which help you realize the unstated preferences of others) are underdeveloped. This is, I think, more likely the more you have used shame as a compass, especially if it was your primary compass during your whole developmental years.

It’s actually pretty hard to express in language, but I hope I have helped share one perspective on how, ironically, more shame can lead to worse behavior for a certain type of rational person, especially in their younger, not-at-all-wise-yet, years.

I found reading this document somewhat healing*, and I bet I am not the only EA woman who has**. With transparency and accountability, maybe we can move forward as a community. I’m hopeful to know that you are prioritising getting the help you need, and I hope other EA men follow suit. I hope that your therapist (or coach) helps you to develop other (non-shame) social compasses for sorting truly unhelpful acts from neutral or helpful acts. Long periods of focused tumult-free reflection are also important, so I’m glad you are putting polyamory and any extra obligations like board responsibilities on hold til you have things sorted. ***

[*Edit 1: “Somewhat healing” = I’ve been thinking about SA in EA for months now (ramping up since September but obviously peaking now). And my mind has come back to this (Owen’s) incident a lot. Why this incident? Well it is probably the most egregious incident in that Time piece that there has (til today) been no public clarity on. I have every day since the Time piece thought to myself “So, who is that man? This one seems the most likely to still, today, be strongly connected to EA. Do we need to be concerned about this actor?” It’s embarrassing to admit that it has consumed my mind this much recently, but I think other community builders are struggling similarly. So, this post somewhat heals 3 things for me: (1) this extra-worrying incident can be crossed off the list as handled without a doubt, eg that’s one less potential predator or reputational risk around. We don’t have to worry about that actor anymore. (2) The man himself is actually stepping up to take responsibility for it. That’s one less man’s scandal or misconduct that EA women have to clean up/​monitor/​apologize for. I feel healed in expectation that I and others might be able to get some of our energy back. I am acutely aware of how much energy men’s mistakes here cost women (women who are often supposed to be working on other altruistic questions!) (3) this post is also a model for how other men can clarify their pasts. I hope to see more of those Time incidents handled or somehow clarified, (although I still wish it could have happened in a different way). So this post might even signal further upcoming clarity, which will be what the community needs to move forward. And having hope that EA can move forward, improved, and back to impact, is healing too.]

[**Edit 2: I’ve gotten some fair pushback on the “I think I speak for a lot of EA women” phrasing I had originally. I modified the language to more what I really mean. I don’t presume to speak for all readers or any single reader. It would even be perfectly valid if this were your moment of peak fury or despair.. like maybe that’s right for you. Personally I am able to take healing from this post, and I bet I’m not the only one who is finding something positive to take out of it]

[***Edit 3: Some people feel this particular paragraph is too warm, and feel it’s an example of dialogue being gentler toward men than women. (1) It felt humanly natural for me to flow into my own thoughts once I’d crossed that shame writeup off my list. That was a mistake and in future I’ll just start a new comment. (2) I don’t regret being warm and leaving out affirmations of ill-fit, because sitting below my comment as I was composing mine was another comment saying how distraught they were at reading this post, and how disappointed in Owen. I did and still do think it was equally important (in expectation to the first part of my comment) for Owen and for this community that someone share a different perspective on reading the piece and also like, wish him well rather than pile the guilt on. Frankly I expected more negative sentiment toward him to come (which has), and some of these responses would make me straight up want to die if I were OP. I don’t want anyone to feel that way. The woman seems to have forgiven him herself so I presume no reason to withhold compassion myself.]

[Amber Dawn]

This is such a good comment, thank you! I’ve also been mulling over the shame/​inappropriateness connection. Another, complementary frame is something like, if you have strong psychological parts that shame you, while at the same time other parts recognize that this shaming is toxic and overpowerful, those parts might well be like ‘F*** you, I refuse to be shamed anymore!’ which might lead to leaning hard in the opposite direction and doing things that healthy shame/​embarrassment might have warned you not to do.

[Ivy Mazzola]

[Edit: this comment was a tangent… now I wish this thread was better organised]

Totally. I think that even when living “shame-free” starts out idealistically, from there, ppl can move into the territory of valuing willfulness and recklessness intrinsically. And that value swap can be hard to catch for them, because they threw out one of their major tools (shame) for noticing when they were behaving self-interestedly and recklessly. Although they may still have conscious intent to behave ethically, safely, and considerately, it becomes easy to miss the ways you are betraying those values, especially if you are surrounded by people who also value edginess intrinsically.

(Idk what happened in Owen’s case but I think I’ve seen this in the BM community)

[GoodEAGoneBad]

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.

[Ivy Mazzola]

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.

[GoodEAGoneBad]

Okay, Ivy. I did really like your other point about shame. Thank you.

[Ivy Mazzola]

Thank you, I didn’t really expect it to get upvoted much tbh but glad it helped

[britomart]

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.”

[Ivy Mazzola]

1. For their assessments of the situation, like their reasoning for concern and OCB’s suitability for board membership, I agree.

2. 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.]

[britomart]

You’re right, I was feeling frustrated and commented uncharitably. I apologise.

[Ivy Mazzola]

Thank you for that response. No worries 👍

[Lauren Maria]

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.

[Ivy Mazzola]

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.

[GoodEAGoneBad]

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.

[GoodEAGoneBad]

Also while I am collecting downvotes instead of doing my actual job: Why is the community health team getting more criticism than Owen himself?

[keller_scholl]

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.

[GoodEAGoneBad]

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.

[keller_scholl]

Thank you. It’s hard for me (and I think for many people) to remember to say what feels obvious to them.

[GoodEAGoneBad]

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.

[Nathan Young]

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.

[ChanaMessinger]

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).

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.

[Nathan Young]

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.

[lilly]

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.]

[Nathan Young]

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.

[Lauren Maria]

I had the same sense. I wasn’t sure how to word it, so thank you for saying this.

[pseudonym]

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.

[Jason]

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.

[David M]

What’s ‘CC’? Edit: found elsewhere, Charity Commission

[Lukas_Gloor]

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.

[pseudonym]

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.

[Lukas_Gloor]

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.

[pseudonym]

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.

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.

[Jason]

“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.

[Lukas_Gloor]

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.

[Will Bradshaw]

It does seem pretty unfortunate that the last paragraph of the top-level comment was in the same comment as the rest of it.

[Ivy Mazzola]

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.

[EAForumAnon]

I’m the woman who Julia asked on a hunch about her experiences with Owen, and one of the women who Owen refers to when he says there have been four other less egregious occasions where he expressed feelings of attraction that he regrets. I’m sharing my experience with Owen below, because I think it’s probably helpful for people reflecting on this situation (and by default, it would remain confidential indefinitely), but as an FYI, I’m probably unlikely to participate in substantive discussion about it in the comments section. (I’m posting this anonymously because I’d prefer to avoid being pulled into lots of discussions about this in a way that drains my time and emotional energy, not because I’m afraid of retribution from someone or negative consequences for my career.)

• Several years ago, I stayed at Owen’s house for a while while I was visiting Oxford. Owen and I were friends, I had been to his house several times before, and he had previously offered that I could stay there if I was in Oxford. I was working at an EA organization at the time that was not professionally connected to Owen.

• Towards the end of my stay, Owen and I went on a long walk around Oxford, where we talked about a lot of different things, including my romantic interests. At one point in the conversation (potentially adjacent to me talking about my romantic interests, though I can’t remember), Owen told me he was attracted to me.

• I didn’t feel pressured or particularly uncomfortable hearing Owen’s comment, but I found it somewhat jarring, given Owen was someone who I perceived as influential and meaningfully senior to me in the community, and I remember feeling worried about the possibility that Owen would make similar comments to other young women who might feel more uncomfortable. I don’t remember exactly how I responded– my best recollection is that I told him that that was flattering to hear (pretty sure I said this), but also felt a bit weird (less sure that I said this, but I do remember that he apologized to me, so presumably I communicated this somehow, though it may have been implicit), and that I thought he shouldn’t say this kind of thing to younger EAs in the future (I’m sure I gave him some kind of feedback like this, but I don’t remember how specific it was, e.g. whether I said “younger EAs” or some other reference class). Owen apologized to me, and we continued the conversation; we remained on good terms afterwards.

• It didn’t occur to me to tell anyone about this at the time (I’m not sure I even knew there was a Community Health team that I could report things to), and I basically forgot about this interaction until a few years later (within the last two years), when Julia Wise emailed me asking me if I had had any experiences with Owen that seemed a little off. (She also gave me some vague, high-level information about a minor-sounding experience someone else had had with Owen, which I won’t share here to protect that person’s confidentiality.) I recounted the incident above to her, and told her I thought it would be good for Owen to receive feedback about how senior he seemed to others in the community, as it seemed to me in our interaction that he hadn’t perceived or internalized this, and wasn’t considering how it could create power dynamics that changed how certain personal interactions came across.
  
  Edited to clarify: My interaction with Owen happened after the interaction reported in TIME, but before Owen received feedback about the TIME interaction from Julia.

[reluctant_burner]

I had ChatGPT rewrite this. Probably not the best place to share this, but if I don’t post here it here, might not post it anywhere.

My impression is that young women new to the community have at the least felt uncomfortable or uneasy in EA in some of their interactions with men who’ve been in the community longer and are a bit older. There’s probably enough of an issue here that it warrants a systemic solution.

As for myself, I admit that I have contributed a bit to the problem. Being a bit older and having been in the community for a while, I have engaged romantically and sexually with women who are younger and new to the community. Looking back, I recognize the problematic power dynamics at play and think there are things I would take back if I could. Nothing egregious, just stuff that wasn’t ideal.

I’m uncertain about the ideal systematic changes and norms, and where to draw the line when it comes to engaging in romantic relationships. While not abusing power is obvious, the gray area is unclear.

In my opinion, the best changes will come from a deeper understanding of the current situation and how we got here. From what I’ve seen, heterosexual men in the EA community who seek intimate relationships with women face significant challenges due to the crushing gender ratio. It can feel like a highly competitive environment where only the most attractive and successful men have any “luck.” Finding relationships outside of EA doesn’t feel like a real solution either, especially when one wants a partner who shares similar values and culture.

In my experience, being in the community for a long time or working in an organization does not feel powerful from the inside. Even in that position , it can lonely and desperate from a romantic/​sexual angle, which in turn can make attractive women feel like they have significant power. As for me, I’m not particularly interested in women in their early 20s, both because of age and power imbalances and because of maturity and other factors. However, this age range seems to be where EA is most successful at recruiting women. Selfishly, I’d love to see more mid-late 20s or older women join.

There’s also the issue of pursuing younger women simply because they might be more impressed with one’s accomplishments so far. However, it would be fantastic if a woman a bit older with many impressive accomplishments took an interest in me. Unfortunately, it seems like women who are already established in the community are already in relationships, leaving only people new to the community as options.

In summary, while from angle there are men who are abusing their power and influence to gain sexual favor with younger woman, from another angle you have men who don’t feel that powerful and do feel lonely and desperate. This does not justify all behavior, of course. I believe that understanding where this behavior comes from is essential to changing it. That’s why I’m writing this.

The gender ratio imbalance in the EA community is a significant challenge, and I don’t think there are any quick or easy solutions. It is a challenging situation for both men and women, albeit in different ways. While this does not excuse mistreating others for one’s own needs, a better understanding of the root causes may help us be more effective in changing this behavior.

A solution might look like teaching people to recognize the power and influence they have even when it doesn’t feel like they have it. As Owen points out, it’s harder to see soft power.

[S.E. Montgomery]

Something about this comment rubbed me the wrong way. EA is not meant to be a dating service, and while there are many people in the community who are open to the idea of dating someone within EA or actively searching for this, there are also many people who joined for entirely different reasons and don’t consider this a priority/​don’t want this.

I think that viewing the relationship between men and women in EA this way—eg. men competing for attention, where lonely and desperate men will do what it takes to to get with women—does a disservice to both genders. It sounds like a) an uncomfortable environment for women to join, because they don’t want to be swarmed by a bunch of desperate men, and b) an uncomfortable environment for men, because to some extent it seems to justify men doing more and more to get the attention of women, often at the cost of women being made to feel uncomfortable. (And many men in EA do not want women to feel uncomfortable!)

Let’s zoom out a bit. To me, it’s not that important that everyone in EA gets a match. I find the gender imbalance concerning for lots of reasons, but ‘a lack of women for men to match with’ is not on my list of concerns. Even if there was a perfect ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ balance of men and women, I think there would still be lonely men willing to abuse their power. (Like you said, many women come into the movement already in relationships, some men/​women do not want to date within the movement, and some people are unfortunately just not people others want to date.) So the problem is not the lack of women, but rather the fact that men in powerful positions are either blind to their own power, or can see their power and are willing to abuse that power, and there are not sufficient systems in place to prevent this from happening, or even to stop it once it has happened.

[Jason]

Does anyone have data on retention rates in EA by age and gender? This comment makes me wonder if the effects of a hostile environment for young women would be demonstrated in that data.

[David M]

Are men more likely to attend EA London events? Attendance data, 2016-2018.

[Tiresias]

I appreciate the comment, and agree that accurately understanding motivations is important for effective reform. I also agree that a lot (if not most) of the harassment/​women face in EA come from sentiments like the one you’re describing in this comment. Admitting fault and vulnerability can be difficult to share, and I’m glad you’re doing so.

I also agree with S.E. Montgomery’s reply that some of this comment rubbed me the wrong way. As I mentioned, my guess is that most sexual harassment stems from sentiments like the one you described. It comes from an understandable place—romantic longing—but has oppressive outcomes. This means, even if the emotional origin is sympathetic, the men who hold this perspective should still work to change their perspective. The specific manifestation of romantic longing that I find ends up being oppressive is one which causes men to see EA women they encounter primarily as potential romantic/​sexual partners. Rather than say, having their thoughts about a woman shaped by her professional accomplishments or personality. This is de-personifying, and leads to many harmful behaviors. If you meet a woman and categorize her primarily as a romantic/​sexual interest, you are much less likely to instinctively think of other aspects of her. For example, if you learn of a new opportunity, and are thinking of people who might be matches for it, just on a gut level, it makes it more likely you’ll forget about her when you’re not in a romantic/​sexual state-of-mind. Or, if you describe her to other people, if you are primarily commenting on her appearance/​your interest in her, what you are then not commenting on (at least as much) is other aspects of her, aspects you would describe if you were meeting a man. This causes other people to view her in a de-personifying way, even if they’ve never met her/​don’t have any romantic/​sexual interest in her. Maybe she gets a reputation for being a “hot EA” rather than a reputation for something like “early career but seems good at x/​y skills, and quirky in z way.” Usually, it’s more subtle than this, but still quite harmful.

Your comment is reflecting on this, and I appreciate that. But some sections come across as you are still framing women’s primary role, at least here, as potential romantic partners. I think you could write a comment about this motivation and how you are still wrestling with it in your own life, without indulging it it so much. Sorry if that’s too forward.

One sentence that stood out to me in particular:

“Selfishly, I’d love to see more mid-late 20s or older women join.” This gives me the impression that the main thing you think of when you think of older women joining is how it benefits your dating prospects. That’s at least the framing here, though in real life I would guess you oscillate more between this framing and a more personifying one. But this specific sentence has no real reason for being here. There’s some self-reflection that this perspective is harmful (the “selfishly”) but not enough in my view. If this statement was necessary to include, I would have liked to see more caveating along the lines of “I don’t like that this is how I think and I’m trying to change it, but …” But since this statement seems unnecessary to me, I’m wondering why it’s even included.

The section that S.E. Montgomery commented on about EA’s gender ratio also stood out to me. As they already explained, it read to me like you were saying one important reason to work on the gender imbalance is to help men date. That seems like a nice benefit of improving the gender ratio, but far and away from the most important reasons for it. Framing it in a dating context feels uncomfortable.

I’m going into detail about this comment not because I want to chastise you or anything, but because this serves (to me at least) of an example of where a lot of harassing/​objectifying/​oppressive behavior towards women comes from. It’s a subtle thing, so I want other people to read this, see an example worked out in real life, and have that inform their thoughts in the future. This comment isn’t egregious or anything; and I think it is quite valuable for many reasons (namely, the content itself, describing motivations). But I also wanted to point out in detail what I saw as flaws.

[laurapomarius]

If there’s anyone else whom I’ve ever made feel uncomfortable or pressured, I’d love to hear about it — I think I might benefit most from a conversation, but I’d also welcome anonymous feedback.”

Sorry if this is uncharitable, but this sentence rubs me the wrong way. It reads to me like “hey people who I might have harassed, it would be good for me if you talked to me”.
I think the priority here should not be what YOU benefit from.

[Ubuntu]

You may be right, but FWIW, I read that sentence as, “I think I might understand a lot more and be able to update my behaviour in a more appropriate way if we have the benefit of the back-and-forth of a conversation, but of course I’m also open to anonymous feedback if that’s what you prefer.” (Versus him coming from a place of something like, “I’d personally feel most comfortable with a conversation.”)

[laurapomarius]

Yeah, I agree with that, and I’m really glad how much Owen expresses he’s keen to work on himself.

I’m not sure my anger is appropriate here, but I’ve been in similar situations as this woman. If one of these people asked me for a conversation about their behaviour, I imagine being impressed/​glad by them wanting to change but also feeling a bit like, ‘You already made me feel shitty, and now it’s my job to make sure you don’t do this again?’.

I think this is especially because the quoted sentence does not acknowledge the person much—even an addition of something like

’If there’s anyone else whom I’ve ever made feel uncomfortable or pressured <<I’m deeply sorry and regretful this happened. I would like to make sure I never put anyone in that position again.>>”

would have made me feel less bad about the phrasing.

[agunning]

I think for this kind of sentiment you should … make it clear that you don’t expect to hear from everyone who’s felt uncomfortable and this is fine? you’d just appreciate feedback?

(I feel slightly weird about the sentence you wrote above in a “the optimal amount of making women uncomfortable is not zero” kind of a way. Like, in this case there should be clearly much less of it on the current margin, just… as the sort of person some women are going to be occasionally uncomfortable about for dumb reasons)

[deleted]

[Emma G-S]

Thanks Laura, I agree. It feels that whenever these incidents are brought to light, women must still take on a large part of the work in educating men on why/​how their behaviour was bad. It is exhausting.

[Lorenzo Buonanno]

Hey everyone,

Note that there’s also a statement from EV UK board, and there is some discussion in the comments there. We suggest centralizing the discussion there if you think a comment could be written on either post.

Edit: unpinning this comment because there are now several independent conversation threads on the two posts, with little overlap

[JP Addison]

Another mod here. We think that discussion has not centralized there. That’s ok — there are different flavors of conversation it kind of makes sense to have on these different posts. We’ve unpinned this comment.

[Nathan Young]

I sense there is a lurking disagreement about whether what Owen did was clumsy or really bad and I guess that will make a lot of this pretty hard to discuss.

[Tiresias]

My take is the action is quite bad, though its origins were in clumsiness. But people not intending to do harm can still do quite bad things. I have two theories as to what Owen even meant, one of which is much worse than the other, but both still result in the action itself being quite bad.

One version is, Owen felt attracted to this women, her presence caused him to want to masturbate, and so his sharing this information meant (at least to him) “I am very sexually attracted to you and cannot treat you ‘normally’ until I have masturbated.” This is truly appalling behavior, though I can understand why someone who is socially obtuse about these things might not realize the extent of its harm/​its appalling nature. It’s just this whole implication of “Frequently, I do not think of you in terms of your accomplishments or personality, but rather your looks and body. I indulge in my sexualization and objectification of you and am making little attempt to remedy that. I want you to know that I think of you sexually, and I will leave and think about your body as I go engage in this sexual act. Only after this will I be able to think of you as a full, fully fleshed out person with value that stems from things other than your sexual appeal. But you should know, at any time I may revert to objectifying you.”

A second version is, Owen wanted to masturbate for unrelated reasons, and was oversharing.

Frankly, based on his apology, and his linking his behavior to his shame about feeling attracted to people, it seems more likely to me that the situation is the former. Since he’s making it sound like attraction played a role here. But it’s hard to tell. And regardless, whether it’s the first situation or the second is unclear to the woman, leaving in her mind that it very well could be the first situation. This could make her feel extremely uncomfortable and harm her in other ways—such as internalizing that a large part of her value stems from her sexual appeal.

[MaxRa]

Do you think one can feel sexually aroused by a person while at the same time not objectifying that person /​ not reducing the person to their body /​ while thinking of them as a full person with value? Am surprised you seem to suggest this is not a possibility here, seems somewhat more plausible to me.

[Tiresias]

I think it is possible to find someone sexually attractive and not objectify them. But, I think it is hard for people (both men and women) to view women sexually without objectifying them. There are a few studies that demonstrate this, though I haven’t seen a massive body of literature on this, which means I view these studies with some skepticism. Specifically, the studies will find that people can view sexual images of men without objectifying brain responses, but cannot do the same for women. Women are consistently objectified in a way men aren’t when viewed in a sexual context. See this study, this other study by the same authors, this study, or this study. (There may be more studies on this; I spent a few minutes googling and reading abstracts based on a memory of a study press release I read some time ago).

The issue here is not that people are sexually attracted to women, it’s that this sexual/​romantic attraction becomes the primary way they view the woman.

Sometimes when I bring up this trend (finding women sexually attractive often involves a high level of objectification, and this is harmful to women), people’s response is “It’s natural/​normal so it isn’t a problem.” But the behavior is harmful, and leads to systemic oppression. That it’s extremely common and may be largely innate means it’s more challenging to solve, not that we should not put effort into solving it.

There are a few things I recommend men do to try to curb this behavior. (1) Try to notice when you are engaging in this behavior. That is, when you are speaking to/​thinking of a woman and viewing her primary as a sexual/​romantic option. (2) When you do notice it, try to reframe her in your mind, actively thinking of things like her professional accomplishments or personality. [This is going to be very difficult to do, and you will not be perfect at it.] (3) Do not talk about her to other people in an objectifying way, which (in the broad definition I’m using now), includes talking about her primarily as a potential romantic partner. This means, if you meet a woman and you’re interested in her, when you talk about her to others, you should spend some time describing her general qualities in addition to the fact that you are interested in her, and avoid bringing up that you think she’s hot altogether. (4) Don’t expect perfection, but consistently strive to be better. Acknowledge objectification is normal, and don’t beat yourself up about doing it. But don’t feel like it’s a problem you can ignore either.

These are not hard and fast rules for every situation, but this is generally the approach I recommend.

Let me dive into an example of what can seem like innocuous behavior, but can actually be harmful to women, and contribute to a bad environment for women, especially when gender ratios are skewed and this sort of thing happens often.

You’re single and want to be in a relationship. You meet a woman at an event/​party and develop a crush on her. You get back to your friends and say something like “I just met this woman named Phoebe. I’m not sure if she’s into me but I’m into her” and you don’t say much else about her.

This is pretty innocuous and it’s really not that bad on the scale of things. But it can still be harmful. Let’s say you met another man at the event/​party, and you also really liked him, but you’re straight so it’s not in a romantic/​sexual way. When you’re summarizing your time at the event/​party to others, you might mention him and talk about the reasons that you like him, things that focus on his personality and who he is as a person. But with Phoebe, in this example, the only thing you’re saying about her is that you like her. So now, Phoebe’s building a reputation that is not built on her personality, but her role as a romantic/​sexual partner. This other man, though, gets to build a reputation for his personality.

The harm goes away if you spend some time describing the non-appearance based reasons of why you like Phoebe. But, again, if the major focus of your conversations about Phoebe is just that you like her, that can be harmful in the way described above. It’s real subtle stuff, but maybe this example shows how even innocuous things can be harmful, and why they should be avoided (with a lot of leeway for not being perfect about it), even if they’re extremely normal.

[MaxRa]

Thanks a lot for the elaboration, I appreciate that!

I don’t have time to read into the literature right now, just very quickly responding to give you some impression of my thoughts and points of potential disagreements (which I haven’t reflected on too much yet, so really interested in your responses):

1. I spontaneously weigh the evidence of fMRI recordings of “objectification” very litte (my background is in cogsci and I worked a little with fMRI, though far from having any expertise, just general impressions of fMRI data being really hard to usefully connect to interesting psychological phenomena), but I agree there’s definitely a “there” there where women’s physical features are generally much more central in terms of what men find sexually attractive than for men’s sexual attractiveness to women.

2. I would not use the term “objectification” to also include thinking of a person as a potential romantic partner. That seems to invite misunderstandings and paint things that are predominantly very beautiful (having a crush) in a problematic way.

   1. (Definition from Wikipedia: “In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person, as an object or a thing. It is part of dehumanization, the act of disavowing the humanity of others.”)

3. The men I talk to about romantic interestests (most among them EAs) don’t seem to me to be doing much objectification with their love interests, e.g. character traits/​flirting experiences/​deep conversations play a huge rule when falling in love, though of course physical attraction matters hugely as well.

   1. Maybe that’s just my social niche though? I can imagine that there are men who basically actually objectify a women when they are sexually attracted to them, and that an affected woman would find it very offputting if a person they want to be friends with regularly just perceives them as a body that makes distracting noises.

   2. It’s just that the men I hang out with are not like that and I expect the women they have crushes on would most often at minimum feel flattered if they knew how my friends see them, and not at all like they were dehumanized.

   3. Hmm, fwiw I also feel fairly uneasy about reducing physical attraction to objectification, can’t immediately put my finger on why though.

avoid bringing up that you think she’s hot altogether.

From previous conversations within my EA subcommunities I have the impression that men talk too little about who they have a crush on. My current hot take is that it’s much easier to develop healthy romantic and sexual attitudes, norms, behaviors etc. if men would generally talk more openly about such topics, including who they find hot.

• I’m generally fairly open and happy to talk about such topics and I feel like I can regularly give fairly useful (and kinda “basic”) romantic advice, and I have the impression that there’s often a strong desire to connect with other men about romantic feelings, experiences, etc.

• E.g. I’d guess that if OCB would’ve felt less shame about his sexual and romantic desires (which I remember him saying in his apology) then he would’ve talked about them more with friends and he’d’ve been in a better position to evaluate what type of romantic and sexual behavior is cooperative and a good idea in general.

[Brian_Tomasik]

Your Phoebe example is interesting and not something I had considered much before. :) The idea that discussion about her romantic/​appearance aspects could crowd out discussion of her personality or talents would make sense if we assume that the total amount of talk about Phoebe versus the other man is the same. In practice, I suspect that if someone has a crush on Phoebe, he’ll talk about her way more than the other man to his friends, including about both romantic/​appearance and personality/​talent attributes. One might even expect Phoebe to get an advantage relative to the other man due to this.

A number of female political commentators and celebrity female politicians are unusually attractive, and this is probably because their appearance makes people more interested in all aspects of them, including their intellectual/​policy contributions. The main unfairness here would then be to crowd out the less attractive women and men whose work is of equal quality.

[Tiresias]

We can maybe think through this with real life examples. If you have a friend who has a minor crush on someone they met once/​twice, and you don’t know that person, what is the primary thing you think about them? What category do you put them in?

[Brian_Tomasik]

Ok. :) If the crush isn’t an EA, I probably would mainly think of her as “my friend’s crush”, though with some curiosity about her career and other attributes. If the crush is an EA, I would be more curious about the other aspects of her (such as wondering what field she works in), though you’re right that “my friend’s crush” would still be a main way to think of her until I learned more.

What I was getting at with my comment was that even merely being a friend’s crush can increase the salience of the person in general, making it more likely I would learn more information about her, including her personality and career pursuits. So my total amount of knowledge about her achievements would be higher than otherwise. And in some cases, people who started out interested in someone for superficial reasons may come to be primarily interested in the less superficial parts. TV Tropes gives this example:

This show with the cute lead character actually has an interesting side character with an in-depth story that you’re really getting into. [...] you end up really liking the show/​movie/​book/​game/​etc for a reason completely different from why you started to check it out.

Traditionally, this is even how many people approach dating: starting with superficial attraction to someone and then coming to like them on a deeper level. (Personally I think that if you ultimately want the deeper level in a relationship, it’s better to directly search for someone who is a good match in that regard. But this is a bit of a tangent.)

Of course, there will be some people who only ever notice the superficial level and don’t explore deeper, but I still think the total amount of deeper knowledge about something tends to be higher when there’s more superficial attention to it. There might be some exceptions where if something is perceived as too gaudy, then serious thinkers may be deterred from engaging with it to avoid appearing low-brow. For example, PETA’s old marketing tactics using nudity might make some elites less likely to engage with animal-rights philosophy for fear of appearing unserious.

[Nathan Young]

so his sharing this information meant (at least to him) “I am very sexually attracted to you and cannot treat you ‘normally’ until I have masturbated.” This is truly appalling behavior, though I can understand why someone who is socially obtuse about these things might not realize the extent of its harm/​its appalling nature.

I feel pretty scared to say this.

I think some people might read this not in the context of this case, but in general, that you can never talk to your consenting friends about sex. That isn’t the case. Many people do, and it’s usually fine.

What made this bad was a repeated pattern of upsetting people, not thinking about the fact that she was alone in his house, in a foreign country and that they didn’t understand one another’s boundaries well. And perhaps that he had a lot of soft power in general, though I find that harder to parse.

But to those reading who aren’t in those situations who have friends with whom they sometimes talk about sex, that’s fine. If you feel uncertain—just ask if someone is comfortable talking about it in a way they can say no to.

[allskies]

I don’t think we have nearly enough infortmation to make conclusions like the ones you’re making here.

For example, we have no idea what sort of exchanges the parties had previously. We do know, from the OP, that this wasn’t a comment made to a stranger, which would be considerably worse—their relationship was established, was “unusually direct and honest”, including talking about sexual things and “oversharing”. For all we know the first person to make a sexual comment might have been the woman in question, thus setting the tone for him to make his comment. I think that would be a significant mitigating factor in how “bad” Owen’s actions were (ie could be reasonably have expected the comment he made to be in keeping with the tone of the relationship they already had).

This needn’t excuse making someone else feel uncomfortable, but the context of which we have no knowledge is hugely important in establishing just how bad an infraction this was.

[Tiresias]

This may be nitpicky about your word choice, but my original comment is framed outright as speculation as to what Owen meant, so I’m not making conclusions.

But, as I state later in the original comment, what Owen meant by the comment is not the biggest factor in this situation. The comment has an ambiguous meaning and that ambiguity might lead the women to think he meant (or has some chance of meaning) the first version of what I laid out. The details of their relationship Owen shared in his statement do not make me think he had a good reason for thinking this was an appropriate statement. Even if they have a history of oversharing (which she may have felt pressured to do with him in the first place), it’s still not clear whether this is oversharing or a statement of the first type that I described. Both are versions of the meaning I posited involve “oversharing,” it’s just that the second version of what I posited had a meaning that more more “merely oversharing” rather than also having all this other implication laid into it.

[agunning]

hmmm
my feeling is
-in general I’m pro erring on the side of deferring to the people affected, there’s likely a lot of information missing

- i feel like there’s a benefit to a norm of ’if people are obeying the letter of the law/​widely agreed community norms and acting in good faith we should try to make them feel assured they’ll be left to their private lives and can work through their dumb mistakes on their own’

if we’re deciding this merits an intervention we should decide what the community norm violated should be, because this does seem to be good faith

[jacquesthibs]

Since I expect some people to be a bit confused as to what exactly was the bad thing that has happened after reading this post, I think it would be great if the community health team could write a post explaining and pointing out exactly what was bad here and in other similar instances.

I think there is value in being crystal clear about what were the bad things that happened because I expect people will takeaway different things from this post.

[Nathan Young]

Since noone else has, I’ll try, downvote if you think this isn’t worth reading. The badness is broken up into a number of different factors.

Most interactions don’t lead to upset. So If we trust Owen’s narrative, then he misread social cues in a way that upset his accuser by talking about masturbation when she didn’t want to and so upset her. If you are a consequentialist, upsetting people is bad. If you are a deontologist, not taking time to understand boundaries such that you overstep them is bad.

If we trust his account, which I guess I do, they had talked about this kind of thing before. But she still didn’t want to and she is still upset about it 5 years later. This caused harm and so was an error.

If there was nothing else at play I guess personally I think this was a bit bad. Worth sitting down and evaluating how one communicates. I think some men you know will have done something like this (though I think it was avoidable and that the costs weren’t worth it). I imagine there is disagreement on his bad this is. I guess some of those reading this aren’t thinking “will I talk about sex despite not wanting to” but instead “will I be as upset as this woman is. I’d like to avoid that”

Next, the woman in question was staying at his house in a foreign country. And she knew that he had the ability to recommend her for jobs and (I sense) figured that he was important to have on her side. This seems to be why Owen thinks she went along with it. Owen was pretty well respected in EA even then, right?

If there was nothing else at play I guess I’m somewhere between a more than a bit bad and very bad. Because he is well known, women who heard of this might think this is the norm or they might just have heard how a well known well liked person upset a woman they know. Perhaps they wondered if sometimes you have to sit feeling uncomfortable (perhaps unsafe/​grossed out) to get jobs. Some will leave EA as a result. I hope their fear isn’t reality, but I sense the harms are. “Is this the kind of thing that happens a lot? ” “Can I invite friends to EA if this might happen”. I don’t know how bad this is, but I sense that after the second time I would stop taking these risks as a community leader. And I imagine some people think even this one event is disqualifying. And even if you the reader disagree, would you have been more careful here? If you would, then I think revealed preferences show you don’t think this was wise.

Next, there are four other occasions where something a bit like this has happened. How many of these happened after the main events described here? I guess 2 or 3. So even after upsetting someone like this, this pattern continues. This does make me question a Owen’s judgenent.

For me this is the part that probably makes it fully bad though I guess many were there already. I am not naïve here. I think people often upset eachother in romantic interactions. I sadly guess many men (10-20%?) have at one time seriously upset romantic partners and some women/​nb (1-5%) have too. But if one has a pattern of behaviour, one should avoid risky situations. Especially if one is a community leader. Instead Owen seems to keep pushing the boundaries. And I’m not claiming to be perfect, just that this falls short . Again, I weakly sense that the kind of person who thinks Owen did nothing wrong is often an individual who doesn’t seek leadership positions. Should leaders be held to higher interpersonal standards? Well I think their behaviour is taken as what is normal by a much wider group.. so yes.

Finally, after what seems like a possibly unresolved pattern of bad behaviour, Owen is further elevated in the community. Perhaps without this article he would have kept upsetting women at a rate of 1 person every couple of years.

I think a lot of these last two points hang on what has happened in the intervening 5 years. For myself, if the upset caused between now and then was very small, then perhaps a reasonable decision-maker would come to the conclusion that Owen had changed his behaviour and was suitable for community leadership. If an event like the above has been happening once a year then it seems really bad that he became a board member in the first place.

I think reasonable people can disagree a bit here, and there are things we don’t know, and I think it’s worth considering that people might be arguing with different assumptions (“There are probably other bad stories” “Owen is probably being overly scrupulous here” “what would I want if I were Owen/​the woman” “how should we judge this specific case” “how do we send a credible signal about this kind of behaviour” “it is good he was honest” “he only admitted this because he had to”). I find it pretty unlikely that Owen wasn’t a bit unkind not to have avoided the later situations in this pattern and unwise given the increased harms from his behaviour as opposed to him being a random community member. But there is some possibility that in 3 months with new information I’ll feel differently.

If you disagree, I suggest you write a version. But I think mine is better than nothing. I have tried to be evenhanded but I imagine I’m prone to both avoiding supporting Owen and avoiding empathising enough with the accuser.

[pseudonym]

I’m not sure if this is actually a point of disagreement, but just to be clear:

Next, the woman in question was staying at his house in a foreign country. And she knew that he had the ability to recommend her for jobs and (I sense) figured that he was important to have on her side. This seems to be why Owen thinks she went along with it. Owen was pretty well respected in EA even then, right?

If there was nothing else at play I guess I’m somewhere between a more than a bit bad and very bad.

I think the “if there was nothing else at play” is doing a lot of work here.

My view is that choosing to offer his room and confirming this with the hiring organization first, instead of checking in with the friend first about the situation and asking her what she options she would feel most comfortable with first, while this was being arranged on the day of her flight rings serious alarm bells to me, and suggests a significant lapse in professional judgement, awareness of power dynamics and a lack of empathy to his friend (or at least poorly communicated).

I’m not excluding the scenario that she in fact was given multiple options and had a fair chance to consider these options and the opportunity to say no, but this isn’t how I interpret Owen’s description of events.

If this interpretation is accurate, even one such event would be sufficient (for me) for a vote of no confidence in Owen’s ability to appreciate professional boundaries and the power he may wield. In this case, being a better established /​ more “central” EA, being older, being a man (possibly physically stronger), being in his home, being in his country, being partly responsible for her job interview (to whatever extent the recommendation played a role). There was also a lack of consideration for the context here, that this was done with such urgency, when she might be stressed about the flight, going to a different country, the interview itself, things she might have put aside at home for this trip.

Given someone acting in good faith has to be oblivious to all of these aspects in order to grossly misjudge the extent this would be accepted by the other party, it makes it difficult for me to rule out the possibility that he was acting opportunistically in his self-interest when offering the room. The masturbation comments in this light would be even worse.

While many have appreciated his apology and response, the fact that these actions were taken only in response to being found out/​being outed as a result of the TIME article also does not inspire confidence in his claim that he wants to “never repeat these mistakes”. Nor do his four other potentially harmful incidents (in fairness, these were much less “egregious” than this one. This is welcome news, but a pretty low bar to clear). The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Similarly,

Again I’ll make decisions about when to resume these in consultation with my therapist.

Shows a continued lack of insight into the impacts of his actions to the community around him, and whether it’s appropriate for him to be the arbiter around continuing activities that gives him power and exposes him to potential victims.

A minor comment:

I have tried to be evenhanded but I imagine I’m prone to both avoiding supporting Owen and avoiding empathising enough with the accuser.

I don’t like how this is phrased, as it implies we should be optimizing to support Owen to the same extent as supporting the victim.

[Nathan Young]

Mostly seems fair.

The only things I’d say is that I don’t personally think he needed to publicly apologise for this thing 5 years ago. But I want to know if there is stuff that’s much more recent and what he’s done to break the pattern. I think CH has done worse there for not reporting it to the board.

On supporting Owen Vs the accuser I think that there is some right amount to support each and I’m comparing to that. Though that said it’s not clear to me that I should support the accuser loads more because she’s the accuser. I guess I should a bit to account for bias, but mainly I should be supportive because she is mostly harmed and he has a pattern of this behaviour.

[ChristianKleineidam]

Next, there are four other occasions where something a bit like this has happened. How many of these happened after the main events described here? I guess 2 or 3. So even after upsetting someone like this, this pattern continues. This does make me question a Owen’s judgenent.

To me, Owen’s post reads like he didn’t notice at the time that he upset her. Owen writes: “She was in a structural position where it was (I now believe) unreasonable to expect honesty about her experience”.

It’s unclear how long it took for Owen to know how uncomfortable he made her.

[Nathan Young]

Rereading this, I sense that also, if none of the other cases were junior community members (say only involved for a year or 2) I’d would feel Owen’s actions less bad overall.

[Tiresias]

I get the impression you are trying hard to do good here, and I appreciate that. I also find this comment extremely disheartening, as even a thoughtful attempt to try to work through the harm of this behavior minimizes the harm and leaves out a big portion of the harm. I’m guessing many, many others in EA share a similar perspective to you, and that is just bumming me out right now. I love so many parts of EA, but I’m being reminded about how, as a women, my entire existence will be swimming uphill against these sorts of perspectives. It’s demoralizing to me, and even though I found the original TIME piece to be extremely uncharitable, I also newly believe that oppressive perspectives about gender and a failure to recognize these perspectives is a major contributor to why the gender ratio is so imbalanced.

I’m not saying you in particular are bad here, or that you are particularly bad. I see that you are being very thoughtful and trying to work through this. It’s just disheartening to see someone who is so thoughtful and operating in good faith still continue—in my view—to get it wrong. I know that this is inevitable in communities, but I also do not enjoy the process of going up against this sort of thing. My impulse is just to go seek refuge and security in a group that understands this sort of thing more, likely a group of mostly women.

For my explanation (though I could’ve gone into more detail) about the harm done, see this comment I made in reply to another one of your comments.

This is a pretty emotional comment, and I’m not sharing to make you feel bad or anything. Or even to say that you’re wrong to share your explanation. I’m sharing my emotional response to your comment to help people imagine what is maybe a cause for the gender imbalance/​women feeling demoralized about EA.

[quinn]

Yeah as an extroverted male reading this makes me wonder if I’m supposed to be threatmodeling that I’ll be promoted and gain movement power some day? Because being around for longer than someone else is informal power (?) and I’m responsible for futures in which that becomes formal power?

Everyone is confused and there’s not a clear takeaway, IMO.

[Tiresias]

I don’t think the only reason the women felt uncomfortable here is because of power dynamics. The power dynamics just made the situation much worse. But you should generally try to avoid making people uncomfortable, particularly in a way that touches on their membership in part of a marginalized group.

So, one way I think all men, not just those in power, should modify their behavior is to refrain from making sexual comments. Especially with people you don’t know well yet. If you know someone quite well, and they seem to be making these comments themselves, and you have a level of trust and security with each other, you can be much more open with what you talk about. But for people you don’t know that well, for people who haven’t initiated this sort of thing themselves, just don’t make sexual comments.

[Nathan Young]

I think he was relatively well known and respected in a much smaller community 5 years ago. So I think it’s a bit different. But if you have power over job apps and someone stays at your house without any other options, yeah, probably be more careful.

[Jgray]

It’s really quite simple.

You need to make sure you never make anyone around you at all uneasy or uncomfortable.

OP easily solved this in 2020 by “not being edgy anymore.” Perhaps you could change your personality like OP and not be an extrovert anymore. Ideally do not speak unless spoken to, and only then if it’s because your silence is making others uncomfortable.

[howdoyousay?]

For the times when I have been done wrong to, I would have been really happy if the injuring party had been as reflective, genuinely self-critical and (from what I can see) steadfast in trying to do better as you are.

From what I can tell, you didn’t have to “out” yourself for this. I respect the move to do this and to make amends and doing so (from what it seems) with the person you wronged. It’s impressive that (from what it seems) they’re keen to see things put right and giving you some support in this regard (if only fact checking this post).

I’ve more often felt like the younger woman in this scenario did. But the depths of your reflections Owen are leading me to think more critically about how I can be careless /​ flippant from my relative position of power and how that would make others feel.

Whether someone has had a big fuck up or minor infractions, I think this stuff is life long learning. There is no simple algorithm (though some guidelines, always evolving); diversity of people and emotional world’s mean that it’s just hard work to understand other people better, and not become complacent or over-confident when you think you’re doing is well or dismissive and derisive if you’re dismayed by lack of success.

[AlexMennen]

From what I can tell, you didn’t have to “out” yourself for this.

This might not be true. Effective Ventures’s statement on the matter says that they were informed of this by Julia Wise, so at least they knew, and it’s possible that someone would have outed him more publicly had he not done so himself.

[Jason]

Right, I think it would have been perilous for the board not to remove Owen with a statutory inquiry by the Charity Commission already underway.

[Owen Cotton-Barratt]

Hi all,

Nine months later, I wanted to provide a brief update, in service of letting people make informed decisions about how to interact with me, and in service of helping people to understand the patterns that can cause harm.

Professional updates

I previously said I was pausing some professional activities, such as starting new mentor relationships or organizing events, and actually paused a larger class (e.g. posting on the forum; attending professional events I’m invited to). I’m now cautiously resuming some of these activities. In some cases (like posting things online) this is just a decision in my court, though I’ll continue to seek advice. In other cases there will be decisions for others to make about how to interface with me^[1] (e.g. whether to have me at events) — in such cases I’d like to cooperate with the relevant parties to help them reach whatever decisions they’d most endorse. I’m making this change after working in-depth with a therapist, integrating more feedback, asking advice from wiser folks, and reflecting to better understand what I did wrong, how it was problematic, and how to act appropriately going forwards.

If anyone has any bad experiences interacting with me in the future, I want to say — please share that with somebody if you feel comfortable doing so. I’d love it if you could share with me (and I don’t think I’ve ever thought badly of someone for giving me blunt feedback), but I understand if it would be easier to share with someone else. I know that my colleagues (broadly understood) won’t want to support patterns where I’m doing harm.

Advice to people in similar situations

Based on my original statement, a few people expressed to me confusion about what had gone wrong. I want to be clear that I wasn’t just unlucky here: my actions would have been ill-judged even absent any power differential, and were decidedly inappropriate when there was one. In particular, I sought increased intimacy — heavily grounded in misguided emotional angst^[2] — in ways that were inattentive to romantic communication norms, and sometimes lost touch with what the other person wanted. In case this might reach anyone in a similar position to where I was (and thereby help to avert the pattern playing out again), here is the advice I’d want to give to my past self:

You need to get over yourself. Emotionally, the question of whether you’re bad for feeling attracted to people is crushing. It happens that it’s a misguided question, and not one that other people would be interested in. I recommend — if you can access it — just not feeling bad about it. But you’re allowed to be misguided on things. What’s not OK is casting other people as your judge (a role that shouldn’t exist!) without their permission.

What’s worse is trying to involve the people you feel attracted to in determining whether you’re bad. This is a recipe for harm — both because they should never have to engage with you on that question, but also because its reductive nature doesn’t leave room for their own feelings, and you’re at risk both of not noticing their experience, and even of asking them to be complicit in masking their experience to provide reassurances on your nonsense question. People who have less structural power are at greater risk of not feeling comfortable being direct — you’re not being respectful by “taking them at their word” and assuming they’ll say the important things, because it doesn’t really give them room to choose how to engage. Moreover, (1) if you have professional interactions with someone where shame inhibits your ability to think/​talk directly about the meta of the relationship, this could make things go wrong, and (2) if you ever hurt someone who regards you in some way as a mentor, that would be a betrayal of their trust.

Instead, think things through in private, or with help. Principally, process your feelings; when it’s no longer painful to think about, if you still feel moved to act, think through how any action may be received. (It’s not bad to think about these things! it’s actually laudable to do so. Naïvety is not a shield. Your sex aversion won’t always stop others from seeing things as about sex.) Journal about it. Talk to friends. Get a therapist.

(If you’re reading this and you feel like this might in some way be talking to you, feel free to reach out — I could say a bit more, but am also just very happy to listen to anyone who finds it difficult to talk about this.)

Personal updates

Having spent time working through my angst I now think I know how to seek romantic connection in healthy ways. However, I also now identify as monogamous — I still think polyamory has a philosophical appeal, but it’s apparent to me that I don’t really want more romance in my life; and it’s now apparent that feeling attraction while monogamous need not involve wronging people. Going forwards I won’t bring these topics up in conversation. Also having taken feedback from folks I’ll avoid some behaviours I wasn’t tracking as potentially problematic (notably, taking meetings in hotel rooms when it was more convenient).^[3]

I’m conscious that in some cases people might be uncomfortable interacting with me because of my past actions. Navigating this is tricky. I’m quite uncomfortable with the idea that people who don’t want to might feel compelled to interact with me, but I don’t think I can promise never to be present in any spaces where this might occur. I will say that I would like it if people felt affordance to withdraw or to ask me to withdraw. (I can’t imagine holding this against someone, and if I find the experience difficult that’s between me and my therapist.)

I’m sorry again to everyone. I care deeply about giving people interacting with me good experiences, and strive to be one of the people who proactively contributes to a healthy culture with robust safeguards against harm. I fell well short of that standard. I’ll work hard to do consistently better on this in the future — I never get to know exactly what my remaining blindspots are, but I’m hopeful that I’ve now understood enough to give the problematic behaviour a wide berth — and I welcome others helping to hold me accountable in this.

1. ^

   And in some cases that might take some time; e.g. CEA had said that they wouldn’t talk to me about the issues in-depth or consider having me at their events until the external investigation EV commissioned was complete — which seemed very reasonable. When I shared a draft of this comment with EV they let me know that the investigation has now concluded; I don’t yet know what its recommendations are or how they plan to respond. I thought I’d go ahead and post now because it seems epistemically cleaner for me to just share things without a question of those being influenced by where EV land. Of course I plan to cooperate with whatever they end up asking of me, and could end up making further policy updates if there’s further useful feedback.

2. ^

   I’ve been confused about whether/​how to mention this because I don’t think that motivations excuse actions. But it’s central enough to what went wrong that I expect things to make less sense — and be less useful for helping to avert similar patterns — if I omit it.

3. ^

   These are serious policy updates — I’m thinking about things pretty differently now, and will act in ways that should steer well clear of what was problematic. They’re not ironclad commitments, because there are clear exceptions (e.g. I don’t want to stop talking to my wife or therapist) and I don’t want to lock something in when I’m not sure I’ve understood all of the cases where it would be a bad idea.

[Catherine Low]

Thanks for the public update. Some readers might also be interested in what actions and decisions EV and the Community Health team have been taking around this.

• Over the last 9 months Owen has not been allowed to attend EV-run events and in-person spaces (like EA Global and EV run offices). EV exec is currently deciding how EV will interact with Owen going forward, and are planning to publish that in the future. They have sought external advice and advice from our team.

• We are in communication with Owen about professional updates on his end so we can check in about safeguards where relevant. We have given him some advice aimed to prevent possible future harm.

People actively considering the choice of whether to work with Owen based on the balance of information available are welcome to reach out to us for input as part of their decision making process. Feel free to reach out to me ([e-mail]) if you are in this position.

[Rebecca]

Quite useful to get these updates. Though i think it would have been good as a quick take that was linked to here—I’ve only just accidentally come across this now, and even though I saw you posting on the forum again recently, didn’t think to check back here. I would imagine this is true of most people who are likely to interact with you going forward

[Owen Cotton-Barratt]

Thanks for the feedback, I didn’t really consider a quick take, and find it plausible it would have been the best option.

I think EV may post a related update in the not-too-distant future, so at this point I’ll plan to wait and then post a link to this update on that (so as not to pull people’s attention onto the topic twice when once will do). Or if it looks like that’s not going to happen I’ll take some other step to make sure it’s visible. Does that seem sufficient?

[Rebecca]

Seems good

[Nathan Young]

So looking at the set of polls I wrote, what would the community have had happen here? Seemingly on net we don’t think that people should publicly report immediately or that behaviour like this is instant disqualification. I guess many believe Owen acted wrongly, but there is little agreement afterwards.

In short, I’m confused as to what agreed ideal behaviour was here, beyond not making this woman uncomfortable in the first place.

[Nathan Young]

Also, there seems to be a big difference between the two accounts of this event. In the accusers account it is clearly awful and Owen has a lot power over her and women like her. In Owen’s account they previously know one another, it’s unclear why she ends up staying with him and he has little power over her job.

Seems underrated how different those are.

[Habryka]

I would not conflate “the accuser’s account” with “the account of the Times article”.

My best guess is that the author heavily cherry-picked statements by the accuser and set up context to make things seem maximally scandalous. Indeed, the Times article really doesn’t score highly on accuracy, and this post seems to corroborate that.

I think the perspectives might still differ a lot, but we don’t know, we only have info through a highly filtered lens of the times article, which I would not treat as a reliable source about anyone’s sentiments.

[titotal]

I’m not sure the accounts actually are that different. The only statement in the article that owen said was false was that he wasn’t an official recruiter at the time. However, if we look at the statements:

• My role didn’t develop to connecting people with different positions until later, and this wasn’t part of my self-conception at the time

• (However it makes sense to me that this was her perception)

This implies that while he wasn’t officially a recruiter, it was reasonable for her to think that he was. It’s plausible to me that he was playing the role unofficially at the time, but thought he was just helping out friends with recommendations. He did confirm that he “suggested her as a candidate” and had “signficant power”.

I think some of the context was flattened in the editing of the times article, but I don’t see any contradictions between the accounts.

[Guy Raveh]

Doesn’t seem like a big difference to me.

[Guy Raveh]

I think on the first report, how far this needs to go depends on the person who was harassed. It’s ok not to require a public apology and it’s ok not to want the accused to lose their job (although it’s also ok to want the opposite!).

But after Wise became aware of more cases, he should have been removed from the board. Personally I think he should have also apologized publicly (like he now did), but I find this less important.

[Lukas_Gloor]

But after Wise became aware of more cases, he should have been removed from the board.

I agree this definitely has to happen if Julia became aware of more cases through further complaints or through an investigation unearthing other things that are at least 50% as bad as the incident described by Owen.

However, if these “other cases” were just Owen going through his memory of any similar interactions and applying what he learned from the staying-at-his-house incident and then scrupulously listing every interaction where, in retrospect, he cannot be 100% confident that he didn’t make someone uncomfortable (and regrets the way he expressed interest), then it’s a bit different. (In that case, removing him from the board doesn’t seem mandatory to me, but I also don’t find it unreasonable.)

Edit: And this seems like the interpretation you’d arrive at if you believe Owen’s account. I’m quoting it here for context:

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.

If you believe this account is accurate, then that’s quite different from what a reader unfamiliar with this info would infer from “after Wise became aware of more cases.”

[CuriousEA]

Perhaps people who pushed back or even attacked the Time article should have some reflection?

[allskies]

If anything this post supports some of the criticism – the account in the TIME article suggests OCB was responsible for finding promising students and placing then in high-profile jobs (neither of which was the case). It makes no mention of the fact he and the accuser were seemingly already friends with an “unusually direct and honest” relationship (a statement the accuser presumably agrees with, as she’s had a chance to vet this post). And that once he learned he had overstepped he was horrified and sought to make amends.

In my mind that’s a lot of important context that was elided, and suggests an awkward misstep rather than something more sinister.

[titotal]

A lot of the criticism went way beyond “Time omitted some important context”. In this highly upvoted post, the OP states that:

If I could pop back in time to witness the reported interactions, I personally would think in 80% of cases that the accused had done nothing wrong

Well now we have the full picture for at least one of the accusations, and we have found out that, according to the accused:

1. The accuser was entirely honest in her account. They may have made a slight mistake in thinking his role of recommending people for jobs was official at the time, but Owen states that this was entirely reasonable to think. It sounds like he was already doing some of it unofficially.

2. The man in question did do something wrong, self-admittedly. He was attracted to this women and pushed boundaries with her in a way that made her feel pressured and uncomfortable. He was not mindful of the significant power imbalances in play that made it difficult for her to push back on unwanted behaviour.

3. Self-admittedly, the culture of EA played a contributing factor in Owen’s wrongdoing. This is very important, as it implies that there areas where EA could easily improve to prevent this occurring again.

While I can quibble with the flattening of context in the article, I think the testimony of the woman in question has been entirely upheld, and she should be commended for bravely speaking up on the matter.

[allskies]

I guess I’d just say that the missing context from the TIME article seems hugely important in understanding exactly how much of a boundary/​norm violation this event was.

Not that I endorse it, but Aella’s position that in 80% of the anecdotes the accused did nothing wrong is not incompatible with this anecdote being (mostly) accurate.

[titotal]

Not that I endorse it, but Aella’s position that in 80% of the anecdotes the accused did nothing wrong is not incompatible with this anecdote being (mostly) accurate.

One of the other cases was banned from EA events for his behaviour, which I’ll take to mean he did something wrong. There was only like 10 incidents described. So with at least two cases of confirmed wrongdoing, and none so far in the “debunked” camp, the statement seems extremely unlikely to be true. Which is unsurprising, given that it was made with very little evidence.

[James Özden]

Adding to your points, I think the Time article is very likely understating (I think by a significant margin) the amount of sexual harassment or otherwise unwanted male advances. For example, there was only one case about Owen in the article but he himself admits (see below quote) there were at least 4 other occasions where his actions might have been misguided /​ overstepped the mark.

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.

Generally, I think we can expect to see some “survivorship bias” e.g. reporters who want to uncover instances of sexual harassment might struggle because people who have faced these experiences might never engage properly with the EA community. For example, say someone new attends an EA event and faces some level of misogyny by male attendees - they will just never attend an EA event again. So of course an article about reported cases will miss a significant proportion of incidents! As a result, it is very hard to track these incidences, especially if they occur at the early stages of someone’s exposure to EA.

(There’s a whole other point about internalised patriarchy where women will just tolerate some non-negligible level of sexism and not report it or even think it’s a problem, but that’s probably another conversation).

[Nathan Young]

Yeah I’d bet this is true.

I think there are tradeoffs here though (and I have also talked to women who like the status quo and I assume men do). It’s not clear to me that the obvious path forward is.

[James Özden]

I think there are tradeoffs here though (and I have also talked to women who like the status quo and I assume men do).

Just flagging that this sentence made me quite uneasy. Of course when you’re talking about removing the institutional power of an oppressing group (e.g. men, white people, humans, etc.) that group will not want to lose their power or status. This doesn’t make it any less important or moral though!

An exaggerated version of this might look like “There are some trade-offs to giving black people the right to vote. Most white people enjoy our political system the way it is, so we would have to consider what they would lose as well”.

If it’s not clear, I think this is the wrong way of thinking about it. I also don’t have any obvious solutions, but I think men should be much more willing to take steps to try correct unearned social power e.g. basic reading on feminist topics, don’t talk over women (or considering how much men are speaking vs women in a group discussion), be mindful of your social power, err on the cautious side for physical touching /​ sexual advances, don’t be defensive when you get called out, etc.

[Jason]

I think Nathan was referring to the tradeoffs of the suggestion in the original proposal, which includes a loss of sex and potential relationships that all parties involved desired to have. Although I am broadly sympathetic to the original suggestion, it’s not wrong to say it would have some costs incurred by both men and women (and both men and women have spoken up here to express concern about those costs).

[SoniaAlbrecht]

I was someone who upvoted Aella’s post that you are referring to, but strongly disagreed with that statement even at the time. It would be disturbing to think that all the people who upvoted the post agreed with that part! I think that statement was so extreme relative to the rest of the post that many people who upvoted it probably feel as I do.

[David Mathers]

The post does not say that they actually had a unusually direct and honest relationship, but merely that OCB perceived things that way at the time:

‘We had what I perceived as a preexisting friendship where we were experimenting with being unusually direct and honest (/​“edgy”)’

[allskies]

I suppose so—without hearing the other side we can’t know for sure. He does say there was “oversharing from both sides”, though.

[CuriousEA]

I reread this post, I cannot find where it says the accuser has the chance to vest this post? May be I missed it somehow?

[Guy Raveh]

e.g. in an earlier draft of this post, before fact-checking it with her, I said that we talked about “feelings of mutual attraction”

(Followed by)

This was not her experience

[CuriousEA]

Thanks.

[Denise_Melchin]

[hastily written]

Never ever would I have guessed this. You were living proof to me that at least some, if not many, decent men people exist. I am completely devastated.

EA has been dying. But for me, this is the ultimate death blow.

[Edit: Comment was modified to no longer refer to a specific demographic group.]

[Aptdell]

How do you define “decent”?

I’m a straight guy, and I grew up in an era of pre-#metoo, sex-positive feminism. The doctrine of the day was “men and women are pretty much the same in every way and it’s sexist to claim otherwise”. “Slut shaming is bad, women can be just as horny as men, wanting women to be chaste and pure is patriarchical and bad, trying to give women special protection from harm is benevolent sexism and therefore bad, treating people the same regardless of their gender is good and desirable.”

An anecdote from this era of feminism—I once read a woman claim something like: if a man hears a new dirty joke, and he tells it to his male friends but not his female friends, that’s sexism.

I figured: “OK, well if men and women are pretty much the same in every way, and treating women as delicate flowers is sexist and bad, that means I can model women’s dating preferences by just putting myself in their shoes and asking myself how I would feel if I was in their situation. Women are just people, after all!”

Obviously, at a certain point I figured out that this was a bad heuristic. I believe I’ve technically been the victim of sexual assault (rot13′d: n qehax thl ng n cnegl tenoorq zl pebgpu bhg bs gur oyhr nsgre V gbyq uvz ur jnf cneglvat gbb uneq—V unir ab vagrerfg va thlf naq jnf tvivat fvtanyf bs naablnapr, abg frkhny vagrerfg). I found it about as unpleasant as brushing off a persistent insect. I basically forgot about it for years, until #metoo came along and I thought to myself “huh, I guess maybe I’ve been assaulted too.”

I’ve also been catcalled by women a few times—those are fond memories that I recall when my self-esteem is low.

I hesitate to share this, because I fear readers will think I’m suggesting that women’s preferences are somehow less important or legitimate. That’s not the case. I recognize that society is full of diverse peope with diverse preferences, and I think we should work to satisfy everyone’s preferences in a harmonious way.

Rather, what I’m trying to say is: I think society underrates how often men have trouble modeling women’s preferences. It looks to me like a preference modeling failure at least partially explains the OP. I think failure to model preferences accurately is a mistake that decent people sometimes make. The OP doesn’t read at all to me like an instance of premeditated, deliberate harm. (And, separately, I wish women would invest more in helping men model their preferences. It seems like if a guy says “that doesn’t seem bad to me”, the most common response is some variant of “you’re a horrible person!”, which is counterproductive for learning. It doesn’t communicate any general rule which could allow me to extrapolate from this instance and accurately model your preferences in other situations.)

[Emma G-S]

@Aptdell this comment is frustrating to read as a woman who has experienced unwanted sexual harassment/​attention in the EA community (for context: I was very involved in the EA community for about 4.5 years, I worked at CEA in Oxford for several years and had/​have many friends who would probably count as influential people in the movement.)

Firstly, your description of sexism, including ‘benevolent sexism’, is overly simplistic and unhelpful here. Infantilising women (i.e. treating them as ‘delicate flowers’) need not be conflated with respecting women, respecting their autonomy and existence as sexual human beings. I suspect your description of a “dirty joke” is actually a joke that denigrates and disrespects women—your female friend probably underestimated your ability to understand that nuance. I’ll match your anecdote with another: I have many close and dear male friends—several of whom have a very ‘edgy’ sense of humour, they are able to joke about sex, men, women, relationships—any number of topics, without ever making me feel unsafe. Probably because ‘women’ are not the butt of their jokes—because they see women as full human beings.

Congrats on being cat-called—let us know when you’re yelled at on the street by a human a foot taller than you who could clearly kill you if they wanted to. Let us know when you’ve been followed home, or pushed up against a wall and groped.

“I wish women would invest more in helping men model their preferences.”—this part gripes me the most. You wish we would do MORE emotional labour to help men learn how to stop behaving badly? How often and loudly do we need to say that we don’t want to be yelled at in the street, or hit-on at work, or sent multiple messages after we’ve politely declined advances? I personally have spent so much of my own time gently and patiently trying to explain to “awkward” men why their behaviour sucks. I’m so tired.

[Edit: as much as I do have problems with @Aptdell’s post above, I also think they’re getting the brunt of my frustration with this whole situation. I write this not to undermine my post but just to acknowledge that my emotions were running high when I wrote it, and I might revise some parts tomorrow. ]

[Aptdell]

this comment is frustrating to read as a woman who has experienced unwanted sexual harassment/​attention in the EA community

Sorry to hear that.

To clarify my perspective more broadly, I’ll link to an older comment I made: “Even in the hypothetical where you dotted every possible i and crossed every possible t, getting affirmative verbal consent for every individual muscle movement as though you were in some sort of parody video—if she feels violated afterwards, something went wrong.”

I personally have spent so much of my own time gently and patiently trying to explain to “awkward” men why their behaviour sucks. I’m so tired.

It seems to me that this is a valuable activity and it would be good if it was possible to do it in a more scalable way, to improve the benefit-to-effort ratio. Obviously if you’re feeling burnt out on it, you should take a break.

I’m sorry you’re feeling tired.

(Side note: I had some responses to your other points, but I kept deleting them because I didn’t have a good theory of how they would help move the discussion forwards. It felt like there was a danger of getting lost in the weeds in an “ordinary internet argument” which didn’t contribute to any “action-relevant” important broader point. If you want to discuss more, maybe you could articulate specific important broader points you think we disagree on that would be good to hash out. Alternatively, if you want to have an ordinary internet argument, we could move this to a different medium, e.g. you can send me a private message.)

[Jason]

(This comment is not intended to provide anyone who has committed misconduct with an excuse, it is meant to inform preventive measures.)

I think this is a strong argument for clearer /​ more explicit community norms, and much more training/​education. (I am talking about formal training/​education provided by organizations; I am not saying that women have an obligation to “educate” men).

I’d suggest (1) society as a whole does a lousy job in this area; (2) men in EA may be less likely to have picked up on and internalized the lessons society as a whole does attempt to teach; and (3) the norms in EA seem to be different than the norms in general society, so that people may be unsure which general-society norms to follow.

I’m not sure what type of training/​education would be helpful, but I know it needs to more intense, more tailored to EA, and more effective than standard corporate anti-harassment training.

If men in general (or men in EA) “have trouble modeling women’s preferences,” that points to a need for relatively more bright-line rules than there would be in a world where that isn’t the case. If an individual man has difficulty in this area, he needs to recognize that issue and err on the side of caution.

[Aptdell]

I largely agree. I think the thing to do is to poll a representative sample of women in EA regarding when they would /​ would not want a guy to flirt with them (and how), then formulate some guidelines based on the poll results and publish the guidelines.

Julia Wise previously expressed skepticism, saying:

My sense is that pre-specified criteria for what constitutes something like “offensive actions” or “unwanted sexual attention” and what the response should be isn’t realistic or a good idea. A lot of factors play into what constitutes a problem — words, body language, setting (the career fair vs. an afterparty vs. a deserted street outside the venue at night), power and status differences between the people, etc.

However, I don’t think this has to be an obstacle in principle. It’s easy to imagine separating these factors out into a point system or rubric—some sort of checklist, decision rule, or decision tree that I can memorize and go through in my head before flirting with someone.

As a side note, I see this as more of an issue with society than with EA. I’d love to see the poll idea done for the general population as well, and given the place we’re at right now as a society, I’m not sure I would expect anyone to reliably forecast the results of such a poll. (As an intuition pump, consider the massive standard deviation values found in Aella’s rape spectrum survey.)

EDIT: I did some introspection on this, and it seems to me like positive “do this” guidelines (like “prioritize ensuring that the other person is comfortable”) could be a lot more effective than negative “don’t do this” guidelines.

[Amber Dawn]

I think it can be somewhat useful to talk explicitly about factors likely to make flirting welcome or unwelcome. But a problem I have with this is that it’s wrong to interact with people based on averages, basically. If 70% of EA women like or dislike being flirted with in X way, what do you do? Do the 30% minority just have to put up with discomfort (or, less seriously, a lack of enjoyable flirting)? Are you 70% flirtatious (pleasing no-one fully)?

I think the problem with checklists is that fundamentally, negotiating social interactions so that everyone is happy and comfortable, and flirting and appropriate escalation, are social skills. And social skills tend to be fuzzy and involve very different types of thinking than analysis, or rule-following. So when people throw their hands up in despair, or ask for explicit rules, it feels a bit like they’re getting annoyed that they can’t just throw their technical skills at a social-skills problem. (Written as someone who finds some social skills hard, including in the areas of flirting/​romance)

[Jason]

But most professional contexts outside of EA have more explicit norms/​rules than EA does. Those professional cultures presumably developed those more explicit norms/​rules for a reason (most likely learning from experience). So I think one has to be careful with assumptions about why people want clearer rules. Maybe, for instance, they don’t trust other people’s social skills.

[Aptdell]

But a problem I have with this is that it’s wrong to interact with people based on averages, basically. If 70% of EA women like or dislike being flirted with in X way, what do you do? Do the 30% minority just have to put up with discomfort (or, less seriously, a lack of enjoyable flirting)? Are you 70% flirtatious (pleasing no-one fully)?

I agree this is a problem, but I don’t think we solve this problem by ignoring it.

Right now men are choosing to flirt with women/​not flirt with women based on some mishmash of: past experiences, flirting intuitions, cultural conditioning, etc. My claim isn’t that the approach I suggested is perfect. My claim is that it’s likely an improvement on this baseline.

I’d suggest getting the community health team to analyze the survey results and generate some guidelines that are acceptable to, say, 95% of women surveyed. Publish the guidelines and say “if you don’t like the guidelines, we recommend you avoid EA events”.

I think if EA has a major problem with sexual harassment, an approach like this could be really effective. On the other hand, if sexual harassment is not actually much of a problem in EA, we may as well continue with the current approach.

I think the problem with checklists is that fundamentally, negotiating social interactions so that everyone is happy and comfortable, and flirting and appropriate escalation, are social skills. And social skills tend to be fuzzy and involve very different types of thinking than analysis, or rule-following. So when people throw their hands up in despair, or ask for explicit rules, it feels a bit like they’re getting annoyed that they can’t just throw their technical skills at a social-skills problem. (Written as someone who finds some social skills hard, including in the areas of flirting/​romance)

First, I suspect there are cultures in which romantic interactions are much more ritualized than our current culture. Flirting doesn’t have to be this super fuzzy thing if we don’t want it to be.

I also think there’s room for social skills in the approach I suggested. People seem to believe there are situations where you shouldn’t flirt with someone even if you think they’re trying to flirt with you—some examples might be: when you’re interviewing them for a job, when you’re in a confined space, when you’re on a deserted street late at night, etc. Basically, social perception can just be another factor on the list of factors to consider. But, as you state, it’s an inherently fuzzy factor, so it probably shouldn’t be as load-bearing as it currently is.

I don’t know Owen that well—I’ve probably interacted with him for half an hour or something—but he never struck me as particularly deficient in social skills. My guess is if he had read this situation accurately, and the woman in question appreciated his edginess, we never would’ve heard about any of this. People seem to favor a really punitive approach to Owen’s actions, but the problem is that even if you’re really good at reading social situations, say 99% accurate, there are always going to be those 1% misreadings which show up if you have a large enough number of social interactions.

Speaking for myself, I don’t think I am notably deficient in social skills. I enjoy social deduction games, acting classes, etc. In my mind, the issue has more to do with differing moral intuitions, especially regarding when harsh punishments are appropriate. (My own moral intuitions would be along the lines of: “First, there is no such thing as a romantically or sexually successful person who has never ever creeped anyone out. Give yourself permission to be creepy. I am not saying that you should go around trying to creep people out… [but, stuff happens].”) I’m usually comfortable trusting my social intuitions, but when so many condemn so harshly based on a short description of a situation with very little social context, that’s when I wonder if social intuitions are really enough.

Maybe a good intuition pump is: Imagine if people could send you to jail if they thought you were being kind of an asshole. Can you see how you would be tempted to stop posting on social media and never leave your room? Even if you’re fairly skilled socially, it’s inevitable that people will sometimes think you’re being kind of an asshole, unless you have an unhealthy obsession with what others think. Now consider that, as far as I can tell, Owen’s crime was essentially “being kind of an asshole”, but in the romantic/​sexual domain. If the costs of “being kind of an asshole” in the romantic/​sexual domain are much higher than in other domains—I have no particular reason to doubt that—then maybe it’s worthwhile to add in additional precautions beyond just “use social skills”?

[Lizka]

I’m commenting as a moderator right now.

I’m really sorry that you’re feeling this way. I think a lot of us have strong emotions about this news and don’t know how to process it. Given that you wrote “[hastily written],” I assume that this comment is helping you process the news.

At the same time, I think it’s important for us to not slip away from our norms on the Forum, which include making sure the space is welcoming to different groups of people, including men. There are a few different ways to interpret the part of your comment that’s about men. Unfortunately, I think right now it’s not clear whether you’re saying that “there are no decent men” (which would be norm-violating). (If you replace “men” with a different demographic group, you clearly see that the statement is not acceptable. This test doesn’t always work — sometimes there’s a long history of stereotype or power that makes statements about a demographic group much worse than the same statement about a different demographic group, but I think it’s a useful signal here.)

So it might be worth clarifying what you mean in the comment. In the future, please avoid sweeping statements about demographic groups.

[Denise_Melchin]

Thank you Lizka. You are making a good point and I have edited the comment above to no longer refer to a specific demographic group.

I would not want anyone to get the impression that Owen’s poor behaviour is merely a strong negative update on men. It is a strong negative update on the decency of everybody.

(Though I would expect women to show a lack of decency in slightly different ways than men.)

I still expect some decent people to exist. I just now think there are even more rare than I previously thought.

[pseudonym]

Fwiw, my read of Denise’s comment was more like “My previous impression of Owen was that he was an outstanding example of what a decent man should look like, and thus this news is especially disappointing and devastating”, rather than something like “Owen was the last decent man, and this shows that there are no decent men”.

[Jason]

Or: “learning of this significantly updated my assessment of the number of decent men downward, especially in EA.”

As a man, I wasn’t offended in light of the circumstances of the statement (though I don’t speak for all men).

Although I’m not endorsing the wording, the message that Owen’s behavior harmed people other than those directly involved, and eroded community trust in multiple ways, is an important message for him and others to hear.

However, I completely understand why Lizka wrote the mod comment and think it was a balanced comment.

[Pablo]

This was also my interpretation, though I can imagine others interpreting it differently.

I would also like to clarify that I strongly disagreed (but didn’t downvote) Denise’s post strictly in response to the final paragraph, to express something like “Let’s not overreact to recent events. EA has accomplished great things and will likely recover from these setbacks. And I hope you don’t leave EA, Denise!” This strikes me as a case where the meaning of the disagree vote count is particularly opaque, so it seemed worth adding this clarification.

[Emma G-S]

I appreciate Denise’s hastily written comment. As others have noted, ‘feelings’ are missing from this thread—strong feelings that many people (women) are feeling. Her reactive comment gives us a good glimpse into the harm being felt, even if it’s hyperbolic .

[David Thorstad]

Lizka, this isn’t a good idea. This kind of moderation will have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to express appropriate emotions at a difficult time.

You state and consider the natural explanation for why Denise’s statement is okay (that there is no especially problematic history of using this and similar statements to oppress men). If open defense of race science and questioning of sexual abuse victims falls within acceptable discourse norms, I think Denise’s statement should fall comfortably within them too.

[Jason]

I’m confused about why David’s comment was downvoted into negative territory but agreevoted positively (-9 /​ +13 at the time I saw it). Whether or not people agree with it, it’s a valid point (and they seem to agree with it on net . . .)

[David Thorstad]

I assume EAs think I’m speaking a bit sharply here? These discussions are hard because EAs often place a very high value on polite/​unemotional discourse, whereas non-EAs often place a higher value on discourse that won’t cause harms to groups/​people and think that sharper or more emotional discourse can sometimes be an appropriate response (or even the only appropriate response) in such cases.

[burner]

This kind of moderation will have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to express appropriate emotions at a difficult time.

That seems fine? The chilling effect is something Mill identified as being a problem when it prevents good ideas from being shared.

[Isabel]

Maybe the norms-controlling/​moderator team could take into account the millennia-old tradition of male power (as a demographic group) over everyone else (as a demographic group), making the statement about there (not) being decent men meaningfully different from a statement about e.g. there (not) being decent women...

[Guy Raveh]

I think this is misguided. Seems very much like “#NotAllMen”.

[Nathan Young]

Just gonna flag that I feel like −100 agreement for someone being sad feels weird to me. Sure I guess you can disagree that it’s the deathblow of EA, but I dunno, just feels a bit much. Not telling anyone off, or trying to create some complex social rule, but maybe it should be % or something.

[Elityre]

I imagine that most of the disagreement is with (implied, but not stated) conditional “that Owen did this means that decent men don’t exist”.

[Habryka]

Yeah, it feels like a weird case for the agree/​disagree voting system. Not a perfect fit for every situation, and this one seems like one of those.

[Ubuntu]

I’m sorry that you’re hurting, Denise, and I know that this was hastily written. And I think there’s some value in others knowing how you’re feeling.

But I worry that your ‘death blow’ comment reinforces the ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ narrative:

“Recently, bright young people have been energized by the political activist movement. Political activism says that instead of helping your friends or spending time with your family, you should have opinions on national politics, vote for candidates you like, donate to campaigns, and go to protests. But these high-sounding ideas came crashing down when President Bill Clinton, a hero of the political activism movement, was caught having sex with his intern Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky, herself a political activist, was lured into the White House with grandiose promises of “making a difference” and “doing her civic duty”. But in the end, political activism’s ideas proved nothing more than a cover for normal human predatory behavior. Young people should resist the lure of political activism and stick to time-honored ways of making a difference, like staying in touch with their family and holding church picnics.”

(https://​​astralcodexten.substack.com/​​p/​​if-the-media-reported-on-other-things)

[Nathan Young]

I think there are couple of discussions happening here at once:

• How to respond to Owen as a person

• How to respond to this situation

• What should have happened in the reporting process

• What should community norms be around situations like this

• What should community expectations of powerful figures be

[agunning]

Re: circling/​radical honesty

I remember being on a circling retreat a number of years ago (indeed, I think it was one Owen was on/​ CEA people did sometime Nov/​Dec 2019) and I remember, for whatever dumb stupid reason my system 1 freaked the fuck out at the instructor and said “do not trust this person”

and you can hang as many ‘radical honesty’ signs on the door as you want, it is very difficult to tell someone ‘hey for whatever dumb reason my gut is freaking the fuck out at you, probably not anything personal’ when you feel like this

and this did not help with my system 1 flipping out, it just felt like there were uncomfortable truths other people could tell and I couldn’t tell uncomfortable truths back

apparently the guy also hosts these things but more for sexuality? I guess this seems like a reasonable idea in theory given what circling is about but you’d certainly need to make explicitly sure feelings like these are welcome/​encouraged? like even when stuff goes well dealing with anxiety around this is an important cost of doing business. (I don’t feel reassured that this was likely to be the case, but I may be mistaken)

not saying circling/​radical honesty is bad, i do see a lot of value in these practices

just
be careful with this shit mk.

[Ozzie Gooen]

This seems really unrelated to Owen, but because I saw this, I’d flag I also went to a circling retreat in Oxford around that time, it might have been the same one.

I found to be personally fairly uninteresting, and got weird vibes from the instructor. In a discussion that Friday (the first day), he mentioned a lot of metamodernism stuff including a lot of stuff by Ken Wiber. Spirituality vibes similar to what I know of some communities in the Bay.

I did some online searching that evening, and found some reports of sexual harassment and similar around the upper parts of Circling Europe.

My general impression is something like, “Issues of sexual harassment and similar are just endemic in alternative communities.”

I know lots of other people I respect have gotten valuable things from circling and similar circling retreats. I’ve also done a bit of circling without the official mediators and found it to be mostly fine.

I just attended on the first day, and decided not to join for the next two. (That said, in fairness, I find incredibly few activities better than my best non-retreat activities, so this itself isn’t saying much).

At the one I was at, maybe 20% of the group seemed like it was EAs, I don’t remember specifically.

[ChanaMessinger]

For what it’s worth, my model is that anything with intense emotional openness and big potential emotional shifts (like circling, like some parts of EA) are both high potential reward (self-improvement, self-knowledge, cool and intense experiences) and higher risk (destabilization, being vulnerable to others’ narratives). I believe Anna Salamon talked about this as a mistake when she discussed CFAR doing a lot of circling without being attendant to the power dynamics between people in the circle.

[agunning]

yeah this was mostly in the spirit of “are there broader cultural issues we need to work on/​ how to we prevent people falling into the same traps”

[Lukas_Gloor]

Yeah, I’ve never done circling, but it wouldn’t surprise me if your system-1 was spot on (though I guess this wasn’t the point of your comment – you’re more commenting on double standards of how people reacted to your system-1 freaking out).

I believe anyone who pitches people to participate in circling with others who are pretty much strangers to them (and not super-carefully-vetted) and applies implicit peer pressure and doesn’t warn them that this sort of thing can be psychologically risky and unsafe, is either dangerously clueless or a bad actor.

(I’m mainly noting the potential for abuse. I have no reason to believe that the majority of people who run these things in EA and adjacent spaces are doing things irresponsibly.)

[Ozzie Gooen]

I believe anyone who pitches people to participate in circling with others who are pretty much strangers to them (and not super-carefully-vetted) and applies implicit peer pressure and doesn’t warn them that this sort of thing can be psychologically risky and unsafe, is either dangerously clueless or a bad actor.

For what it’s worth, I live in the Bay Area, where there are large spirituality communities and surprisingly related “professional development” communities. These practices seem surprisingly normal in these communities.

I think that the leaders of these groups are typically very overconfident in their approaches, are a bit desperate to sell them, and not very epistemically sophisticated, so very rarely give adequate warnings and help.

[agunning]

(tbc my perspective then was “I feel like I’m being overly paranoid/​unfair here but I’d just been exposed to n=1 anecdata of this sort of spidey sense being correct from a friend, so”
and my perspective now is “I now have a very precise model of how this particular train could get derailed and I am … uncertain, but concerned”)

[sapphire]

Honesty, never-mind radical openness, is usually impossible if one party is dependent on the other. This is honestly one reason I hate how intensely hierarchical the EA community is. Hierarchy destroys openness.

[Robi Rahman]

Can you explain how the EA community is intensely hierarchical? From what I’ve seen, EA tends to have a relatively flat orginazational structure and very high tolerance for contradicting or questioning authority figures, but maybe others have had different experiences with this than I have.

[sapphire]

I think thats the public image but isn’t how things actually work internally. Id really recommend reading this comment by Buck about how “You’ve also made the (IMO broadly correct) point that a lot of EA organizations are led and influenced by a pretty tightly knit group of people who consider themselves allies”. Notably the post is pretty explicit that any proposed changes should be geared toward getting this small group onboard.

It is less public (at this point) but some of the core EAs have definitely been capricious in terms of who they want to receive any kind of support or endorsement. And they feel quite willing to do this without any community buy in.

[Robi Rahman]

Okay so, if you’ll bear with me a moment, your comment has actually convinced me that EA is in fact not hierarchical, but I do agree with your intended point.

Buck’s comment, and the parent post by ConcernedEAs, point out that there’s a small, tightly-knit group that’s involved in many of the core EA organizations, who all know each other and collectively influence a lot of funding outcomes.

This is not the same thing as a hierarchy. There’s no middle management, no corporate ladder you have to climb, and (as far as I’ve seen) no office politics you have to wade through before you can reach the top of an organization or receive your grant funding. EA is far less hierarchical than anything similar you could compare it to, such as 501(c)(3)s, academia, government, or for-profit corporations. It’s more like a loose collection of 100 startups.

But the point I think you are making when you (and other comments I’ve seen) call it hierarchical is that this small group of influential people have a lot of power, and if most of your professional life is within EA, your outcomes are dependent on them and their decisions.

I think there is an aspect in which EA does really well with this: if you have a good (or bad) idea for a charitable project, it’ll get funded (or not) based on its merits (or flaws), and EA won’t disqualify you from opportunities for being too young or too old or female or a foreigner.

But there is this problem you’re pointing out, where maybe you have to join Buck and Claire’s polycule to get in touch with the grantmakers, or you’re expected to stay in Owen’s guest room while you’re in town for the nonprofit interview he referred you to. This tight-knit group of people has a lot of influence, and as we’re seeing in the situation described in this post, their power affects all the people they interact with even if they don’t realize it.

Edit: for anyone who disagrees with this comment, can you explain what that I said was wrong?

[Wil Perkins]

This is not the same thing as a hierarchy. There’s no middle management, no corporate ladder you have to climb, and (as far as I’ve seen) no office politics you have to wade through before you can reach the top of an organization or receive your grant funding

Seems like you’re confusing hierarchy with ‘formal corporate hierarchy.’ There is what I would call an informal hierarchy in EA. Most of your post seems to agree with that so frankly I’m a bit confused as to your point?

One of the reasons this type of setup is so problematic is that informal hierarchies pretend to be open while secretly keeping power tight. In that way it can be far worse than other organizations you list.

[Robi Rahman]

Seems like you’re confusing hierarchy with ‘formal corporate hierarchy.’

No, I’m aware there are other kinds, and EA has less of those as well.

frankly I’m a bit confused as to your point?

Okay, if it wasn’t clear enough: a few people in the middle of a social movement knowing each other doesn’t make it a hierarchy.

[Wil Perkins]

Perhaps we just have different definitions of the word. There are a small group of people who are tightly knit and control many of the large scale decisions in EA.

To me, that is clearly a form of hierarchy. Where does that word break down for you?

[Nathan Young]

My confusion here is not so much this event, but the other things that have happened in the last 5 years. I feel like if I upset someone and was pretty high up in EA I would be more cautious than to let bad stuff happen another 3 more times in the next 5 years.

[ChristianKleineidam]

I was newly open to polyamory, and newly exposed to circling and saw something powerful and good about speaking truths even when they were uncomfortable.

From what you describe, it sounds to me like you didn’t really express truths when they were uncomfortable.

The truth was that you felt shame. It’s easier to be edgy and say “I have to masturbate before I see you” than to say “I feel ashamed of the attraction I have for you. I think I should masturbate so that I don’t get aroused by your presence before seeing you.”. Saying “I feel ashamed of the attraction I have for you” would be showing vulnerability. Probably, it would have made sense to share that feeling of shame about your attraction to her even earlier as at this point in time even the full version would have been too much.

The problem is that you neither followed the societal standards nor the standards of being radically honest about your experience.

[ChanaMessinger]

(Speaking in a private capacity) Fwiw, I suspect that >90% of the worlds in which I found the masturbation comment uncomfortable, I would have found your suggested comment uncomfortable.

I don’t know what the vibe of the situation was here, but speaking to the more general case: in my experience, one thing about vulnerability is that if someone comes off as needy (which can be easy to do by accident), it can amplify other discomforts, because then I’m being put in a position of power or control over this person’s shame or other bad feelings, so then I feel like it’s on me to fix their bad feelings.

[WobblyPanda]

I would like to ask for some of your perceptions of the relative importance of the different problems that coincided here. I see three problems with the situation (am I missing some?):

1. The masturbation comment

2. The couchsurfing

3. The power differential

No. 1 seems easy to avoid. I hardly ever talk about such private things. Generally the topic of “Things to do with sex” seems relatively sharply defined to me, so that I don’t find it challenging to avoid it categorically.

The other two seem like things I could more easily get wrong, so I find it disconcerting how easily this mistake could’ve happened to me.

Couchsurfing is something that I’ve offered before, regardless of the gender of the guest. It itself puts me, as the host, in a position of power because I know the place, have keys, etc., and the guest doesn’t have an easy fallback option. So I’m usually quite careful with it and use a phrasing like, “By the way, if you want to crash at my place just let me know. It’s quite small and messy though and there’s all the construction work. You can probably find something nicer.” (Typically with some links to the main EA couchsurfing sites.) That gives the guest a plausible reason so they can refuse without having to give a reason. (Or would people not do that because they’d feel it’s misleading/​dishonest to refuse an offer for a reason other than the implied one? Or would they understand that I’m giving the pretend reasons on purpose so it’s okay?)

But apart from that my general feeling was that offering couchsurfing is good and nice and should be done? (I like to save costs for hotels if possible, so I want to pay it forward or give back to the community.) Or should there be guidelines for when offering couchsurfing is appropriate and when it is not? I mean, refusing when someone asks would be awkward, but just not offering it in the first place if the other person is newer to EA, more junior, or younger could work, apart from the fuzziness of those terms?

The third one is particularly tricky because I don’t usually perceive myself as being in a position of power (except in, to me, known cases like couchsurfing), but someone else might easily perceive me as more powerful, unbeknownst to me. E.g., I can’t tell people’s ages very well. And a lot of EAs usually seem really impressive to me, so if more people are like me and we meet, we’ll be intimidated by each other without realizing this about each other. At one point I had just given a talk, and suddenly there was someone talking to me all flustered-like. It took me a moment to realize that giving the talk must’ve increased my perceived power charisma, so that I tried to be extra silly to get it down again. But I could’ve easily missed or misattributed the flusteredness and probably have in many other cases.

Would it be acceptable to quite generally (when there is any doubt about the power dynamics, so like 80% of the time) to be like, “I’m generally concerned about power dynamics. I’m a bit intimidated by your accomplishments, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you also see yourself in an equal or higher position of social power. What is your impression? Do you think it might be more prudent to try to find another solution than the couchsurfing?” Something like that?

So in summary:

There are my questions above about guidelines for offering couchsurfing and about how to find out about the other person’s perception of power.

But I’d also be interested in the relative importance of the three (or more?) factors: Is it more additive, and if so, is like 10 bad + 10 bad + 10 bad = 30 bad or 27 bad + 1 bad + 2 bad = 30 bad? Or is it multiplicative: 10 bad x 10 bad x 10 bad = 1000 bbbaaaddd or 10 bad x 2 bad x 5 bad = 100 bbbaaaddd? I mean, the sum/​product is not important. I just get the feeling that there’s an understanding that the masturbation comment was bad, but it’s less clear to me whether the other two factors were equally bad or half as bad or much less bad.

[Amber Dawn]

I think offering people couchsurfing is good and nice, but you should do it before they arrive.

I basically think the masturbation comment is bad and was made especially bad by the other things. I think it’s not exactly additive or multiplicative but that the three of them together created a Situation that was worse than either of them individually. The masturbation comment disturbed her, AND because she was staying at his house she couldn’t easily remove herself from the disturbing situation, AND because he was powerful it was hard for her either to ask to be re-accommodated or to say “eww, don’t make gross comments like that”.

[WobblyPanda]

Thank you!

Above I also read some comments about offering the couchsurfing itself being bad. But I got some numbers meanwhile, and people say that offering the couchsurfing itself didn’t cross the line yet (outside some hypotheticals that may or may not have happened) but that the comment had a factor ~50x effect on the badness, which did cross the line.

[Nathan Young]

Poll:

People who have behaved like this should publicly apologise as close to the time as possible.

Agreevote to agree. I don’t necessarily endorse this but I think it’s valuable for us to know what we think on stuff like this—I bet we disagree a surprising amount.

[nananana.nananana.heyhey.anon]

I actually endorse the idea of polls on this but don’t want to make one. Why? I’m in several text and real life conversations with women right now and none of them are commenting here because we’re sad and annoyed and frustrated. So they’re not voting.

[Nathan Young]

Poll:

There should be a way for people who have behaved like this to hold community roles afterwards if they can meet some standard.

Agreevote to agree. I don’t necessarily endorse this

[Jason]

Poll, contingent on the above being true:

The person returning to the community role needs to accept that there may be longer-term restrictions on, or added oversight of, their conduct. That may involve a level of restriction and oversight that would seem onerous or heavy-handed if applied to someone without a history of inappropriate conduct.

[Nathan Young]

Some of you should write other polls in this post, so we can figure out what we think. I’m not gonna write them, but I suggest women in EA might want to figure out what they think, because again, I sense a broad set of views and many people who don’t want to comment, but might agree/​disagree.

[Lauren Maria]

I struggle with seeing polls like this as being a valid source of information that change my beliefs because we have no way of knowing who is actually voting and whether or not they are trolls.

[Jason]

I think you’re right to be cautious, although most of the other sources of information I could think of have some significant flaws of some sort as well. So it’s probably best to look for consensus from several different information flows that don’t have too many overlapping weaknesses.

[Arepo]

Also they really exploit the forum’s karma system. Should we strong vote for strong agree? If so, mine would be worth about 3x the average forum user’s. Even if I only ‘weak’ vote, it automatically gives +/​-2 to the karma score now.

[Nathan Young]

I think they are better than nothing. I would like specific voting objects but we make do with what we have.

[Nathan Young]

Let’s be real, many people upvoting here don’t actually think there are trolls, but the polls make you uneasy, right?

perhaps because you feel they are an oversimplification? or because you feel they are unrepresentative?

[Ofer]

Even if sock puppet accounts do not currently influence votes, the more the EA community will use such polls to decide on things the more likely such influence will become.

[Nathan Young]

I think we currently see too little community sensemaking, not too much. And if sockpuppets could be used on polls they could be used everywhere. Why not complain that the whole voting system is wrong?

[Ofer]

And if sockpuppets could be used on polls they could be used everywhere. Why not complain that the whole voting system is wrong?

I agree that such concerns are not limited to the polls on this page. (I’ve also wrote a comment related to such concerns here.)

[Nathan Young]

I mean, trolling requires EAs (the only people who are looking at a page at the bottom of the home page) creating additional accounts. I think it’s unlikely they would do that.

[Lauren Maria]

I think the amount of press EA has gotten lately makes it more likely for there to be trolls but I could be wrong.

[MaxRa]

Good point. Maybe the forum could introduce up- and downvoting restrictions until a new account has reached a few milestones, like being active for more than a month and adding comments with overall positive upvotes. This is how I remember StackOverflow handling this.

[Nathan Young]

I don’t think we have any evidence this is happening.

[Habryka]

We have at least some basic tools to detect account-creation and mass-voting. I don’t think the voting system is perfect, but at least on LW I would notice if someone was creating multiple accounts to vote, as I have noticed multiple times in the past.

[Arvin]

A very valid concern. Thankfully, if I’m not mistaken, the moderators block troll votes (70% confidence) and have done so already in the past (50% confidence).

[Nathan Young]

Poll:

What Owen did was (given the best of our knowledge) wrong and very serious.

Agreevote to agree. I don’t necessarily endorse this

[ZachWeems]

I think people are accidentally down-voting instead of disagree-voting, which makes the comment hidden.

The up/​down vote is on the left, agree/​disagree is on the right.

[Nathan Young]

No, I think it’s deliberate.

[ZachWeems]

The agree-votes have pretty directly proven you correct.

[Nathan Young]

Poll:

Owen should have been removed from the board as soon as this was known, regardless of his accuser’s opinion.

Agreevote to agree. I don’t necessarily endorse this

[FC]

Here are some reasons to downvote this poll and all the other polls (I have not yet done this). Some people feel very frightened and stressed etc, and for them, it is not yet the time to engage with these polls.

In addition, it feels wrong that justice is ruled by a weird anonymous voting procedure which does not include a bunch of deliberation (and that does not include more people that are specialised in this problem) . EA is not a democratic organisation (for good or bad reasons) - ultimately, this is not how EVF makes decisions. Suppose, someone did X (X is clearly morally wrong), a community does a vote, and more than 50% think it is acceptable, that does not mean the behaviour is acceptable (or even if 80% agree).

The EVF board hired an external group to look into this issue (see their announcement post)- I don’t understand why you don’t first trust them (you can still disagree if they conclude).

[Nathan Young]

Thanks for saying why you disagree.

Perhaps, though by that argument maybe we shouldn’t have long and complex arguments either. We are already engaging in discussion while upset and stressed. What I would like is for us at least to be able to see some of the landscape.

I don’t think this suggests justice, I think it allows us to see what each other think.

It’s not that I don’t trust the external group—it’s that I am interested in what we all think and feel.

[bruce]

Some personal thoughts about the the polls generally—apologies in advance if this comes across confrontational, as I know you are well-intentioned! Also to be clear, I enjoyed and appreciated what you did with the cluster poll, as they provided new information RE: clusters—I’m referring mainly to comment polls like this.^[1]

I understand your desire and goals RE: polling, but I personally find many of the polls to be of unclear value, and it often clogs up the comment sections (even if they are downvoted to the bottom, as this is, I often stay updated by looking at “recent discussion” on the front page).

I hear that you are interested in what we all think and feel—I am too! But I don’t know if the polls actually answer this, or at least I find it difficult to meaningfully update on them.

Perhaps, though by that argument maybe we shouldn’t have long and complex arguments either.

I’d much rather just see more discussion on the actual question being polled, because then people provide their reasoning. In this case, even if those who aren’t on the forum or aren’t in a position to comment or engage, I can see if I agree with the reasoning myself, and update more strongly on reasoning I find more compelling, etc. On the other hand, if all I see is “7 agreement karma 22 votes”, that doesn’t give me a lot of information other than something like “ok seems like people voted both ways on this”.

I also worry that it may even be counterproductive and give the wrong impression of what the community’s views are.

One recent example that comes to mind:

• Apparently, the majority opinion is that what Owen did was not “wrong and very serious”.

If this is actually representative of the EA community’s opinion, then many people I know who have been dismayed /​ distressed about recent events will be doing a fair amount of updating about how this community sees sexual harassment, abuse of power, navigating professional /​ personal boundaries, etc.^[2]

It’s also a little draining in some sense—I feel like I want to ignore most of these polls, but I also want to signal to people in this community who are more personally affected by these that there are others who care about the things they care about. This isn’t your fault though, just raising how these are real considerations when I’m reading your polls, and imagining how my friends who might see these polls may react. And on topics where those most deeply affected have strong reasons to not engage with the poll, this is going to be a larger issue.

I also agree with earlier comments about the potential for trolls (contra your earlier claim, there is recent evidence to support this), and the negative incentives that this may contribute to if these polls end up being action guiding (or even just perceived to be action guiding) in some way.

1. ^

   This has like 6 different claims. Are people agreeing with all 6? the general vibe? just three? Is the 19 voters to 35 karma indicative of 19 people saying weakly yes, or a bimodal distribution from people who feel very strongly?

2. ^

   I can also already see the quote in the next hit piece: “In an internal poll, a majority of EAs believe that [OCB’s actions] were not wrong/​very serious”.

[Nathan Young]

Quick thoughts:

• Thank you for raising this. I appreciate pushback.

• I don’t think this issue is being brigaded. If it were we’d see a load of chat on twitter. I think that explains too much. I just would bet it isn’t the case. Some people are making new burners but I’d guess that’s it.

• My top level comment is in positive karma. Just as you don’t like the polls, many people do. In fact I’ve received 2-3 messages to that end. What you and those who agree with you are doing is expressing a preference. Others have different preferences. And the evidence suggests that your preference is not the overwhelming majority.

• I would like to be better and more gracious at doing this. But I think that it provides information on balance. Again, as the karma shows, people agree.

• I like polls sure, and martyrdom, but also feel scared and tired and like the truth is getting ignored because it’s impolitic. The truth seems to be that people have more complex views on this than is comfortable, in many directions.

• I am deeply confused by the idea that we want to make comments and look at the voting (which we do, people regularly comment on it) but that trying to establish simple ideas is somehow a different class of thing.

• I suggest that many people don’t like what these polls show and so instead think “they must be inaccurate or inappropriate”. I don’t think so (70%), and I’m pretty well calibrated. In time, I think just as criticisms of me saying FTX would go really badly were false, so will the idea that EAs hold simple views on the topic of this case. I think people would do well to be curious—what do people in EA believe? What do women believe and want? What norms will create a community that does the most good? Again, I don’t know, but I don’t think that anyone else does either

• On the what “Owen did was not “wrong and very serious” ” poll, I think that is a deeply unpopular view to express under one’s own name, so I’m not surprised people haven’t said it. But I think it’s a thing people believe—I’ve talked to some. I think it’s easy to be repulsed by this, to theorize that these people don’t care about the accusers welfare or are closing ranks around Cotton Barrett. I don’t know! Which is why I ask. It seems clear to me that this discussion is a scary and exhausting place, not just for people who ignore the polls but for those who are voting in ways that surprise you.

• I think of this community as a brain. And when my brain is scared and hurt it comes to quick conclusions “Owen is really bad” “casual sex should not happen in EA” or “Owen was misunderstood” “We should be able to do what we want”. But this often isn’t useful. Instead I want to understand what happened, what makes people able to keep doing good work and what good norms should be. And allowing the community to raise it’s prefereces is the first part of that. Many people seemingly thought that SBF was reckless and broke promises. I wish we’d had some comment polls about that.

• Bruce, I am glad you raised this and thanks to any who agree with him. I like you and I like your desire to create a safe environment for discourse. I know this feels weird and I think it could be done better. I desire that we have some sense of what people believe and I feel that strongly. I feel sad and frustrated and curious and like making polls and crying and many other things. I wish you all well.

[Jason]

I think the polls here were too soon—among other things, it’s not clear that we want to be quantifying hot takes as opposed to more settled views a week or so after breaking news.

I also suggest the Forum software is just not set up for polling. I think a pol.is could be potentially useful on this topic to identify clusters, or a traditional survey site to allow capturing somewhat more nuanced responses. The existence of strong votes is particularly ill suited to polling where the number of each vote type isn’t disclosed.

Trolls are a concern, although that’s true of both voting and general Forum activity/​upvotes. I think one concern with relying on Forum comments to gauge community sentiment is that we’re largely seeing a few dozen people who are either particularly passionate about the particular question at hand or are quite frequent posters. So that’s unlikely to be representative of the broader community.

[Jason]

Alternative possibility: Assuming that immediate removal was not warranted (but not taking a position on that either way), Owen should have been given a stern warning that (1) any future incidents would warrant removal, and (2) for any future reports, the reporter would get the benefit of the doubt.

(Agreevote to agree/​disagree: I’m not committing to a position, mainly pointing out that there are options between removal and doing very little.)

[Nathan Young]

Sure but in this case, what is the issue with what happened? I guess maybe there were other smaller behaviours afterwards?

[Guy Raveh]

Note that the future reports did come and therefore he should’ve been removed before this point in time.

[Jason]

The idea was that a final-chance warning would hopefully deter future incidents.

I didn’t specify either way what the consequences would be for future reports of prior-to-warning events (especially if pre-EVF) . That wouldn’t have been necessary to resolve upfront because one cannot deter past events.

[Nathan Young]

I don’t feel comfortable doing it here, but on another topic I’d attempt to write a concensus statement of what parts we all agree with and what we think should have happened. Feels like that might be a useful process.

[burner9372]

(In this comment I’m assuming that the context Owen provided is accurate.)

I expected worse from the TIME Magazine article. I don’t see this as sexual harassment. If this is true, then the TIME article pointed to what seems like a one-off mistake, and it’s unreasonable that you have to resign because of this.

If you perceived a friendship where unusually direct and honest communication with the person was permitted, and the person went along with it, and you communicated in a way that was similar in the levels of ‘edginess’ to some previous conversations, then the feelings that were hurt are on her—not you.

People have a personal responsibility to tell others to stop what they’re doing if they don’t feel like they want others to do those things. Don’t expect others to read your mind.

If anyone feels that someone’s career deserves to be harmed to such an extent because they unintentionally made someone else feel uncomfortable with a single comment which led to that other person openly object to that former person’s behavior a single comment, then I think people who hold that opinion should grow up.

If anyone feels the need to harm someone’s career to such an extent just because they felt uncomfortable from a single comment that wasn’t intended to harm them, then frankly, I think that person needs to grow up.

[Jonathan Mannhart]

I have a lot of other issues with this comment, but I think just from reading Owen’s statement your portrayal of “if anyone feels feels the need to harm someone’s career to such an extent just because they felt uncomfortable from a single comment” is just objectively false?

who said in a recent email to me “I deliberately did not name you as I want to draw attention to [systemic issues]”

The mischaracterisation of people who come forward like this is something I really really wish nobody in the EA community would do. It can be incredibly hard to come forward. (And comments like this one make it harder.)

(Edit: you edited your comment, and your new wording I also disagree with. It seems to me that “someone’s career deserves to be harmed” wasn’t her motivation. It was drawing attention to systemic issues. Which would make sense and is plausibly very altruistic. To just strongly assume otherwise seems bad faith.

Personally, your phrasing “should grow up” is what I disagree with most. This is a serious conversation and that is not an argument, just an insult, which should have no place here.)

[burner9372]

Please read my edit carefully.

If anyone feels that someone’s career deserves to be harmed to such an extent because they unintentionally made someone else feel uncomfortable

My argument is that if people continue to push for more absurd demands on other people’s behavior (‘this person should have known this other person was uncomfortable even though this wasn’t communicated to the former person through multiple opportunities during repeated interactions of a similar kind’), those demands are going to critically damage the society they live in.

People naively ignore the fact that if they agree on penalizing people to such an extent for simple mistakes, then it’s likely that a reaction from other parts of society (parts that I assume many people here have to little to do with) will cause at least some rollback of the freedoms that were hard-won by more serious activists from the past, as well as prevent progress on many serious efforts that are ongoing today, by being associated with such radicalism.

Also, I think it’s simply authoritarian. Let people make mistakes without having to endure this kind of persecution.

[zchuang]

I think people are disagree voting because:

a. They do not think your description of the situation matches the description Owen provided.

b. The desserts language is misleading because it’s not about who deserves career advancement but about can the person be placed in areas where their career has advanced in way that does not induce uncomfortable sexual situations upon others.

[burner9372]

You are correct. My mistake.

I’ll rephrase that as “If anyone feels that someone’s career deserves to be harmed to such an extent because they unintentionally made someone else feel uncomfortable with a single comment, then I think people who hold that opinion should grow up.”

[britomart]

Cotton-Barratt writes “(this wasn’t the first time I’d mentioned masturbation)”—this wasn’t about a single comment.

[burner9372]

Very well. “a single comment which led to that other person openly object to that former person’s behavior”.

[nananana.nananana.heyhey.anon]

This comment seems willfully obtuse. The person is referring to a pattern of behavior, ergo a series of comments and bad experiences. A comment that comes at the end of a series and culminates in someone trying to take corrective action is not “a single comment that led to” their action.

Please reflect on how much you might be mad/​sad/​hurt/​fearful and saying foolish things. Maybe don’t say them, or at least come back and fix them later.

[britomart]

Again, I think you’re missing the point. This is about a pattern of behaviour.

[burner9372]

Should I add the word “ultimately”?

[Lukas_Gloor]

If you perceived a friendship where unusually direct and honest communication with the person was permitted, and the person went along with it, and you communicated in a way that was similar in the levels of ‘edginess’ to some previous conversations, then the feelings that were hurt are on her—not you.

People have a personal responsibility to tell others to stop what they’re doing if they don’t feel like they want others to do those things. Don’t expect others to read your mind.

I’d be about 50%* on your side if there weren’t for power dynamics. With the power dynamics, it’s more like 5%. I agree that Owen’s account sounds less concerning than the one in the TIME article, but I still think this sort of thing shouldn’t happen. Since it sounds like this was a work trip for an interview rather than a visit at a friend’s place, the person who’s responsible for getting you the interview shouldn’t be testing the waters for what might or might not make you uncomfortable enough to speak up. That doesn’t involve mind reading – it involves staying away from anything sexually or romantically pressuring. (Many would say that this means staying away from anything sexual or romantic altogether in an asymmetric power dynamic, since it’s hard to foresee what is or isn’t “pressure.” I think that makes sense for the most extreme types of power dynamics, like supervisor and direct reports. For power-and-(perceived)-friendship dynamics like the one Owen describes, I think it’s not per se indefensible to express interest in some way (not that Owen necessarily did this by mentioning masturbation – but it can straightforwardly be interpreted to have these undertones). However, I’d say it’s on the person at the upper end of the power dynamic to make extra sure they’re choosing a timing and method of expression that’s as easy to reject as possible (and also minimize fallout/​subsequent awkwardness). (So, not before a job interview when the other person has no place arranged to stay except your flat.) And if you can’t see this going well, then don’t express interest or breach these topics. (For these reasons, many orgs have a strict policy against this, which is of course separate from the moral question of it, but still, it’s often good to mimic what’s “good practice” if the context is similar.) In any case, if Owen had deliberately thought about it from that angle, he’d himself have realized that he shouldn’t do the thing he did. (I read his apology to imply agreement with this view I just expressed.)

*On why I only agree 50% with “People have a personal responsibility to tell others to stop what they’re doing if they don’t feel like they want others to do those things. Don’t expect others to read your mind”:
The user “nananana.nananana.heyhey.anon” expresses this really well in their comment. Sure, ultimately, it’s your responsibility to say something. At the same time, people also have a responsibility to not go around pushing boundaries. Imagine a psychopath who always stops doing things when explicitly told to stop doing that specific thing, but he keeps pushing boundaries left and right whenever he’s not asked to stop. Clearly, such a psychopath shouldn’t be a part of the sort of communities we want to build. Therefore, there’s more to the picture than “Others have to speak up if they’re uncomfortable.” When a person expresses that they were made uncomfortable, that means things already went too far. It’s not a big deal if this happens unintentionally, but it’s still regrettable. It shouldn’t form a pattern. We can’t read minds, but we can guess – and it’s important to cultivate this sort of guessing and learn to get good at it.

[nananana.nananana.heyhey.anon]

[Edited to distinguish between “you” the individual and the general “you/​us/​people.”]

“People have a personal responsibility to tell others to stop what they’re doing if they don’t feel like they want others to do those things. Don’t expect others to read your mind.”

Correction: “[I believe that] People have a personal responsibility to tell [me] to stop what [I’m] doing if they don’t feel like they want [me] to do those things. Don’t expect [me] to read your mind.”

You can take totally that stance. I personally even like that stance sometimes and have found it empowering sometimes!

We know we can’t actually dictate a reality where everyone else takes that stance? Even if you might wish it were the case. Your version of Ought =/​= Is.

For a truth-seeking community, I get really frustrated when EAs miss this point. We interact with lots of people — people who believe what you believe, people who believe basically the opposite, and everyone in between. They may believe personal responsibility means modifying your behavior to avoid possible awkwardness, rather than expecting others to inform you if they found the behavior awkward.

Regardless of professed belief, it’s quite common to behave in a way that aligns with this reality: Giving negative feedback is often uncomfortable or even scary for a lot of humans. They are inconsistent in their willingness or incentives for overcoming that aversion. People who have or are perceived to have more influence/​power/​authority over others should recognize that it is socially riskier, more difficult, and more aversive for well-meaning others to give them negative feedback, and act accordingly.

If we want to live according to an accurate model of reality, I think you have to be willing to cope with this reality and try to “read others’ minds” (eg empathize) more.

One can maybe refuse to date people who see “personal responsibility” differently, but one can’t refuse to work with such people.

If I see that someone refuses to accept that this variation exists in the definition of “responsible behavior” in society and in our workplaces and even across different scenarios with the same individuals, if they’re unable or unwilling to modify behavior sometimes to learn from that variation, I hope I don’t have to work with them or refer people I know to work under them.

[Nathan Young]

I think there is value in trying to write a more agreeable version of this case, but in particular I think “People have a personal responsibility to tell others to stop what they’re doing if they don’t feel like they want others to do those things” is just not most people’s understanding of consent let alone randomly telling someone sexually explicit stuff.

[burner9372]

I think ‘randomly’ doesn’t apply here. Owen had multiple conversations with the person about ‘edgy’ things, including sexual things, including masturbation.

Suppose I have a friend who sometimes talks to me about masturbation, and with whom I sometimes talk to about masturbation. Suppose one day, my friend said that they were uncomfortable all along, I would find that regrettable, but I don’t think it’s my fault they didn’t speak up previously.

[Nathan Young]

I think it’s worth dialing it back a bit and trying again. Thank you for trying to present an unpopular view.

[Jason]

The hail of disagreevotes is probably due to your original comment not recognizing the power dynamics at play in Owen’s situation.

[burner9372]

I don’t how much ‘soft power’ Owen was supposed to have 5 years ago (by being older and more involved in the community). While it’s regrettable if someone pretended to be comfortable while actually being uncomfortable, it’s unclear to me that the perception of ‘soft power’ would matter so much that one cannot speak up.

[Isaac King]

The fact that this comment is at −160 karma is frankly shocking to me. Trust is important in any community, and the fact that people appear to be completely dismissing the fact that Owen and anon had established an atypical norm of honesty and forthcomingness about their thoughts and emotions and are choosing to frame this norm being followed as somehow inappropriate makes me expect that any agreements I might make with another EA will likely be broken as soon as it’s socially advantageous to do so. I enjoy and appreciate the EA community because, at least up until recently, people here seemed committed to caring about what’s true and what will maximally benefit the world, not jumping on the social shaming bandwagon. I sincerely hope I’m misunderstanding what’s going on here, because if EA really is giving up their epistemic integrity as it looks to me like is happening here, that indicates a much darker future than I expected.

(It’s theoretically possible that all the downvotes are people disagreeing with the last paragraph only, and I think disagreement with that one is indeed much more justified. But the first four paragraphs are clearly the main point of this comment, and if someone agrees with those and disagrees with the last one, I don’t think they should be downvoting the comment overall.)