Hi John, just to clarify some inaccuracies in your two comments:
- I’ve never harassed anyone, and I’ve never stated or implied that I have. I have apologized for making some people uncomfortable with “coming on too strong” in my online romantic advances. As I’ve said before in that Apology, I never intended to cause any discomfort, and I’m sorry that I did so. There have, to my knowledge, been no concerns about my behavior since I was made aware of these concerns in mid-2018.
- I didn’t lie on my website. I had (in a few places) described myself as a “co-founder” of EA [Edit: Just for clarity, I think this was only on my website for a few weeks? I think I mentioned it and was called it a few times over the years too, such as when being introduced for a lecture. I co-founded the first dedicated student group network, helped set up and moderate the first social media discussion groups, and was one of the first volunteers at ACE as a college student. I always favored a broader-base view of how EA emerged than what many perceived at the time (e.g., more like the founders of a social movement than of a company). Nobody had pushed back against “co-founder” until 2019, and I stopped using the term as soon as there was any pushback.], as I think many who worked to build EA from 2008-2012 could be reasonably described. I’ve stopped using the term because of all the confusion, which I describe a bit in “Some Early History of Effective Altruism.”
- Regarding SI, we were already moving on from CEA’s fiscal sponsorship and donation platform once we got our 501c3 certification in February 2019, so “stopped” and “severed ties” seem misleading.
- CEA did not make me write an apology. We agreed on both that apology document and me not attending CEA events as being the right response to these concerns. I had already written several apologies that were sent privately to various parties without any involvement from CEA.
- There was no discussion of my future posting on the EA Forum, nor to my knowledge any concerns about my behavior on this or other forums.
Otherwise, I have said my piece in the two articles you link, and I don’t plan to leave any more comments in this thread. I appreciate everyone’s thoughtful consideration.
Hi Jacy, you said in your apology “I am also stepping back from the EA community more generally, as I have been planning to since last year in order to focus on my research.”
I haven’t seen you around since then, so was surprised to see you attend an EA university retreat* and start posting more about EA. Would you describe yourself as stepping back into the EA community now?
Hi Khorton, I wouldn’t describe it as stepping back into the community, and I don’t plan on doing that, regardless of this issue, unless you consider occasional posts and presentations or socializing with my EA friends as such. This post on the EV of the future was just particularly suited for the EA Forum (e.g., previous posts on it), and it’s been 3 years since I published that public apology and have done everything asked of me by the concerned parties (around 4 years since I was made aware of the concerns, and I know of no concerns about my behavior since then).
I’m not planning to comment more here. This is in my opinion a terrible place to have these conversations, as Dony pointed out as well.
Why should we believe that you have in fact changed? You were kicked out of Brown for sexual misconduct. You claim to believe that the allegations at that time were false. Instead of being extra-careful in your sexual conduct following this, at least five women complain to CEA about your sexual sexual misconduct, and CEA calls the complaints ‘credible and concerning’. There is zero reason to think you have changed.
Plus, you’re a documented liar, so we should have no reason to believe you.
It’s a comment that is typical of Jacy—he cannot help but dissemble. “I am also stepping back from the EA community more generally, as I have been planning to since last year in order to focus on my research.” It makes it sound like he was going to step back anyway even while he was touting himself as an EA co-founder and was about to promote his book! In fact, if you read between the lines, CEA severed ties between him and the community. He then pretends that he was going to do this anyway. The whole apology is completely pathetic.
Were you expelled from Brown for sexual harassment? Or was that also for clumsy online flirting?
You did lie on your website. It is false that you are a co-founder of effective altruism. There is not a single person in the world who thinks that is true, and you only said it to further your career. That you can’t even acknowledge that that was a lie speaks volumes.
Perhaps CEA can clarify whether there was any connection between the allegations and CEA severing ties with SI.
Were the allegations reported to the Sentience Institute before CEA? Why did you not write a public apology before CEA approached you with the allegations? You agreeing with CEA to being banned from EA events and you being banned from EA events are the same thing.
The issue is how long you should ‘step away’ from the community for.
I wouldn’t have described Jacy as a co-founder of effective altruism and don’t like him having had it on his website, but it definitely doesn’t seem like a lie to me (I kind of dislike the term “co-founder of EA” because of how ambiguous it is).
Anyway I think calling it a lie is roughly as egregious a stretch of the truth as Jacy’s claim to be a co-founder (if less objectionable since it reads less like motivated delusion). In both cases I’m like “seems wrong to me, but if you squint you can see where it’s coming from”.
[meta for onlookers: I’m investing more energy into holding John to high standards here than Jacy because I’m more convinced that John is a good faith actor and I care about his standards being high. I don’t know where Jacy is on the spectrum from “kind of bad judgement but nothing terrible” to “outright bad actor”, but I get a bad smell from the way he seems to consistently turns to present things in a way that puts him in a relatively positive light and ignores hard questions, so absent further evidence I’m just not very interested in engaging]
“I don’t know where Jacy is on the spectrum from “kind of bad judgement but nothing terrible” to “outright bad actor”.”
I don’t understand this and claims like it. To recap, he was thrown out of university in 2012 for sexual misconduct. Someone who was at Brown around this time told me that no-one else was expelled from Brown for sexual misconduct the entire they were there. This suggests that his actions were very bad.
Despite being expelled from Brown, at least five women in the EA community then complain to CEA because of his sexual misconduct. CEA thinks these actions are bad enough to ban him from all EA events and dissociate from him completely. Despite Jacy giving the impression that was due to clumsy flirting, I strongly doubt that this is true. Clumsy flirting must happen a fair amount in this community given the social awkwardness of EAs, but few people are expelled from the community as a result. This again suggests that the allegations against Jacy are very bad.
This should update us towards the view that the Brown allegations were also true (noting that Jacy denies that they are true).
In your view he also makes statements that are gross exaggerations/delusional in order to further his career (though I mustn’t say that he lied).
I think we have enough evidence for the ‘bad actor’ categorisation.
It’s from “man things in the world are typically complicated, and I haven’t spent time digging into this, but although there surface level facts look bad I’m aware that selective quoting of facts can give a misleading impression”.
I’m not trying to talk you out of the bad actor categorization, just saying that I haven’t personally thought it through / investigated enough that I’m confident in that label. (But people shouldn’t update on my epistemic state! It might well be I’d agree with you if I spent an hour on it; I just don’t care enough to want to spend that hour.)
Yes, I personally want to do that, because I want to spend time engaging with good faith actors and having them in gated spaces I frequent.
In general I have a strong perfectionist streak, which I channel only to try to improve things which are good enough to seem worth the investment of effort to improve further. This is just one case of that.
(Criticizing is not itself something that comes with direct negative effects. Of course I’d rather place larger sanctions on bad faith actors than good faith actors, but I don’t think criticizing should be understood as a form of sanctioning.)
Is Jacy’s comment above where he seemed to present things in a way that puts him in a relatively positive light and ignores hard questions? Or the Apology post? I don’t really see how you’re getting that smell. John wrote a very negative comment, whether or not you think that negativity was justified, so it makes sense for Jacy to reply by pointing out inaccuracies that would make him seem more positive. I think it would take an extremely unusual person to engage in a discussion like this that isn’t steering in a more positive direction towards them. I also just took the questions he “ignored” as being ones where he doesn’t see them as inaccurate.
This is all not even mentioning how absolutely miserable and tired Jacy must be to go through this time and time again, again regardless of what you think of him as a person...
In my opinion, this is a bizarre comment. You seem to have more sympathy with Jacy, who has been accused of sexual harassment at least six times in this life for having to defend himself than eg the people who are reading this who he has harassed, or the people who are worried that he might harass them in the future as he tries to rejoin the community.
Actually no I got reasonably good vibes from the comment above. I read it as a bit defensive but it’s a fair point that that’s quite natural if he’s being attacked.
I remember feeling bad about the vibes of the Apology post but I haven’t gone back and reread it lately. (It’s also a few years old, so he may be a meaningfully different person now.)
I actually didn’t mean for any of my comments here to get into attacks on our defence of Jacy. I don’t think I have great evidence and don’t think I’m a very good person to listen to on this! I just wanted to come and clarify that my criticism of John was supposed to be just that, and not have people read into it a defence of Jacy.
(I take it that the bar for deciding personally to disengage is lower than for e.g. recommending others do that. I don’t make any recommendations for others. Maybe I’ll engage with Jacy later; I do feel happier about recent than old evidence, but it hasn’t yet moved me to particularly wanting to engage.)
So, are you saying it is an honest mistake but not a lie? His argument for being a co-founder seems to be that he was involved in the utilitarian forum Felicifia in 2008. He didn’t even found it. I know several other people who founded or were involved in that forum and none of them has ever claimed to be a founder of effective altruism on that basis. Jacy is the only person to do that and it is clear he does it in order to advance his claim to be a public intellectual because it suggests to the outside world that he was as influential as Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, Elie Hassenfeld, and Holden Karnofsky, which he wasn’t and he knows he wasn’t.
The dissembling in the post is typical of him. He never takes responsibility for anything unless forced to do so.
I’m saying it’s a gross exaggeration not a lie. I can imagine someone disinterested saying “ok but can we present a democratic vision of EA where we talk about the hundred founders?” and then looking for people who put energy early into building up the thing, and Jacy would be on that list.
(I think this is pretty bad, but that outright lying is worse, and I want to protect language to talk about that.)
I want to flag that something like “same intention as outright lying, but doing it in a way to maximize plausible deniability” would be just as bad as outright lying. (It is basically “outright lying” but in a not stupid fashion.)
However, the problem is that sometimes people exaggerate or get things wrong for more innocuous reasons like exaggerated or hyperbolic speech or having an inflated sense of one’s importance in what’s happening. Those cases are indeed different and deserve to be treated very different from lying (since we’d expect people to self-correct when they get the feedback, and avoid mistakes in the future). So, I agree with the point about protecting language. I don’t agree with the implicit message “it’s never as bad as outright lying when there’s an almost-defensible interpretation somewhere.” I think protecting the language is important for reasons of legibility and epistemic transparency, not so much because the moral distinction is always clean-cut.
You are taking charitable interpretations to an absolute limit here. You seem to be saying “maybe Jacy was endorsing a highly expansive conception of ‘founding’ which implies that EA has hundreds of founders’”. This is indeed a logical possibility. But I think the correct credence to have in this possibility is ~0. Instead, we should have ~1 credence in the following “he said it knowing it is not true in order to further his career”. And by ‘founding’ he meant, “I’m in the same bracket as Will MacAskill”. Otherwise, why put it on your website and in your bio?
I don’t think it’s like “Jacy had an interpretation in mind and then chose statements”. I think it’s more like “Jacy wanted to say things that made himself look impressive, then with motivated reasoning talked himself into thinking it was reasonable to call himself a founder of EA, because that sounded cool”.
(Within this there’s a spectrum of more and less blameworthy versions, as well as the possibility of the straight-out lying version. My best guess is towards the blameworthy end of the not-lying versions, but I don’t really know.)
This feels off to me. It seems like Jacy deliberately misled people to think that he was a co-founder of EA, to likely further his own career. This feels like a core element of lying, to deceive people for personal gain, which I think is the main reason one would claim they’re the co-founder of EA when almost no one else would say this about them.
Sure I think it can also be called “gross exaggeration” but where do you think the line is between “gross exaggeration” and “lying”? For me, lying means you say something that isn’t true (in the eyes of most people) for significant personal gain (i.e. status) whereas gross exaggeration is a smaller embellishment and/or isn’t done for large personal gain.
So rather than a lie, you think it might be a motivated delusion. Motivated delusions are obviously false. But then at the end you say it is not obviously false. This is inconsistent.
But I think it’s important to reserve terms like “lie” for “completely false”, because otherwise you lose the ability to police that boundary (and it’s important to police it, even if I also want higher standards enforced around many spaces I interact with).
Hi John, just to clarify some inaccuracies in your two comments:
- I’ve never harassed anyone, and I’ve never stated or implied that I have. I have apologized for making some people uncomfortable with “coming on too strong” in my online romantic advances. As I’ve said before in that Apology, I never intended to cause any discomfort, and I’m sorry that I did so. There have, to my knowledge, been no concerns about my behavior since I was made aware of these concerns in mid-2018.
- I didn’t lie on my website. I had (in a few places) described myself as a “co-founder” of EA [Edit: Just for clarity, I think this was only on my website for a few weeks? I think I mentioned it and was called it a few times over the years too, such as when being introduced for a lecture. I co-founded the first dedicated student group network, helped set up and moderate the first social media discussion groups, and was one of the first volunteers at ACE as a college student. I always favored a broader-base view of how EA emerged than what many perceived at the time (e.g., more like the founders of a social movement than of a company). Nobody had pushed back against “co-founder” until 2019, and I stopped using the term as soon as there was any pushback.], as I think many who worked to build EA from 2008-2012 could be reasonably described. I’ve stopped using the term because of all the confusion, which I describe a bit in “Some Early History of Effective Altruism.”
- Regarding SI, we were already moving on from CEA’s fiscal sponsorship and donation platform once we got our 501c3 certification in February 2019, so “stopped” and “severed ties” seem misleading.
- CEA did not make me write an apology. We agreed on both that apology document and me not attending CEA events as being the right response to these concerns. I had already written several apologies that were sent privately to various parties without any involvement from CEA.
- There was no discussion of my future posting on the EA Forum, nor to my knowledge any concerns about my behavior on this or other forums.
Otherwise, I have said my piece in the two articles you link, and I don’t plan to leave any more comments in this thread. I appreciate everyone’s thoughtful consideration.
Hi Jacy, you said in your apology “I am also stepping back from the EA community more generally, as I have been planning to since last year in order to focus on my research.”
I haven’t seen you around since then, so was surprised to see you attend an EA university retreat* and start posting more about EA. Would you describe yourself as stepping back into the EA community now?
*https://twitter.com/jacyanthis/status/1515682513280282631?s=20&t=reRvYxXCs2z-AvszF31Gng
Hi Khorton, I wouldn’t describe it as stepping back into the community, and I don’t plan on doing that, regardless of this issue, unless you consider occasional posts and presentations or socializing with my EA friends as such. This post on the EV of the future was just particularly suited for the EA Forum (e.g., previous posts on it), and it’s been 3 years since I published that public apology and have done everything asked of me by the concerned parties (around 4 years since I was made aware of the concerns, and I know of no concerns about my behavior since then).
I’m not planning to comment more here. This is in my opinion a terrible place to have these conversations, as Dony pointed out as well.
Why should we believe that you have in fact changed? You were kicked out of Brown for sexual misconduct. You claim to believe that the allegations at that time were false. Instead of being extra-careful in your sexual conduct following this, at least five women complain to CEA about your sexual sexual misconduct, and CEA calls the complaints ‘credible and concerning’. There is zero reason to think you have changed.
Plus, you’re a documented liar, so we should have no reason to believe you.
It’s a comment that is typical of Jacy—he cannot help but dissemble. “I am also stepping back from the EA community more generally, as I have been planning to since last year in order to focus on my research.” It makes it sound like he was going to step back anyway even while he was touting himself as an EA co-founder and was about to promote his book! In fact, if you read between the lines, CEA severed ties between him and the community. He then pretends that he was going to do this anyway. The whole apology is completely pathetic.
Were you expelled from Brown for sexual harassment? Or was that also for clumsy online flirting?
You did lie on your website. It is false that you are a co-founder of effective altruism. There is not a single person in the world who thinks that is true, and you only said it to further your career. That you can’t even acknowledge that that was a lie speaks volumes.
Perhaps CEA can clarify whether there was any connection between the allegations and CEA severing ties with SI.
Were the allegations reported to the Sentience Institute before CEA? Why did you not write a public apology before CEA approached you with the allegations? You agreeing with CEA to being banned from EA events and you being banned from EA events are the same thing.
The issue is how long you should ‘step away’ from the community for.
I wouldn’t have described Jacy as a co-founder of effective altruism and don’t like him having had it on his website, but it definitely doesn’t seem like a lie to me (I kind of dislike the term “co-founder of EA” because of how ambiguous it is).
Anyway I think calling it a lie is roughly as egregious a stretch of the truth as Jacy’s claim to be a co-founder (if less objectionable since it reads less like motivated delusion). In both cases I’m like “seems wrong to me, but if you squint you can see where it’s coming from”.
[meta for onlookers: I’m investing more energy into holding John to high standards here than Jacy because I’m more convinced that John is a good faith actor and I care about his standards being high. I don’t know where Jacy is on the spectrum from “kind of bad judgement but nothing terrible” to “outright bad actor”, but I get a bad smell from the way he seems to consistently turns to present things in a way that puts him in a relatively positive light and ignores hard questions, so absent further evidence I’m just not very interested in engaging]
“I don’t know where Jacy is on the spectrum from “kind of bad judgement but nothing terrible” to “outright bad actor”.”
I don’t understand this and claims like it. To recap, he was thrown out of university in 2012 for sexual misconduct. Someone who was at Brown around this time told me that no-one else was expelled from Brown for sexual misconduct the entire they were there. This suggests that his actions were very bad.
Despite being expelled from Brown, at least five women in the EA community then complain to CEA because of his sexual misconduct. CEA thinks these actions are bad enough to ban him from all EA events and dissociate from him completely. Despite Jacy giving the impression that was due to clumsy flirting, I strongly doubt that this is true. Clumsy flirting must happen a fair amount in this community given the social awkwardness of EAs, but few people are expelled from the community as a result. This again suggests that the allegations against Jacy are very bad.
This should update us towards the view that the Brown allegations were also true (noting that Jacy denies that they are true).
In your view he also makes statements that are gross exaggerations/delusional in order to further his career (though I mustn’t say that he lied).
I think we have enough evidence for the ‘bad actor’ categorisation.
It’s from “man things in the world are typically complicated, and I haven’t spent time digging into this, but although there surface level facts look bad I’m aware that selective quoting of facts can give a misleading impression”.
I’m not trying to talk you out of the bad actor categorization, just saying that I haven’t personally thought it through / investigated enough that I’m confident in that label. (But people shouldn’t update on my epistemic state! It might well be I’d agree with you if I spent an hour on it; I just don’t care enough to want to spend that hour.)
Here is an interesting post on the strength of the evidence provided by multiple independent accusations of sexual misconduct throughout one’s life.
http://afro-optimist.blogspot.com/2018/09/why-you-should-probably-believe-ford.html
Isn’t the upshot of this that you want to be more critical of good faith actors than bad faith actors? That seems wrong to me.
Yes, I personally want to do that, because I want to spend time engaging with good faith actors and having them in gated spaces I frequent.
In general I have a strong perfectionist streak, which I channel only to try to improve things which are good enough to seem worth the investment of effort to improve further. This is just one case of that.
(Criticizing is not itself something that comes with direct negative effects. Of course I’d rather place larger sanctions on bad faith actors than good faith actors, but I don’t think criticizing should be understood as a form of sanctioning.)
Is Jacy’s comment above where he seemed to present things in a way that puts him in a relatively positive light and ignores hard questions? Or the Apology post? I don’t really see how you’re getting that smell. John wrote a very negative comment, whether or not you think that negativity was justified, so it makes sense for Jacy to reply by pointing out inaccuracies that would make him seem more positive. I think it would take an extremely unusual person to engage in a discussion like this that isn’t steering in a more positive direction towards them. I also just took the questions he “ignored” as being ones where he doesn’t see them as inaccurate.
This is all not even mentioning how absolutely miserable and tired Jacy must be to go through this time and time again, again regardless of what you think of him as a person...
In my opinion, this is a bizarre comment. You seem to have more sympathy with Jacy, who has been accused of sexual harassment at least six times in this life for having to defend himself than eg the people who are reading this who he has harassed, or the people who are worried that he might harass them in the future as he tries to rejoin the community.
Actually no I got reasonably good vibes from the comment above. I read it as a bit defensive but it’s a fair point that that’s quite natural if he’s being attacked.
I remember feeling bad about the vibes of the Apology post but I haven’t gone back and reread it lately. (It’s also a few years old, so he may be a meaningfully different person now.)
I actually didn’t mean for any of my comments here to get into attacks on our defence of Jacy. I don’t think I have great evidence and don’t think I’m a very good person to listen to on this! I just wanted to come and clarify that my criticism of John was supposed to be just that, and not have people read into it a defence of Jacy.
(I take it that the bar for deciding personally to disengage is lower than for e.g. recommending others do that. I don’t make any recommendations for others. Maybe I’ll engage with Jacy later; I do feel happier about recent than old evidence, but it hasn’t yet moved me to particularly wanting to engage.)
So, are you saying it is an honest mistake but not a lie? His argument for being a co-founder seems to be that he was involved in the utilitarian forum Felicifia in 2008. He didn’t even found it. I know several other people who founded or were involved in that forum and none of them has ever claimed to be a founder of effective altruism on that basis. Jacy is the only person to do that and it is clear he does it in order to advance his claim to be a public intellectual because it suggests to the outside world that he was as influential as Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, Elie Hassenfeld, and Holden Karnofsky, which he wasn’t and he knows he wasn’t.
The dissembling in the post is typical of him. He never takes responsibility for anything unless forced to do so.
I’m saying it’s a gross exaggeration not a lie. I can imagine someone disinterested saying “ok but can we present a democratic vision of EA where we talk about the hundred founders?” and then looking for people who put energy early into building up the thing, and Jacy would be on that list.
(I think this is pretty bad, but that outright lying is worse, and I want to protect language to talk about that.)
I want to flag that something like “same intention as outright lying, but doing it in a way to maximize plausible deniability” would be just as bad as outright lying. (It is basically “outright lying” but in a not stupid fashion.)
However, the problem is that sometimes people exaggerate or get things wrong for more innocuous reasons like exaggerated or hyperbolic speech or having an inflated sense of one’s importance in what’s happening. Those cases are indeed different and deserve to be treated very different from lying (since we’d expect people to self-correct when they get the feedback, and avoid mistakes in the future). So, I agree with the point about protecting language. I don’t agree with the implicit message “it’s never as bad as outright lying when there’s an almost-defensible interpretation somewhere.” I think protecting the language is important for reasons of legibility and epistemic transparency, not so much because the moral distinction is always clean-cut.
I agree with this.
You are taking charitable interpretations to an absolute limit here. You seem to be saying “maybe Jacy was endorsing a highly expansive conception of ‘founding’ which implies that EA has hundreds of founders’”. This is indeed a logical possibility. But I think the correct credence to have in this possibility is ~0. Instead, we should have ~1 credence in the following “he said it knowing it is not true in order to further his career”. And by ‘founding’ he meant, “I’m in the same bracket as Will MacAskill”. Otherwise, why put it on your website and in your bio?
I don’t think it’s like “Jacy had an interpretation in mind and then chose statements”. I think it’s more like “Jacy wanted to say things that made himself look impressive, then with motivated reasoning talked himself into thinking it was reasonable to call himself a founder of EA, because that sounded cool”.
(Within this there’s a spectrum of more and less blameworthy versions, as well as the possibility of the straight-out lying version. My best guess is towards the blameworthy end of the not-lying versions, but I don’t really know.)
This feels off to me. It seems like Jacy deliberately misled people to think that he was a co-founder of EA, to likely further his own career. This feels like a core element of lying, to deceive people for personal gain, which I think is the main reason one would claim they’re the co-founder of EA when almost no one else would say this about them.
Sure I think it can also be called “gross exaggeration” but where do you think the line is between “gross exaggeration” and “lying”? For me, lying means you say something that isn’t true (in the eyes of most people) for significant personal gain (i.e. status) whereas gross exaggeration is a smaller embellishment and/or isn’t done for large personal gain.
So rather than a lie, you think it might be a motivated delusion. Motivated delusions are obviously false. But then at the end you say it is not obviously false. This is inconsistent.
True/false isn’t a dichotomy. The statement here was obviously a stretch / not entirely true. I’d guess it had hundreds of thousands of microlies ( https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SGFRneArKi93qbrRG/truthful-ai?commentId=KdG4kZEu9GA4324AE )
But I think it’s important to reserve terms like “lie” for “completely false”, because otherwise you lose the ability to police that boundary (and it’s important to police it, even if I also want higher standards enforced around many spaces I interact with).