sapphire leaves out that the bits they quote in their document look like this now, and have since just a few days after posting:
[Edit]
What used to stand in this place was an imagined apology, generated by [my model of Brent] plus [my sense of what could be the *least* bad state of affairs that’s consistent with reality].
I took that least-bad-of-all-possible-explanations, and wrote a statement out of it, specifically so that the discussion would not anchor on the most-bad-of-all-possible-explanations, the way it sometimes does, to the detriment of our morality and our sense of truth.
As more and more info has come out, I can no longer quite stomach leaving up the exact words that I wrote; I think the least-bad-possible-state-of-affairs is worse than I thought it was three days ago. My original words are preserved elsewhere in a few places—if you wish to read them, I or others are happy to provide you with them. But I don’t want them HERE anymore, in the place that people are visiting to participate in the conversation, and the place that new people will look at.
(Again, not trying to hide the words overall, or the fact that I wrote them; I believe a few others have archived or reposted, and I’ve preserved them myself to hand out on request.)
I continue to admire the degree to which people of startlingly different views and backgrounds were willing to come together and discuss in a way that at *no* time resembled either the extremes of witch-hunting or victim-blaming. I continue to appreciate every person who’s participated below, and to be humbled by all of the perspectives you’ve trusted me enough to share.
(This is a public post, and has remained public the whole time specifically as a defense against adversarial cherry-pickers like sapphire. It also happened to be one of the most central places where the EA and rationality community hashed things out, resulting in Brent’s ouster and everyone converging on “yeah okay this was EXTREMELY bad;” it’s super plausible that without my hosting of the conversation (including with my FB norms, that sapphire sneers at) the communities would have not had a single room where everybody said their piece and came to the correct conclusion.)
Also, for the (reasonable) tone objection, I note that there was, less than 36h later and while the first conversation was extremely active and ongoing, this followup, which sapphire would like to pretend is … immaterial?
If I had it to do all over again, I would post these questions first, and yesterday’s post an hour or two later. I think yesterday’s post was crucial, but looking at how reasonable everyone was when engaging with it, I may have overestimated its *urgency.* And I think I underestimated the degree to which I would tug the conversation in one direction, and that’s caused at least me and possibly others to spin their wheels on questions of guilt or malice while meanwhile an expression of hurt has NOT been adequately answered.
My crime re: Brent is, basically, being skeptical enough to not IMMEDIATELY jump on the bandwagon, and instead taking an extra couple of days to wait for evidence to appear (which it did, thanks to my FB norms being such that people felt safe sharing their reactions, and which I then updated on). By “literally one of the last rationalists defending Brent,” sapphire means “stopped defending him on ~Sep 22 instead of ~Sep 19.” More on my processing of what went wrong there, presented in metaphor.
For calibration, I scrolled back through my own past week of FB posts, looking for anything that might be representative of my stance on things like abuse and abusers, and the two most relevant ones from just the past week are this and this; decently representative reads for people who don’t know me. The first is me giving people a heads-up about extreme language from a possible mutual, and the second is me strenuously objecting to someone saying that it’s right to deceive others for their own benefit.
(Also, findable in the comments under the post sapphire is cherrypicking are things like the following:
In this case, for instance—if reasonably convinced that either:
a) safewords were ignored in cases where there was no prenegotiated agreement, or
b) deliberate lies were in fact told to third parties with the intent to decrease scrutiny or increase space for abusive behavior
… I would stop interacting with Brent in person and rescind his invitation to my house. I would probably not make a broad-spectrum public statement to that effect, but I would not keep this fact a secret, either.
… which in fact happened.)
I don’t expect I’ll engage much beyond this; I think my posts (99.99% of which are public) stand for themselves, and my stance is basically “the best conversations are the consensual ones,” and I generally don’t consent to being in conversation with sapphire; only showed up here in self-defense. Parting note.
sapphire leaves out that the bits they quote in their document look like this now, and have since just a few days after posting:
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/pfbid022BUomRWLnDk3ev9SvurcY31rpxLViWFw96TrLB2cpgxBrYiuDdQUcxzxtoHRSNdhl
(This is a public post, and has remained public the whole time specifically as a defense against adversarial cherry-pickers like sapphire. It also happened to be one of the most central places where the EA and rationality community hashed things out, resulting in Brent’s ouster and everyone converging on “yeah okay this was EXTREMELY bad;” it’s super plausible that without my hosting of the conversation (including with my FB norms, that sapphire sneers at) the communities would have not had a single room where everybody said their piece and came to the correct conclusion.)
Also, for the (reasonable) tone objection, I note that there was, less than 36h later and while the first conversation was extremely active and ongoing, this followup, which sapphire would like to pretend is … immaterial?
My crime re: Brent is, basically, being skeptical enough to not IMMEDIATELY jump on the bandwagon, and instead taking an extra couple of days to wait for evidence to appear (which it did, thanks to my FB norms being such that people felt safe sharing their reactions, and which I then updated on). By “literally one of the last rationalists defending Brent,” sapphire means “stopped defending him on ~Sep 22 instead of ~Sep 19.” More on my processing of what went wrong there, presented in metaphor.
For calibration, I scrolled back through my own past week of FB posts, looking for anything that might be representative of my stance on things like abuse and abusers, and the two most relevant ones from just the past week are this and this; decently representative reads for people who don’t know me. The first is me giving people a heads-up about extreme language from a possible mutual, and the second is me strenuously objecting to someone saying that it’s right to deceive others for their own benefit.
(Also, findable in the comments under the post sapphire is cherrypicking are things like the following:
… which in fact happened.)
I don’t expect I’ll engage much beyond this; I think my posts (99.99% of which are public) stand for themselves, and my stance is basically “the best conversations are the consensual ones,” and I generally don’t consent to being in conversation with sapphire; only showed up here in self-defense. Parting note.