I would encourage anyone reading this to remember [Qhapna] has truly horrible opinions on what is a reasonable way to treat people. He was literally one of the last rationalists defending Brent. Neither his personal behavior nor his habit of defending abusers has improved over time. I’d recommend reading something I wrote some time ago:
Hi folks, I’m coming in as a mod. We’re doing three things with this thread: we’re issuing two warnings and encrypting one person’s name in rot13.
Discussions of abuse and sexual misconduct tend to be difficult and emotionally intense, and can easily create more confusion and hurt than clarity and improvement. They are also vitally important for communities — we really need clarity and improvement!
So we really want to keep these conversations productive and will be trying our best.
1.
We’re issuing a warning to @sapphire for this comment; in light of the edits made to the thread sapphire references in their comment, we think it was at best incautious and at worst deliberately misleading to share the unedited version with no link to the current version.
This isn’t the first time sapphire has shared content from other people in a way that seems to somewhat misrepresent what others meant to convey (see e.g.), and we think some of their comments fall below the bar for being honest.
When we warn someone, we expect them to consistently hold themselves to a higher standard in the future, or we might ban them.
2.
We’re also issuing a warning to @Ivy Mazzola for this comment, which fell short of our civility norms. For instance, the following is not civil:
Do you want to start witchhunts? Who exactly are you expecting to protect by saying somebody can be mean and highstrung on Facebook? What is the heroic moment here? Except that isn’t what was said, because then it would be clear that was not related enough to bring up. So instead you posted on a thread having to do with sexual abuse that he is abusive.
Anger can be understandable, but heated comments tend to reduce the quality of discussion and impede people from making progress or finding cruxes.
3.
We’ve also encrypted mentions of the person being discussed in this thread (in rot13), per our policy outlined here, and we’ve hidden their username in their replies.
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.
[This comment has been edited cuz it was long and rambly trying to be gentle and nuanced before, but now idk, maybe it just sounded more aggressive before because it was longer idk]
I’m sighing at your response of digging your heels in. I am glad [Qhapna] chimed in for himself. But I still think someone should drill in is just how much games of telephone can go wrong. It honestly sounds like you might do all this again in future.
I get the desire to post names. I am all about 100% transparency, particularly when done in great detail as a primary document (it looks like your document missed a lot of detail but you can always edit it to be more honest if you think it still matters. That’s your right.). But discretion and being careful about where and how we say things are also important because of the very real risks that people get not-true stories out of the vague-things-we-think-sound-true that all of us people (myself included) can be prone to say if we don’t catch ourselves. This is an outcome you should care about if you care about getting the truth out there.
Sooo, I had gone to your Twitter yesterday to check that there weren’t real substantiated claims of abuse made against [Qhapna]. I thought to myself “maybe she knows something I don’t” (I take abuse claims seriously, so checked at least one of your social medias before defending him out of the blue). Anyway, nothing about [Qhapna]. “All cool”, I thought. But yeah scrolling down a bit, I believe you participated in a game of telephone just a couple days before.
I was very much hoping you would be reasonable and either apologize or stay silent, because people make mistakes and I am not trying to shame you. But since you dug your heels in that naming DS on such a delicate thread was actually the right thing to do (potential misinformation be damned, I guess?), I will share this screenshot becasue you really ought to take seriously the suggestion that you should be more careful: [edit: I deleted the screenshot cuz I guess it was flashy and I didn’t think to just quote it. The username and pic had been obscured before though.]
The tweet said:
“Holy shit the EAs gave well known abuser Mike Vassar a 50k grant in 2022!”
Do you think this is a correct statement? Would readers of this forum post think this is correct? It probably soouunds roughly correct to those of us who have been following this entire thread, right?
I honestly had to look myself to be sure but, it (most likely) isn’t correct.
[Edit I just deleted a bunch if words about where I thought the misunderstanding happened trying to make it look reasonable]
But way more importantly for this topic, the wrong guy was named (by you or someone who told you that). (The right guy was Jacy I think). Please realize how predictable an outcome this was. Like, I’m not shaming you because I find the outcome so incredibly predictable, and I think the conversation was relevant in that case, like worth discussing even though discussing is hard. But as long as that outcome is predictable, it is not right to namedrop people on any post that is not actually related to them quite as casually as you did here. I’m trying to help you realize that even people you respect can get stories wrong and the truth that you want to get out there might not even get that far before transforming into something you never meant. Mistakes happen but like, false gossip is really really hard to stop once it gets started.You should care about risk of misinformation if you care about truth and helping people make the right decisions.
My primary point is that games of telephones are real and their leading to misinformation is predictable. So real and predictable you yourself have already participated in one pulled from this very forum post. We should care and minimize the risk by only discussing relevant things.
One last epistemic note: Lauren Maria asked for names if the major figure was within EA. I don’t think [Qhapna] counts tbh. I think you jumped the gun on finding him relevant even in that case. [Qhapna] has written elsewhere that he does not consider himself an EA. Some people consider themselves rationalists and EAs simultaneously. I admit there is Venn-style overlap. But [Qhapna] is not one of those. He is a rationalist through and through. [Even if naming him had made sense here, that caveat should have been included due to her request.]
Also, sure I’ll say it since I’m here. This type of claim “[he] has truly horrible opinions on what is a reasonable way to treat people” and the rest goes against competing claims that he has very high integrity and strict moral compass when it comes to the treatment of others. He has written many long pieces about this. If you haven’t seen them recently it might be because he blocked you.
Hmmm this is why I originally had a long paragraph about where I think the misunderstanding occurred. I think that someone serving as regranter is not the same thing as being given 50K.
I would encourage anyone reading this to remember [Qhapna] has truly horrible opinions on what is a reasonable way to treat people. He was literally one of the last rationalists defending Brent. Neither his personal behavior nor his habit of defending abusers has improved over time. I’d recommend reading something I wrote some time ago:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTGEnE4k6cFE3E_LW2_MfCXps7LbK1xoCrvpUW3PLI-c3QDHMlDKIMLP1W37DWAm2mkE4tSQ-tX8Aic/pub
Terrible judgment, a habit of feeling oppressed, and extreme arrogance is a very toxic combination.
Hi folks, I’m coming in as a mod. We’re doing three things with this thread: we’re issuing two warnings and encrypting one person’s name in rot13.
Discussions of abuse and sexual misconduct tend to be difficult and emotionally intense, and can easily create more confusion and hurt than clarity and improvement. They are also vitally important for communities — we really need clarity and improvement!
So we really want to keep these conversations productive and will be trying our best.
1.
We’re issuing a warning to @sapphire for this comment; in light of the edits made to the thread sapphire references in their comment, we think it was at best incautious and at worst deliberately misleading to share the unedited version with no link to the current version.
This isn’t the first time sapphire has shared content from other people in a way that seems to somewhat misrepresent what others meant to convey (see e.g.), and we think some of their comments fall below the bar for being honest.
When we warn someone, we expect them to consistently hold themselves to a higher standard in the future, or we might ban them.
2.
We’re also issuing a warning to @Ivy Mazzola for this comment, which fell short of our civility norms. For instance, the following is not civil:
Anger can be understandable, but heated comments tend to reduce the quality of discussion and impede people from making progress or finding cruxes.
3.
We’ve also encrypted mentions of the person being discussed in this thread (in rot13), per our policy outlined here, and we’ve hidden their username in their replies.
(I understand, and thank you for stepping in.)
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.
[This comment has been edited cuz it was long and rambly trying to be gentle and nuanced before, but now idk, maybe it just sounded more aggressive before because it was longer idk]
I’m sighing at your response of digging your heels in. I am glad [Qhapna] chimed in for himself. But I still think someone should drill in is just how much games of telephone can go wrong. It honestly sounds like you might do all this again in future.
I get the desire to post names. I am all about 100% transparency, particularly when done in great detail as a primary document (it looks like your document missed a lot of detail but you can always edit it to be more honest if you think it still matters. That’s your right.). But discretion and being careful about where and how we say things are also important because of the very real risks that people get not-true stories out of the vague-things-we-think-sound-true that all of us people (myself included) can be prone to say if we don’t catch ourselves. This is an outcome you should care about if you care about getting the truth out there.
Sooo, I had gone to your Twitter yesterday to check that there weren’t real substantiated claims of abuse made against [Qhapna]. I thought to myself “maybe she knows something I don’t” (I take abuse claims seriously, so checked at least one of your social medias before defending him out of the blue). Anyway, nothing about [Qhapna]. “All cool”, I thought. But yeah scrolling down a bit, I believe you participated in a game of telephone just a couple days before.
I was very much hoping you would be reasonable and either apologize or stay silent, because people make mistakes and I am not trying to shame you. But since you dug your heels in that naming DS on such a delicate thread was actually the right thing to do (potential misinformation be damned, I guess?), I will share this screenshot becasue you really ought to take seriously the suggestion that you should be more careful: [edit: I deleted the screenshot cuz I guess it was flashy and I didn’t think to just quote it. The username and pic had been obscured before though.]
The tweet said:
“Holy shit the EAs gave well known abuser Mike Vassar a 50k grant in 2022!”
Do you think this is a correct statement? Would readers of this forum post think this is correct? It probably soouunds roughly correct to those of us who have been following this entire thread, right?
I honestly had to look myself to be sure but, it (most likely) isn’t correct.
[Edit I just deleted a bunch if words about where I thought the misunderstanding happened trying to make it look reasonable]
But way more importantly for this topic, the wrong guy was named (by you or someone who told you that). (The right guy was Jacy I think). Please realize how predictable an outcome this was. Like, I’m not shaming you because I find the outcome so incredibly predictable, and I think the conversation was relevant in that case, like worth discussing even though discussing is hard. But as long as that outcome is predictable, it is not right to namedrop people on any post that is not actually related to them quite as casually as you did here. I’m trying to help you realize that even people you respect can get stories wrong and the truth that you want to get out there might not even get that far before transforming into something you never meant. Mistakes happen but like, false gossip is really really hard to stop once it gets started. You should care about risk of misinformation if you care about truth and helping people make the right decisions.
My primary point is that games of telephones are real and their leading to misinformation is predictable. So real and predictable you yourself have already participated in one pulled from this very forum post. We should care and minimize the risk by only discussing relevant things.
One last epistemic note: Lauren Maria asked for names if the major figure was within EA. I don’t think [Qhapna] counts tbh. I think you jumped the gun on finding him relevant even in that case. [Qhapna] has written elsewhere that he does not consider himself an EA. Some people consider themselves rationalists and EAs simultaneously. I admit there is Venn-style overlap. But [Qhapna] is not one of those. He is a rationalist through and through. [Even if naming him had made sense here, that caveat should have been included due to her request.]
Also, sure I’ll say it since I’m here. This type of claim “[he] has truly horrible opinions on what is a reasonable way to treat people” and the rest goes against competing claims that he has very high integrity and strict moral compass when it comes to the treatment of others. He has written many long pieces about this. If you haven’t seen them recently it might be because he blocked you.
from private convos I am pretty sure that the tweet about mike vassar is in reference to this https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7b9ZDTAYQY9k6FZHS/abuse-in-lesswrong-and-rationalist-communities-in-bloomberg?commentId=FCcEMhiwtkmr7wS84 (which is about Mike Vassar, not Jacy)
there may or may not be other things informing it, but it’s not about Jacy.
Hmmm this is why I originally had a long paragraph about where I think the misunderstanding occurred. I think that someone serving as regranter is not the same thing as being given 50K.