(I am curious how you can be so confident that no innocent people were kicked out by mistake if you really were following a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy!)
Where did you get the impression that we didn’t ask questions? Everyone that was accused was kicked out because we talked to both sides and to relevant witnesses and found the accusers to be credible. No further information has come out since to contradict this assessment.
As jason points out below, this was a boardgame club. Would you really insist we keep a credibly accused abuser around, just in case there was an elaborate conspiracy to destroy the boardgame society? At some point, self-preservation has to kick in.
Indeed, I would support a higher standard of evidence when the “punishment” is more damaging, such as affecting careers and so on. Fortunately, EA has significantly more resources at hand to investigate with than my little club.
Every system has to balance between the risk of punishing innocents vs the risk of letting guilty people run free. “beyond reasonable doubt” is built on the principle that it’s better for ten guilty people to go free than to lock up one innocent person. But if you let ten abusers into your local community meetup, the community will die, or worse, become a powerbase for abusers.
And—at least in a low-resource environment where the cost of a false positive isn’t high (like a boardgame club) -- it’s not inappropriate to consider base rates. Even if you think the base rate of truthful accusations made to boardgame clubs is only (say) 70 percent, that’s still a thumb on the scale.
Think about the decisions of parking-enforcement hearing officers as an analogy. They start with the assumption that the base rate of parking enforcers messing up is lower than the base rate of people lying to get out of parking tickets. It’d be very difficult to run a parking enforcement program otherwise.
The other uncomfortable truth is that kicking probably innocent people out is sometimes unavoidable. For instance, in the context of classified information, you would absolutely revoke someone’s clearance (which is career ending) if you concluded there was a 1 percent chance that they were passing major secrets to the enemy and could not improve that estimate. Better to end 100 CIA agents’ careers than to allow an Ames or Hanssen type traitor to operate. Kicking someone out of a boardgame club on less than 50 percent likelihood of sexual assault is sensible, because the costs of a false negative are worse than the costs of a false positive.
Since temporalis hasn’t answered to the literal question, I think I can.
The literal text of the OP, as cited, says “Everyone that was accused of assault was banned from the club”. That, to me, does not sound like the qualifiers you offer here, where “we talked to both sides and to relevant witnesses and found the accusers to be credible”. That would be best summarized as “Everybody that was credibly accused of assault was banned”, and even with that, the full explanation of how was an accusation found credible should better follow, and not long after, if we are to think that it was a more-or-less like a trial process, and not a more-or-less like a witch-hunt process.
The original text was ambigous between a description of policy and of outcomes. My reading now is that it was intended as the latter, though people are likely to interpret it as the former and think it’s advocating not looking into accusation credibility?
Where did you get the impression that we didn’t ask questions? Everyone that was accused was kicked out because we talked to both sides and to relevant witnesses and found the accusers to be credible. No further information has come out since to contradict this assessment.
As jason points out below, this was a boardgame club. Would you really insist we keep a credibly accused abuser around, just in case there was an elaborate conspiracy to destroy the boardgame society? At some point, self-preservation has to kick in.
Indeed, I would support a higher standard of evidence when the “punishment” is more damaging, such as affecting careers and so on. Fortunately, EA has significantly more resources at hand to investigate with than my little club.
Every system has to balance between the risk of punishing innocents vs the risk of letting guilty people run free. “beyond reasonable doubt” is built on the principle that it’s better for ten guilty people to go free than to lock up one innocent person. But if you let ten abusers into your local community meetup, the community will die, or worse, become a powerbase for abusers.
And—at least in a low-resource environment where the cost of a false positive isn’t high (like a boardgame club) -- it’s not inappropriate to consider base rates. Even if you think the base rate of truthful accusations made to boardgame clubs is only (say) 70 percent, that’s still a thumb on the scale.
Think about the decisions of parking-enforcement hearing officers as an analogy. They start with the assumption that the base rate of parking enforcers messing up is lower than the base rate of people lying to get out of parking tickets. It’d be very difficult to run a parking enforcement program otherwise.
The other uncomfortable truth is that kicking probably innocent people out is sometimes unavoidable. For instance, in the context of classified information, you would absolutely revoke someone’s clearance (which is career ending) if you concluded there was a 1 percent chance that they were passing major secrets to the enemy and could not improve that estimate. Better to end 100 CIA agents’ careers than to allow an Ames or Hanssen type traitor to operate. Kicking someone out of a boardgame club on less than 50 percent likelihood of sexual assault is sensible, because the costs of a false negative are worse than the costs of a false positive.
Since temporalis hasn’t answered to the literal question, I think I can.
The literal text of the OP, as cited, says “Everyone that was accused of assault was banned from the club”. That, to me, does not sound like the qualifiers you offer here, where “we talked to both sides and to relevant witnesses and found the accusers to be credible”. That would be best summarized as “Everybody that was credibly accused of assault was banned”, and even with that, the full explanation of how was an accusation found credible should better follow, and not long after, if we are to think that it was a more-or-less like a trial process, and not a more-or-less like a witch-hunt process.
The original text was ambigous between a description of policy and of outcomes. My reading now is that it was intended as the latter, though people are likely to interpret it as the former and think it’s advocating not looking into accusation credibility?