Could you please tell if being able to ask somebody designated what actual social rules are in case you have any doubts would help?
That’d be amazing! That could also be a public forum that allows for anonymous questions, so there isn’t so much of a burden on one person to answer everything objectively. A single person will probably sometimes have trouble telling how widely shared their personal preferences are.
Could you please let me know why would you perceive them as that harsh?
Hmm, I don’t have any experience with their process, so I think I made wrong assumptions about it. When I went to my first EAG conference (as opposed to EAGx), I thought that a different blacklist applied and so was afraid that I might already be banned without knowing it, maybe in analogy with the US no-flight list. Turns out I wasn’t. I’m probably just unusually anxious about such things.
From some of the posts in the last couple of weeks I’ve rather gotten the impression that the community health team always or usually (?) talks to the perpetrator before banning them, so that it would’ve been unlikely for me to be banned without knowing about it. (Plus, the same list probably applies to both EAGs and EAGxs.)
Then again, even when I’m given a chance to explain and apologize, there are still the related problems that (1) some of the harm has been done, i.e. I scared someone, (2) I can’t really prove my intentions, and (3) even if I’m believed that my intentions were harmless, it’s complicated to understand what that really changes. For me it usually makes a big difference whether someone does something intentionally or not, but that varies a lot even among my friends. They might forgive me on a cerebral level but still retain the same new fear response on an intuitive level.
I think in my comment I didn’t mean to put so much focus on the community health team and their standards… They’re in a good position to describe the ways in which they make their decisions because they have a lot of records to draw on at this point. So maybe it would be easier for them to observe social rules in EA than for any other individual. Then again a public forum could work too.
That makes me wonder, maybe I can infer from the absence (?) of public complaints about people’s appearance on the EA Forum that it’s very hard to do something wrong in that area in the EA context. Or maybe it just so happens that it’s not acceptable to complain about someone’s appearance because that’s an outgroup thing to do, but deep down it still disturbs people, and so they’re more likely to seemingly overreact to something else the visually-weird person does because they’ve long formed a comprehensive model of them being weird and have just been waiting for signals of weirdness that it’s okay to verbalize? Or social norms around what it’s okay to complain about might change, and then a long record of weird appearance might surface all at once?
Perhaps such a forum for social norms should be wholly anonymous so that people are encouraged to also report on negative gut reactions that they have when it’s not, at the time, acceptable to voice them?
I think that Community Health Team has some type of contact form on their website, which also can be anonymous? It may be worth drawing their attention to what you say here and your comments above—and it may also help to clarify your questions!
That’d be amazing! That could also be a public forum that allows for anonymous questions, so there isn’t so much of a burden on one person to answer everything objectively. A single person will probably sometimes have trouble telling how widely shared their personal preferences are.
Hmm, I don’t have any experience with their process, so I think I made wrong assumptions about it. When I went to my first EAG conference (as opposed to EAGx), I thought that a different blacklist applied and so was afraid that I might already be banned without knowing it, maybe in analogy with the US no-flight list. Turns out I wasn’t. I’m probably just unusually anxious about such things.
From some of the posts in the last couple of weeks I’ve rather gotten the impression that the community health team always or usually (?) talks to the perpetrator before banning them, so that it would’ve been unlikely for me to be banned without knowing about it. (Plus, the same list probably applies to both EAGs and EAGxs.)
Then again, even when I’m given a chance to explain and apologize, there are still the related problems that (1) some of the harm has been done, i.e. I scared someone, (2) I can’t really prove my intentions, and (3) even if I’m believed that my intentions were harmless, it’s complicated to understand what that really changes. For me it usually makes a big difference whether someone does something intentionally or not, but that varies a lot even among my friends. They might forgive me on a cerebral level but still retain the same new fear response on an intuitive level.
I think in my comment I didn’t mean to put so much focus on the community health team and their standards… They’re in a good position to describe the ways in which they make their decisions because they have a lot of records to draw on at this point. So maybe it would be easier for them to observe social rules in EA than for any other individual. Then again a public forum could work too.
That makes me wonder, maybe I can infer from the absence (?) of public complaints about people’s appearance on the EA Forum that it’s very hard to do something wrong in that area in the EA context. Or maybe it just so happens that it’s not acceptable to complain about someone’s appearance because that’s an outgroup thing to do, but deep down it still disturbs people, and so they’re more likely to seemingly overreact to something else the visually-weird person does because they’ve long formed a comprehensive model of them being weird and have just been waiting for signals of weirdness that it’s okay to verbalize? Or social norms around what it’s okay to complain about might change, and then a long record of weird appearance might surface all at once?
Perhaps such a forum for social norms should be wholly anonymous so that people are encouraged to also report on negative gut reactions that they have when it’s not, at the time, acceptable to voice them?
I think that Community Health Team has some type of contact form on their website, which also can be anonymous? It may be worth drawing their attention to what you say here and your comments above—and it may also help to clarify your questions!
Excellent, done!