I took it down due to the responses from the forum. The original intention of the post was to catalyze action from the within the community, but after it was around for a day or two, I realized this will not happen. The original goal of posting here will not be served.
In addition, the post being live here brought me a lot of headache. I felt like the responses from the forum were mob-like and fell into three categories 1. normalizing ( this is just a statistic, every community has a few) 2. dismissive (not a big deal) 3. attacking. I also have a full time job so didn’t have the time to respond and felt increasingly unsafe given that I wasn’t posting as an anon.
There will be some follow up work on this topic in upcoming days.
I saw all of the comments in the state before commenter removed her post.
There was a lot of women who responded in depth and consideration to the post. Altogether, this produced a pretty convincing response that did not make post look as favorable as I think the commenter wanted it.
I don’t at all like EA rhetoric, which is highly defective, but the women there probably spent 100-woman hours of time writing all of their comments. By removing the post, the commenter silenced their views without answering or developing a response.
I felt it was higher EV to spend my time developing AI than developing responses in comment sections.
If EA didn’t like my post, that’s fine. I said my piece. There are other places on the internet and elsewhere where my discussion was welcome and where I felt heard. :)
It’s faster to be on a boat where you’re rowing in the direction of the current than against it.
Why didn’t you just delete the specific comments that you thought were disrespectful? You have the option of enforcing your own norms on your own posts. Or did you not know that was an option? (It certainly took me a while to discover I could do this!).
Though I guess the answer to that would be some variant of: “because it is too cognitively and emotionally time-consuming to decide whether each comment crossed the line or not and I have important AI Alignment work to do.”
To be clear with my view so my questions don’t feel like some sort of interrogation where I’m trying to “gotcha!” or anything like that: it is your post. You have the right to delete it without justifying the decision. In my view you didn’t censor the views of the women in the comments, the EA Forum did. The EA Forum could and should be programmed such that deleted posts don’t remove the comments as well.
Strongly agree that the EA Forum should be programmed such that deleting a post does not remove comments. People put so much time into writing comments on this forum.
Agree with just deleting comments you find unfair rather than hiding the post. At least if one deletes and reposts on their blog the charitable thing would be to link to the wayback machine. If you think the commentors look worse than you, why hide it? Isn’t it important to show if there is toxicity?
It’s possible responding here is a kinda random spot but I’m on mobile so 😅
I didn’t know I could delete individual comments but even if I could, I wouldn’t feel good censoring individual comments. Am I mad she called me bigoted? Of course. Should she be allowed to make her speech about me being bigoted? Yes. As someone who is strongly criticizing EA so publicly, I for one want free and unrestricted speech. From a system perspective, multiple players playing most optimally helps us get at the best solutions. Optimality though doesn’t mean playing nasty/below the belt, and I’d definitely opine that calling me bigoted was a nasty move on her part.
About deleting the post: EA is not entitled to my words, my thoughts or my time. I am not getting paid to do this, it is all free and voluntary and comes at the cost of alternative uses of my time. There were multiple people who expressed similar sentiments as Monica though her characterization was the most extremely worded. If EA as a group speak abusively to me, or otherwise indicate my opinions are unvalued, I’m just gonna take my post and exit the door. I think that’s fair to decide to not invest your energy where it is not appreciated.
Thirdly and most importantly, EA is very fond of talking but not fond of acting. The post I made led to no action. Even today, the TIME article despite being a public expose is likely going to lead to no action because everybody makes their little speeches and votes in the comment section, feel they’ve done enough and move on to business as usual. Talk is shit; discourse is not doing. At the time of deleting the post, I knew how EA felt as a group about my concerns, I knew no action will be taken, and I don’t care for more talk.
Thanks for explaining your thought process. I agree with the first half. But I’ll respectfully push back on the rest. Please bear with me as this may be hard to hear. But I also hope it is roundabout nice to hear, and hope it clears the air.
1. Was your energy not appreciated? Yes it’s fair to leave spaces where you aren’t appreciated. But many people in that thread did take the concerns seriously and give you a warm reception. Catherine and Julia both offered to speak to you. As did Rocky. The comments were also full of people saying things like “I don’t want to negate your experiences” or “I’m glad this post was written”. From what I remember, kind and concerned comments were finding their way to the top, and your post was even netting more upvotes by day too.
Additionally, I say this as someone who was hesitant about your post myself (I asked for further details on the original post), any hesitance about the piece or even down-votes didn’t mean that I or others didn’t want to take your concerns seriously, nor that we didn’t already have our own concerns about women in EA. We just needed a little help to make sense of the whole post, and possibly didn’t agree with the relevance of many of your closing suggestions or the way polyamory was brought into it.
And regarding any brutish comments, I think if you’d allowed time, they would have been heavily down-voted (call me naive but I’ve got faith in the community like that). I’ve gotten hate online when I say something controversial too, some of which still stands out in my mind years later. But it doesn’t negate the good responses I also received, which usually take time and roll in as reactions to the bad ones. Bad comments don’t mean one should pack up, and then tell other people who weren’t there that their “energy was not appreciated” or their post was “heavily down-voted”. I hate to be the one to say it to you, but I think it needs to be said eventually… based on what I saw and know, I don’t think that wording and any similar wording you’ve used elsewhere is honest.
2. Did the post”lead to no action”? Firstly, you can’t have determined in a few days (by the time you deleted the post) that no one was going to act. Most of us would already have had a lot on our plate so we’d need time to mull it over, and think what we could do.
Personally, I’m now moving forward with a project which I can thank you for inspiring. But more importantly, the Community Health Team told me they’ve been working on a similar project, which I assume your post inspired too, so things were in fact going to be addressed. Also, even if no formal EA-wide action were ever taken, I’d bet you that multiple EA communities and orgs improved or are working on improving their processes after reading your post (and the comments as by EA NYC). Community builders talk (as you know) so if I had to bet, I’d bet changes would have reached the EA Forum (for grassroots implementation) or the CEA Groups Team (for top-down implementation) within a few months of now.
(Sheepishly): Personally, I would have taken action sooner except… I went back to the post soon after to message you something like “Hey, I want to move forward with a project about this, do you want to share more details to help the process?” but on seeing the deleted post, I assumed I had been blocked for requesting more details on the post. Should I have looked harder? YES, OMG YES. However I had remembered it sounding like you were pretty done and wish to be hands-off by the end of that post anyway. I unfortunately then kinda shrugged and did decide to delay taking action because I had another EA project that I knew would end by February.
Why am I telling my own dumb story? Well, I think it’s instructive of something bigger. Although it was surely not your intention, by deleting the post from the forum, you made it that much harder:
for someone to tell you “thanks for your post”
for you to have your mind changed about the community’s reception, if warranted (I think you’d at least have realized it was warranted to have a more nuanced view)
for someone to tell you about actions they’d taken or were planning to take in response to your post.
For someone to believe you’d treat alternative perspectives in good faith—for poly people in particular it started to look likely you might use disagreement as proof of toxicity. If so, this would at best waste time, so people who want to take action try to avoid risky exchanges which might bog them down.
for someone to believe you’d be a reliablecollaborator to reach out to, or that you still wanted to be a collaborator at all
So I don’t know that you could have expected to know of action you inspired by the time you deleted the post, or to have heard of actions you did inspire after deleting it.
3. How I think EAs fucked up and made it easy for you and others to conclude inaction: Okay, it takes time to take action. But as for posting public updates about intentions to take action, yeah I think I and the broader EA community may have dropped the ball there. Obviously in retrospect, to the extent EA org leaders and community builders (I’m the latter) did not prioritize clarifying that we cared and were taking action, these were poor choices. Feelings of resentment, confusion, and concern were validly building for EAs.
I have some compassion for why this ball was probably dropped: (1) thatpoly people (like me) would find public discussions very aversive. Why open the floor for anti-poly talk, when you can just put your nose to grindstone and do something, off a public forum? (2) Distant community builders and org leaders might not see it as necessary to share plans (maybe in certain Slacks, but not the Forum). Perhaps they would share results some months later (it takes time to test protocols and stuff), but not plans. (3) Even if it might seem right to do, posting plans and then responding to discussion about those plans is really labor intensive with nebulous reward (lame that this plays into it, but I think true)
But regardless, it’s obvious mistakes were made about transparency, and there’s a slice of humble pie with many people’s names on it, definitely mine.
But Hey I think it’s okay: I hope it is now obvious that the responses you got and some period of relative silence following didn’t mean the community didn’t care or appreciate the post. It didn’t mean you had no effect! We don’t always get to see the exact effect we have, but your post made waves. Sometimes you just gotta trust your ripples are keeping on, you know? I know that’s a cringe metaphor, but I hope it’s easier to trust now.
I only hope that next time you have an important or controversial point, you don’t paint a community with a broad brush or forcibly stop the conversation too early (taking a break makes sense though). I say this regardless of whether you owe EA anything. But EA and, way more importantly, the world still needs new ideas, and I think good ideas have a better chance at being adopted if people are more patient or something.
FWIW I know firsthand how extremely frustrating discussing gender and harrassment in EA and the world can be. Like, honestly crazy-making in my experience, especially when that discussion goes on for days or weeks. Let alone being at the center of it! I hope most others who dropped in and out of the discussions realize how hard it is to relate to your position and that perhaps most of us would be at our last straw.
Therefore, although I’ve gone on about both, I don’t hold anything against you for deleting the post or for misportraying the community response since, and I’d try to sway others from holding either against you as well (if necessary). This is one reason I’m replying publicly. So people know these sentiments have been said and the community can move forward. FWIW I think people who would like to help solve gender issues in EA (including me) would still be happy for your feedback.
Anyway, good luck with the AI capabilities T.T Predictable Pedantic Note: Please don’t get so single-minded about it that you end up contributing to extinction (including yours) o.o
There are multiple reasons I didn’t take EA’s help.
California law is more liberal than EA community health code. Community health is a euphemistic and blunt term for “sexual harassment”, minimizing its seriousness with a vaguely worded umbrella term. Usually every org has a sexual harassment code, non retaliation policy, etc. Phrases like “second/third chances”, “measuring impact of abuser and abused”, “unfairly harm reputation” etc doesn’t reflect victims will be taken seriously. It is also worded in a way that impact to community as against individual would be prioritized should claims be found true. I was better off going to the cops in CA.
The people I had bad experiences with were deeper/more popular/influential in EA than I was and given how everyone’s friends/lovers and stuff, I didn’t think there would be impartiality. I am easier to be othered than them.
Given the multiplicity of the problem, I didn’t want to go after individuals because they are too small fish to be worth my time frying. It was the culture that was broken that needed fixing because these people believe they are good individuals while doing things everyone else at EA was also doing.
Julia Wise’s office has way too much opacity and no accountability frameworks but courts/cops in CA are held accountable. DA’s lose elections and governments fall for mishandling criminal justice, what happens to Julia Wise for mishandling?
I didn’t know Julia Wise so didn’t have reason to think she was different than the distribution of EA people commenting on my post. It’s a lot to ask that you trust some private individual blindly you haven’t met. Julia also only reached out to me yesterday to clarify about Kathy Forth, but not in Nov/Dec/Jan.
One of the other people who reached out was an ex primary partner of a person who attempted to sleep with me, so I didn’t feel safe talking to her ( see, conflict of interest). I scheduled a meeting with the other and we didn’t end up meeting due to scheduling. The meeting was also a month later because when I posted my original post they were overworked from FTX scandal. A month later I had already checked out of EA.
After EA’s response to my post, really you expect me to trust that EA will help me? I did not.
On deleting post:
It was only removed from EA forum but a google search with my name would’ve taken you to my blog/twitter where it went viral. So I did not subtract information that could be useful for decision making from the collective conscious, I just removed it from the EA forum.
Like I said, I don’t need to offer ANY REASON to delete post because EA is not entitled to it. I was surprised the response was not overwhelmingly compassionate or empathetic but kinda cruel and debating. It was my life, my pain, my personal experiences being analysed, overanalysed, doubted, questioned by RANDOM internet strangers who I had no obligation to. Kindness should be an obligation but there was no kindness to be found. Any amount of attack can be reason enough for me to take it down because I want to tolerate ZERO disrespect.
It was also a Monday when the comments came rolling in, I was in between meetings at work, super annoyed and had no time to respond either(or desire to respond to the nasty ones). There weren’t many people defending me so it was me against like 10 others it was exhausting. I had saved everything though for later use because I wasn’t the type to shut up and disappear when the issue at hand is important: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KgnpB8hOeOYPeMc2Hk48St5w7mPE4kzr/edit
You can check the upvote / downvote count and use that as an indicator of aggregate response of the group. From memory the post got close to 100 downvotes, which was A LOT.
I had also shared it on twitter where the response was widely, widely different and kind, so I knew that the response on EA was atypical and tbh, extremely weird (my first response to a person claiming assault would be empathy, but may be EA selects for low empathy people?) https://twitter.com/keerthanpg/status/1591515890109255680?lang=en
Women who were hurt by EA are not chilling on the forum, they have left already. This space is an echo chamber that self selects for a certain type of person. You can find these women scattered on Twitter and the internet.
Ripples are not enough for me Ivy, I am high agency and impatient. A day or two later my friend Richard Ngo posted a brainstorming post as well, he had more buy-in with the community so I thought they’d act collaboratively if its coming from him. No action was taken as a consequence of that post either. The community had a second opportunity, and this time it was not over indexed on my personal experiences / emotionally worded, but the community did not take that either.
On AI capabilities: EA’s x-risk modeling is dumb and you’ll see it eventually. My views closely resemble that of Sam Altman. All of this crisis just makes me wanna throw my heart into work and build that AI. :)
Edit 1:
Bad comments don’t mean one should pack up, and then tell other people who weren’t there that their “energy was not appreciated” or their post was “heavily down-voted”. I hate to be the one to say it to you, but I think it needs to be said eventually… based on what I saw and know, I don’t think that wording and any similar wording you’ve used elsewhere is honest.
I just read your whole comment carefully(sorry it was long). Appreciation is subjective and hard to quantify but votes are, you can look at the drive link I posted to do the math of vote counts ( ~75 downvotes count for me as “heavily downvoted”, my comments were also appropriately downvoted as you can see in the comment graph relative to parent/child nodes in the comment trees, so from my perspective it is a reasonably correct characterization). Given that you’re (delicately but still) accusing me of being deliberately dishonest, do you want to correct that characterization?
Edit 2:
Well, there may be a way to verify the correctness of “energy was not appreciated” as a claim. Compare the distribution of responses on my twitter post and the frozen EA forum post + responses.
I just read your whole comment carefully(sorry it was long). Appreciation is subjective and hard to quantify but votes are, you can look at the drive link I posted to do the math of vote counts ( ~75 downvotes count for me as “heavily downvoted”, my comments were also appropriately downvoted as you can see in the comment graph relative to parent/child nodes in the comment trees, so from my perspective it is a reasonably correct characterization). Given that you’re (delicately but still) accusing me of being deliberately dishonest, do you want to correct that characterization?
My quick 2 cents on this point (rest of the points are probably above my pay-grade): I think if we were to poll say… the entire world’s population the vast majority of people would say they don’t feel a post of theirs was “heavily downvoted” unless it was net negative—and only then if it was strongly net negative.
You are totally free to have your own subjective feeling of what counts as “heavily downvoted” and it is allowed to deviates from the norm, but you deliberately chose not to clarify how your definition is different from the standard definition most anyone would think about. This isn’t exactly dishonesty in my mind, but definitely feels like a tactic a politician who isn’t upfront would use.
Given that you’re (delicately but still) accusing me of being deliberately dishonest, do you want to correct that characterization?
It’s a fair accusation to make. Like… uncontroversially so as well. Why wouldn’t it be? Let’s assume we have some government-funded project to combat sexual harassment. Let’s assume a vote was cast on whether the project should remain funded. Let’s say the votes were more positive than negative. If some seedy politician got up and said the project was clearly and obviously “heavily downvoted” and nowhere highlighted that actually most people voted in favour of it, you would be fucking pissed and right to accuse him of being dishonest. He didn’t technically lie and if said politician then responded with:
“How well this government-funded project works for women is subjective and hard to quantify but votes are, you can look at this here chart to do the math of vote counts ( ~75,00000 downvotes count for me as “heavily downvoted”, as you can see in this graph relative to parent/child nodes in the comment trees, so from my perspective it is a reasonably correct characterization). Given that you’re (delicately but still) accusing me of being deliberately dishonest, do you want to correct that characterization?”
Would you say he is right and it is complete and utterly unfair to accuse him of being dishonest? We can go into the details of whether he was technically lying or not all we want, but it is still a fair accusation to say they are being dishonest.
Ah, I just found this comment after it was referenced elsewhere. My definition of “heavily downvoted” = “lot of downvotes”. My post had around 75 or so downvotes which may be a third of total votes(speaking from memory).
but it is still a fair accusation to say they are being dishonest.
I’m making a credible accusation of harassment at the cost of my reputation, time and mental energy and you’re strawman attacking me for two words in the whole excerpt based on a subjective definition of “heavily downvoted” to call me overall dishonest? Dude.
If some seedy politician got up and said the project was clearly and obviously “heavily downvoted” and nowhere highlighted that actually most people voted in favour of it, you would be fucking pissed and right to accuse him of being dishonest.
My intention was not to point out that most people in EA voted against it which would be a false characterization. The intention of my statement was to convey that there was heavy backlash against my post, which I believe is accurate. The evidence for the claim that there was “heavy backlash” is “lots of downvotes / a large fraction of downvotes”. I wanted to get the information out that I faced a lot of attack for saying what I did( even right now, I am defending my exact choice of words and defending against being characterized as a liar for a small difference in opinion) because that’s useful information to survivors, and because it is an out of domain / unexpected response toward people coming out.
Ultimately my words are my words and not your words. Feel free to disagree with my exact framing but be more careful before accusing someone of intentional fabrication/lying and puncturing the overall credibility of people who are already taking much personal and reputational risk to talk about their truths. Dishonesty implies intention. One day, when it’s your turn to tell your story, others may dismiss you as well based on small disagreements in adjective use.
I’m making a credible accusation of harassment at the cost of my reputation, time and mental energy and you’re strawman attacking me for two words in the whole excerpt based on a subjective definition of “heavily downvoted” to call me overall dishonest? Dude.
Yea so we are talking about those two words and not the rest of what you have to say. I prefaced my whole comment as much. If you want to criticize me for not engaging with your other points my response is mostly “I’m not a woman” and I know Ivy is busy writing up a response anyway better than I could.
In the meantime, I’m allowed to only focus on a single point where I have 2 cents to share.
And those 2 cents remain that I think it is uncontroversial for someone to be accused of being dishonest if they obfuscate the support they have from a community they’ve criticized of being unsupportive.
If you feel that me having this take additionally also invalidates your entire harassment accusation, I can only say it doesn’t, that is not my intent, and I could make additional recommendations that I could DM you that don’t feel appropriate in public.
I make it very clear where I can that the Time article was a good thing for the EA community and happily bonk any would-be downplayers. And in doing so happily defend you speaking out.
Feel free to disagree with my exact framing but be more careful before accusing someone of intentional fabrication/lying and puncturing the overall credibility of people who are already taking much personal and reputational risk to talk about their truths.
I don’t think it is a good norm to tell others they shouldn’t accuse you of something they genuinly think/feel might be going on just because doing so—you feel—will hurt your overall credibility and reputation.
I also seriously doubt your personal and reputational risk is really taking a hit from my one point. I don’t doubt you feel that it is and I’m sorry you have to feel that, but I don’t think that it actually is taking a hit.
Dishonesty implies intention. One day, when it’s your turn to tell your story, others may dismiss you as well based on small disagreements in adjective use
The thing is, I feel like, when that happens, I’ll thank people for pointing out something that seems like a reasonable objection. Maybe I had a blindspot and they were pointing something out, out of concern for that blindspot.
I’ll tell them their feeling that I did something dishonest is valid. That’s their valid experience.
Then I’ll kindly reassure them for reasons x,y,z I am an honest person they can trust. If I made a mistake and missed some detail, I’d add their information to my story.
The intention of my statement was to convey that there was heavy backlash against my post, which I believe is accurate.
I think what a lot of people are trying to say is that your statement would have been much stronger and this intention of yours would actually be met more, if you additionally talked about the support you got from the EA community—and hey maybe this is absolutely nothing—but I don’t recall this being a claim you ever made.
When a scientist runs an experiment and additionally points out all the ways their empirical claims could be wrong or have been misinterpreted, it strengthens their claim since it highlights they have considered other viewpoints before reaching their conclusion.
strawman attacking me
I don’t understand how my conservative politician example is a strawman attack. Happy to have it pointed out and change my mind.
Sorry, I don’t know who DMed you?Is this a misunderstanding? I wrote one paragraph (beginning with “Sheepishly”) where I say that I had wished to DM you, but unfortunately I never did, which I regret.
I’ll respond to your other comment tomorrow and appreciate you writing it
Because they all did in the comments of your orginal post. I remember that being the case because I had specifically checked at the time for community health team’s response (Julia and Catherine), and also I remember being impressed with EA NYC response (and I thought of that as Rocky although they also have another person for community health and diversity).
Before writing my long comment above, I did quickly check the Greater Wrong mirror post for their comments cuz I’d hate to mention ther names and be wrong. But I’m happy to publicly commend people for trying to communicate, as long as it can be gleaned from publicly visible information.
If they also DMed you, I didn’t know that. The offers to speak in comments are all I’m referencing.
I took it down due to the responses from the forum. The original intention of the post was to catalyze action from the within the community, but after it was around for a day or two, I realized this will not happen. The original goal of posting here will not be served.
In addition, the post being live here brought me a lot of headache. I felt like the responses from the forum were mob-like and fell into three categories 1. normalizing ( this is just a statistic, every community has a few) 2. dismissive (not a big deal) 3. attacking. I also have a full time job so didn’t have the time to respond and felt increasingly unsafe given that I wasn’t posting as an anon.
There will be some follow up work on this topic in upcoming days.
I saw all of the comments in the state before commenter removed her post.
There was a lot of women who responded in depth and consideration to the post. Altogether, this produced a pretty convincing response that did not make post look as favorable as I think the commenter wanted it.
I don’t at all like EA rhetoric, which is highly defective, but the women there probably spent 100-woman hours of time writing all of their comments. By removing the post, the commenter silenced their views without answering or developing a response.
I felt it was higher EV to spend my time developing AI than developing responses in comment sections.
If EA didn’t like my post, that’s fine. I said my piece. There are other places on the internet and elsewhere where my discussion was welcome and where I felt heard. :)
It’s faster to be on a boat where you’re rowing in the direction of the current than against it.
Why didn’t you leave the post up and just ignore the responses then?
Because I refuse to be spoken disrespectfully to :)
Why didn’t you just delete the specific comments that you thought were disrespectful? You have the option of enforcing your own norms on your own posts. Or did you not know that was an option? (It certainly took me a while to discover I could do this!).
Though I guess the answer to that would be some variant of: “because it is too cognitively and emotionally time-consuming to decide whether each comment crossed the line or not and I have important AI Alignment work to do.”
To be clear with my view so my questions don’t feel like some sort of interrogation where I’m trying to “gotcha!” or anything like that: it is your post. You have the right to delete it without justifying the decision. In my view you didn’t censor the views of the women in the comments, the EA Forum did. The EA Forum could and should be programmed such that deleted posts don’t remove the comments as well.
Strongly agree that the EA Forum should be programmed such that deleting a post does not remove comments. People put so much time into writing comments on this forum.
Agree with just deleting comments you find unfair rather than hiding the post. At least if one deletes and reposts on their blog the charitable thing would be to link to the wayback machine. If you think the commentors look worse than you, why hide it? Isn’t it important to show if there is toxicity?
It’s possible responding here is a kinda random spot but I’m on mobile so 😅
Let me explain my thought process.
I didn’t know I could delete individual comments but even if I could, I wouldn’t feel good censoring individual comments. Am I mad she called me bigoted? Of course. Should she be allowed to make her speech about me being bigoted? Yes. As someone who is strongly criticizing EA so publicly, I for one want free and unrestricted speech. From a system perspective, multiple players playing most optimally helps us get at the best solutions. Optimality though doesn’t mean playing nasty/below the belt, and I’d definitely opine that calling me bigoted was a nasty move on her part.
About deleting the post: EA is not entitled to my words, my thoughts or my time. I am not getting paid to do this, it is all free and voluntary and comes at the cost of alternative uses of my time. There were multiple people who expressed similar sentiments as Monica though her characterization was the most extremely worded. If EA as a group speak abusively to me, or otherwise indicate my opinions are unvalued, I’m just gonna take my post and exit the door. I think that’s fair to decide to not invest your energy where it is not appreciated.
Thirdly and most importantly, EA is very fond of talking but not fond of acting. The post I made led to no action. Even today, the TIME article despite being a public expose is likely going to lead to no action because everybody makes their little speeches and votes in the comment section, feel they’ve done enough and move on to business as usual. Talk is shit; discourse is not doing. At the time of deleting the post, I knew how EA felt as a group about my concerns, I knew no action will be taken, and I don’t care for more talk.
Nit: I am an AI capabilities researcher.
Thanks for explaining your thought process. I agree with the first half. But I’ll respectfully push back on the rest. Please bear with me as this may be hard to hear. But I also hope it is roundabout nice to hear, and hope it clears the air.
1. Was your energy not appreciated?
Yes it’s fair to leave spaces where you aren’t appreciated. But many people in that thread did take the concerns seriously and give you a warm reception. Catherine and Julia both offered to speak to you. As did Rocky. The comments were also full of people saying things like “I don’t want to negate your experiences” or “I’m glad this post was written”. From what I remember, kind and concerned comments were finding their way to the top, and your post was even netting more upvotes by day too.
Additionally, I say this as someone who was hesitant about your post myself (I asked for further details on the original post), any hesitance about the piece or even down-votes didn’t mean that I or others didn’t want to take your concerns seriously, nor that we didn’t already have our own concerns about women in EA. We just needed a little help to make sense of the whole post, and possibly didn’t agree with the relevance of many of your closing suggestions or the way polyamory was brought into it.
And regarding any brutish comments, I think if you’d allowed time, they would have been heavily down-voted (call me naive but I’ve got faith in the community like that). I’ve gotten hate online when I say something controversial too, some of which still stands out in my mind years later. But it doesn’t negate the good responses I also received, which usually take time and roll in as reactions to the bad ones. Bad comments don’t mean one should pack up, and then tell other people who weren’t there that their “energy was not appreciated” or their post was “heavily down-voted”. I hate to be the one to say it to you, but I think it needs to be said eventually… based on what I saw and know, I don’t think that wording and any similar wording you’ve used elsewhere is honest.
2. Did the post”lead to no action”?
Firstly, you can’t have determined in a few days (by the time you deleted the post) that no one was going to act. Most of us would already have had a lot on our plate so we’d need time to mull it over, and think what we could do.
Personally, I’m now moving forward with a project which I can thank you for inspiring. But more importantly, the Community Health Team told me they’ve been working on a similar project, which I assume your post inspired too, so things were in fact going to be addressed. Also, even if no formal EA-wide action were ever taken, I’d bet you that multiple EA communities and orgs improved or are working on improving their processes after reading your post (and the comments as by EA NYC). Community builders talk (as you know) so if I had to bet, I’d bet changes would have reached the EA Forum (for grassroots implementation) or the CEA Groups Team (for top-down implementation) within a few months of now.
(Sheepishly): Personally, I would have taken action sooner except… I went back to the post soon after to message you something like “Hey, I want to move forward with a project about this, do you want to share more details to help the process?” but on seeing the deleted post, I assumed I had been blocked for requesting more details on the post. Should I have looked harder? YES, OMG YES. However I had remembered it sounding like you were pretty done and wish to be hands-off by the end of that post anyway. I unfortunately then kinda shrugged and did decide to delay taking action because I had another EA project that I knew would end by February.
Why am I telling my own dumb story? Well, I think it’s instructive of something bigger. Although it was surely not your intention, by deleting the post from the forum, you made it that much harder:
for someone to tell you “thanks for your post”
for you to have your mind changed about the community’s reception, if warranted (I think you’d at least have realized it was warranted to have a more nuanced view)
for someone to tell you about actions they’d taken or were planning to take in response to your post.
For someone to believe you’d treat alternative perspectives in good faith—for poly people in particular it started to look likely you might use disagreement as proof of toxicity. If so, this would at best waste time, so people who want to take action try to avoid risky exchanges which might bog them down.
for someone to believe you’d be a reliable collaborator to reach out to, or that you still wanted to be a collaborator at all
So I don’t know that you could have expected to know of action you inspired by the time you deleted the post, or to have heard of actions you did inspire after deleting it.
3. How I think EAs fucked up and made it easy for you and others to conclude inaction:
Okay, it takes time to take action. But as for posting public updates about intentions to take action, yeah I think I and the broader EA community may have dropped the ball there. Obviously in retrospect, to the extent EA org leaders and community builders (I’m the latter) did not prioritize clarifying that we cared and were taking action, these were poor choices. Feelings of resentment, confusion, and concern were validly building for EAs.
I have some compassion for why this ball was probably dropped: (1) that poly people (like me) would find public discussions very aversive. Why open the floor for anti-poly talk, when you can just put your nose to grindstone and do something, off a public forum? (2) Distant community builders and org leaders might not see it as necessary to share plans (maybe in certain Slacks, but not the Forum). Perhaps they would share results some months later (it takes time to test protocols and stuff), but not plans. (3) Even if it might seem right to do, posting plans and then responding to discussion about those plans is really labor intensive with nebulous reward (lame that this plays into it, but I think true)
But regardless, it’s obvious mistakes were made about transparency, and there’s a slice of humble pie with many people’s names on it, definitely mine.
But Hey I think it’s okay:
I hope it is now obvious that the responses you got and some period of relative silence following didn’t mean the community didn’t care or appreciate the post. It didn’t mean you had no effect! We don’t always get to see the exact effect we have, but your post made waves. Sometimes you just gotta trust your ripples are keeping on, you know? I know that’s a cringe metaphor, but I hope it’s easier to trust now.
I only hope that next time you have an important or controversial point, you don’t paint a community with a broad brush or forcibly stop the conversation too early (taking a break makes sense though). I say this regardless of whether you owe EA anything. But EA and, way more importantly, the world still needs new ideas, and I think good ideas have a better chance at being adopted if people are more patient or something.
FWIW I know firsthand how extremely frustrating discussing gender and harrassment in EA and the world can be. Like, honestly crazy-making in my experience, especially when that discussion goes on for days or weeks. Let alone being at the center of it! I hope most others who dropped in and out of the discussions realize how hard it is to relate to your position and that perhaps most of us would be at our last straw.
Therefore, although I’ve gone on about both, I don’t hold anything against you for deleting the post or for misportraying the community response since, and I’d try to sway others from holding either against you as well (if necessary). This is one reason I’m replying publicly. So people know these sentiments have been said and the community can move forward. FWIW I think people who would like to help solve gender issues in EA (including me) would still be happy for your feedback.
Anyway, good luck with the AI capabilities T.T
Predictable Pedantic Note: Please don’t get so single-minded about it that you end up contributing to extinction (including yours) o.o
Hey Ivy,
There are multiple reasons I didn’t take EA’s help.
California law is more liberal than EA community health code. Community health is a euphemistic and blunt term for “sexual harassment”, minimizing its seriousness with a vaguely worded umbrella term. Usually every org has a sexual harassment code, non retaliation policy, etc. Phrases like “second/third chances”, “measuring impact of abuser and abused”, “unfairly harm reputation” etc doesn’t reflect victims will be taken seriously. It is also worded in a way that impact to community as against individual would be prioritized should claims be found true. I was better off going to the cops in CA.
The people I had bad experiences with were deeper/more popular/influential in EA than I was and given how everyone’s friends/lovers and stuff, I didn’t think there would be impartiality. I am easier to be othered than them.
Given the multiplicity of the problem, I didn’t want to go after individuals because they are too small fish to be worth my time frying. It was the culture that was broken that needed fixing because these people believe they are good individuals while doing things everyone else at EA was also doing.
Julia Wise’s office has way too much opacity and no accountability frameworks but courts/cops in CA are held accountable. DA’s lose elections and governments fall for mishandling criminal justice, what happens to Julia Wise for mishandling?
I didn’t know Julia Wise so didn’t have reason to think she was different than the distribution of EA people commenting on my post. It’s a lot to ask that you trust some private individual blindly you haven’t met. Julia also only reached out to me yesterday to clarify about Kathy Forth, but not in Nov/Dec/Jan.
One of the other people who reached out was an ex primary partner of a person who attempted to sleep with me, so I didn’t feel safe talking to her ( see, conflict of interest). I scheduled a meeting with the other and we didn’t end up meeting due to scheduling. The meeting was also a month later because when I posted my original post they were overworked from FTX scandal. A month later I had already checked out of EA.
After EA’s response to my post, really you expect me to trust that EA will help me? I did not.
On deleting post:
It was only removed from EA forum but a google search with my name would’ve taken you to my blog/twitter where it went viral. So I did not subtract information that could be useful for decision making from the collective conscious, I just removed it from the EA forum.
Like I said, I don’t need to offer ANY REASON to delete post because EA is not entitled to it. I was surprised the response was not overwhelmingly compassionate or empathetic but kinda cruel and debating. It was my life, my pain, my personal experiences being analysed, overanalysed, doubted, questioned by RANDOM internet strangers who I had no obligation to. Kindness should be an obligation but there was no kindness to be found. Any amount of attack can be reason enough for me to take it down because I want to tolerate ZERO disrespect.
It was also a Monday when the comments came rolling in, I was in between meetings at work, super annoyed and had no time to respond either(or desire to respond to the nasty ones). There weren’t many people defending me so it was me against like 10 others it was exhausting. I had saved everything though for later use because I wasn’t the type to shut up and disappear when the issue at hand is important: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KgnpB8hOeOYPeMc2Hk48St5w7mPE4kzr/edit
You can check the upvote / downvote count and use that as an indicator of aggregate response of the group. From memory the post got close to 100 downvotes, which was A LOT.
I had also shared it on twitter where the response was widely, widely different and kind, so I knew that the response on EA was atypical and tbh, extremely weird (my first response to a person claiming assault would be empathy, but may be EA selects for low empathy people?) https://twitter.com/keerthanpg/status/1591515890109255680?lang=en
Women who were hurt by EA are not chilling on the forum, they have left already. This space is an echo chamber that self selects for a certain type of person. You can find these women scattered on Twitter and the internet.
Ripples are not enough for me Ivy, I am high agency and impatient. A day or two later my friend Richard Ngo posted a brainstorming post as well, he had more buy-in with the community so I thought they’d act collaboratively if its coming from him. No action was taken as a consequence of that post either. The community had a second opportunity, and this time it was not over indexed on my personal experiences / emotionally worded, but the community did not take that either.
On AI capabilities: EA’s x-risk modeling is dumb and you’ll see it eventually. My views closely resemble that of Sam Altman. All of this crisis just makes me wanna throw my heart into work and build that AI. :)
Edit 1:
I just read your whole comment carefully(sorry it was long). Appreciation is subjective and hard to quantify but votes are, you can look at the drive link I posted to do the math of vote counts ( ~75 downvotes count for me as “heavily downvoted”, my comments were also appropriately downvoted as you can see in the comment graph relative to parent/child nodes in the comment trees, so from my perspective it is a reasonably correct characterization). Given that you’re (delicately but still) accusing me of being deliberately dishonest, do you want to correct that characterization?
Edit 2:
Well, there may be a way to verify the correctness of “energy was not appreciated” as a claim. Compare the distribution of responses on my twitter post and the frozen EA forum post + responses.
My quick 2 cents on this point (rest of the points are probably above my pay-grade): I think if we were to poll say… the entire world’s population the vast majority of people would say they don’t feel a post of theirs was “heavily downvoted” unless it was net negative—and only then if it was strongly net negative.
You are totally free to have your own subjective feeling of what counts as “heavily downvoted” and it is allowed to deviates from the norm, but you deliberately chose not to clarify how your definition is different from the standard definition most anyone would think about. This isn’t exactly dishonesty in my mind, but definitely feels like a tactic a politician who isn’t upfront would use.
It’s a fair accusation to make. Like… uncontroversially so as well. Why wouldn’t it be? Let’s assume we have some government-funded project to combat sexual harassment. Let’s assume a vote was cast on whether the project should remain funded. Let’s say the votes were more positive than negative. If some seedy politician got up and said the project was clearly and obviously “heavily downvoted” and nowhere highlighted that actually most people voted in favour of it, you would be fucking pissed and right to accuse him of being dishonest. He didn’t technically lie and if said politician then responded with:
Would you say he is right and it is complete and utterly unfair to accuse him of being dishonest? We can go into the details of whether he was technically lying or not all we want, but it is still a fair accusation to say they are being dishonest.
Ah, I just found this comment after it was referenced elsewhere. My definition of “heavily downvoted” = “lot of downvotes”. My post had around 75 or so downvotes which may be a third of total votes(speaking from memory).
I’m making a credible accusation of harassment at the cost of my reputation, time and mental energy and you’re strawman attacking me for two words in the whole excerpt based on a subjective definition of “heavily downvoted” to call me overall dishonest? Dude.
My intention was not to point out that most people in EA voted against it which would be a false characterization. The intention of my statement was to convey that there was heavy backlash against my post, which I believe is accurate. The evidence for the claim that there was “heavy backlash” is “lots of downvotes / a large fraction of downvotes”. I wanted to get the information out that I faced a lot of attack for saying what I did( even right now, I am defending my exact choice of words and defending against being characterized as a liar for a small difference in opinion) because that’s useful information to survivors, and because it is an out of domain / unexpected response toward people coming out.
Ultimately my words are my words and not your words. Feel free to disagree with my exact framing but be more careful before accusing someone of intentional fabrication/lying and puncturing the overall credibility of people who are already taking much personal and reputational risk to talk about their truths. Dishonesty implies intention. One day, when it’s your turn to tell your story, others may dismiss you as well based on small disagreements in adjective use.
Yea so we are talking about those two words and not the rest of what you have to say. I prefaced my whole comment as much. If you want to criticize me for not engaging with your other points my response is mostly “I’m not a woman” and I know Ivy is busy writing up a response anyway better than I could.
In the meantime, I’m allowed to only focus on a single point where I have 2 cents to share.
And those 2 cents remain that I think it is uncontroversial for someone to be accused of being dishonest if they obfuscate the support they have from a community they’ve criticized of being unsupportive.
If you feel that me having this take additionally also invalidates your entire harassment accusation, I can only say it doesn’t, that is not my intent, and I could make additional recommendations that I could DM you that don’t feel appropriate in public.
I make it very clear where I can that the Time article was a good thing for the EA community and happily bonk any would-be downplayers. And in doing so happily defend you speaking out.
I don’t think it is a good norm to tell others they shouldn’t accuse you of something they genuinly think/feel might be going on just because doing so—you feel—will hurt your overall credibility and reputation.
I also seriously doubt your personal and reputational risk is really taking a hit from my one point. I don’t doubt you feel that it is and I’m sorry you have to feel that, but I don’t think that it actually is taking a hit.
The thing is, I feel like, when that happens, I’ll thank people for pointing out something that seems like a reasonable objection. Maybe I had a blindspot and they were pointing something out, out of concern for that blindspot.
I’ll tell them their feeling that I did something dishonest is valid. That’s their valid experience.
Then I’ll kindly reassure them for reasons x,y,z I am an honest person they can trust. If I made a mistake and missed some detail, I’d add their information to my story.
I think what a lot of people are trying to say is that your statement would have been much stronger and this intention of yours would actually be met more, if you additionally talked about the support you got from the EA community—and hey maybe this is absolutely nothing—but I don’t recall this being a claim you ever made.
When a scientist runs an experiment and additionally points out all the ways their empirical claims could be wrong or have been misinterpreted, it strengthens their claim since it highlights they have considered other viewpoints before reaching their conclusion.
I don’t understand how my conservative politician example is a strawman attack. Happy to have it pointed out and change my mind.
Also I’m curious how did you know exactly who DM’ed me? Where did you get that information?
Sorry, I don’t know who DMed you?Is this a misunderstanding? I wrote one paragraph (beginning with “Sheepishly”) where I say that I had wished to DM you, but unfortunately I never did, which I regret.
I’ll respond to your other comment tomorrow and appreciate you writing it
How did you know that Catherine Low, Julia Wise and Rocky offered to speak with me?
Because they all did in the comments of your orginal post. I remember that being the case because I had specifically checked at the time for community health team’s response (Julia and Catherine), and also I remember being impressed with EA NYC response (and I thought of that as Rocky although they also have another person for community health and diversity).
Before writing my long comment above, I did quickly check the Greater Wrong mirror post for their comments cuz I’d hate to mention ther names and be wrong. But I’m happy to publicly commend people for trying to communicate, as long as it can be gleaned from publicly visible information.
If they also DMed you, I didn’t know that. The offers to speak in comments are all I’m referencing.
I see, makes sense.
It is eery to me that you aren’t including a category that is:
”Good faith discourse from other women sharing their valid and different experiences in EA”