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.
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.