I read about Kathy Forth, a woman who was heavily involved in the Effective Altruism and Rationalist communities. She committed suicide in 2018, attributing large portions of her suffering to her experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault in these communities. She accuses several people of harassment, at least one of whom is an incredibly prominent figure in the EA community. It is unclear to me what, if any, actions were taken in response to (some) of her claims and her suicide. What is clear is the pages and pages of tumblr posts and Reddit threats, some from prominent members of the EA and Rationalist communities, disparaging Kathy and denying her accusations.
I’m one of the people (maybe the first person?) who made a post saying that (some of) Kathy’s accusations were false. I did this because those accusations were genuinely false, could have seriously damaged the lives of innocent people, and I had strong evidence of this from multiple very credible sources.
I’m extremely prepared to defend my actions here, but prefer not to do it in public in order to not further harm anyone else’s reputation (including Kathy’s). If you want more details, feel free to email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I will figure out how much information I can give you without violating anyone’s trust.
I’m glad you made your post about how Kathy’s accusations were false. I believe that was the right thing to do—certainly given the information you had available.
But I wish you had left this sentence out, or written it more carefully:
But they wouldn’t do that, I’m guessing because they were all terrified of getting called out in posts like this one.
It was obvious to me reading this post that the author made a really serious effort to stay constructive. (Thanks for that, Maya!) It seems to me that we should recognize that, and you’re erasing an important distinction when you categorize the OP with imprudent tumblr call-out posts.
If nothing else, no one is being called out by name here, and the author doesn’t link any of the tumblr posts and Reddit threads she refers to.
I don’t think causing reputational harm to any individual was the author’s intent in writing this. Fear of unfair individual reputational harm from what’s written here seems a bit unjustified.
EDIT: After some time to cool down, I’ve removed that sentence from the comment, and somewhat edited this comment which was originally defending it.
I do think the sentence was true. By that I mean that (this is just a guess, not something I know from specifically asking them) the main reason other people were unwilling to post the information they had, was because they were worried that someone would write a public essay saying “X doesn’t believe sexual assault victims” or “EA has a culture of doubting sexual assault victims”. And they all hoped someone else would go first to mention all the evidence that these particular rumors were untrue, so that that person could be the one to get flak over this for the rest of their life (which I have, so good prediction!), instead of them. I think there’s a culture of fear around these kinds of issues that it’s useful to bring to the foreground if we want to model them correctly.
But I think you’re gesturing at a point where if I appear to be implicitly criticizing Maya for bringing that up, fewer people will bring things like that up in the future, and even if this particular episode was false, many similar ones will be true, so her bringing it up is positive expected value, so I shouldn’t sound critical in any way that discourages future people from doing things like that.
Although it’s possible that the value gained by saying this true thing is higher than the value lost by potential chilling effects, I don’t want to claim to have an opinion on this, because in fact I wrote that comment feeling pretty triggered and upset, without any effective value calculations at all. Given that it did get heavily upvoted, I can see a stronger argument for the chilling effect part and will edit it out.
Thank you for both of your comments. I appreciate you explaining why you wrote a post about Kathy and I think it’s useful context for people to understand as they are thinking about these issues. My intention was not to call anybody out, rather, to point to a pattern of behavior that I observed and describe how it made me (and could make others) feel.
Hi Maya! Thank you for posting about your experience. I think it is a valuable to have this perspective and I’m sure it wasn’t easy to write and post publicly. I’m not sure if you reached out to Scott, but if you did and made any updates regarding your belief of Kathy Forth’s accusations, then I do think it would be very impactful if you could update your post to reflect that. It seems like this one part of your post triggered a lot of old trauma in the community and likely overshadowed the other concerns contained in the post. I believe an update (no matter in which direction) could really improve trust in the capacity for good-faith discussions around this difficult topic.
Thanks for your comment—for all who are interested, I did reach out to Scott and he provided me with an in-depth explanation of some of the context behind Kathy’s accusations and suicide. His explanation provided me with a deeper understanding of the situation and helped me realize that action was taken to check the validity of some of Kathy claims and that there was a more involved and nuanced response to the situation than I realized initially.
Hi Maya, glad to hear that that was the outcome of your deeper dive. If you’re comfortable, I think it might be good if you edited in a comment about this to your top-level post (and maybe that’s what Constance meant?), because a lot of people read posts but then don’t read the comments, and so they might not otherwise know you updated about this (very important-seeming, to me) question (like something like “Edit: after checking out some of the claims raised in the comments, I now think the situation was more like [whatever you think]”)
Yes updating and creating an “Edit:” right after point #4 would be the ideal place to put this update so that it reaches the most readers.
Maya, I’m glad that you talked to Scott and got more information. I hope that the deeper context has provided some reassurance to you that there exist parts of EA as a community that do care about the concerns of women and that there is a path available to change the culture.
I’m sorry you’ve gotten flak. I don’t think you deserve it. I think you did the right thing, and the silence of other people “in the know” doesn’t reflect particularly well on them. (Not in the sense that we should call them out, but in the sense that they should maybe think about whether they knowingly let a likely-innocent person suffer unjust reputation harm.)
I think there’s a culture of fear around these kinds of issues that it’s useful to bring to the foreground if we want to model them correctly.
Agreed. I think the culture of fear goes in both directions. Women often seem to fear making accusations.
But I think you’re gesturing at a point where if I appear to be implicitly criticizing Maya for bringing that up, fewer people will bring things like that up in the future, and even if this particular episode was false, many similar ones will be true, so her bringing it up is positive expected value, so I shouldn’t sound critical in any way that discourages future people from doing things like that.
Not what I was gesturing at, but potentially valid.
My thinking is that attempts to share info “in good faith” should not be punished, regardless of whether that info pushes towards condemnation vs exoneration. (We can debate what exactly counts as “good faith”, but I think it should be defined ~symmetrically for both types of info. I’d like more discussion of what constitutes “good faith”, and fewer implications that [call-outs/denials] are always bad. I’m open to super restrictive definitions of “good faith”, like “only share info with CEA’s community health team and trust them to take appropriate action” or similar.)
In any case, my main goal was to get you to reciprocate what I saw as the OP’s attempt to be less triggered/more constructive, so thanks for that.
I did not know Kathy well, but I did meet and talk with her at length on a number of occasions in EA/aligned spaces. We talked about cultural issues in the movement and for what it is worth, she came across as someone of good character, good judgement and measured takes.
I am not across the particulars of her accusations and I feel matters like this have a place, actual courts and not forums. I don’t think cherry picked criticisms of her claims are appropriate.
I think EA will continue to stumble on this issue, and our downfall as a movement will continue to be handling deontologicaly or virtuously abhorrent behaviour.
I think the author of this forum post has been points of great importance. In particular, their critique of the style of writing required to be taken seriously and understood in the manner intended, is novel.
I want to strong agree with this post, but a forum glitch is preventing me from doing so, so mentally add +x agreement karma to the tally. [Edit: fixed and upvoted now]
I have also heard from at least one very credible source that at least one of Kathy’s accusations had been professionally investigated and found without any merit.
Maybe also worth adding that the way she wrote the post would in a healthy person be intentionally misleading, and was at least incredibly careless for the strength of accusation. Eg there was some line to the effect of ‘CFAR are involved in child abuse’, where the claim was link-highlighted in a way that strongly suggested corroborating evidence but, as in that paraphrase, the link in fact just went directly to whatever the equivalent website was then for CFAR’s summer camp.
It’s uncomfortable berating the dead, but much more important to preserve the living from incredibly irresponsible aspersions like this.
While this is important (clarifying of misinformation), I want to mention that I don’t think this takes away from the main message of the post.
I think it’s important to remember that even with a culture of rationality, there are times when we won’t have enough information to say what happened (unlike in Scotts case), and for that reason Mayas post is very relevant and I am glad it was shared.
It also doesn’t seem appropriate to mention this post as “calling out”. While it’s legitimate to fear reputations being damaged with unsubstantiated claims, this post doesn’t strike me as doing such.
I came to the comments here to also comment quickly on Kathy Forth’s unfortunate death and her allegations. I knew her personally (she subletted in my apartment in Australia for 7 months in 2014, but more meaningfully in terms of knowing her, we also we overlapped at Melbourne meetups many times, and knew many mutual people). Like Scott, I believe she was not making true accusations (though I think she genuinely thought they were true).
I would have said more, but will follow Scott’s lead in not sharing more details. Feel free to DM me.
just to draw some attention to the “(some of)”, Kathy claimed in her suicide note that her actions had led to one person being banned from EA events. My understanding is that she made a mixture of accusations that were corroborated and ones that weren’t, including the ones you refer to. I think this is interesting because it means both:
Kathy was not just a liar who made everything up to cause trouble. I would guess she really was hurt, and directed responsibility for that hurt to a mixture of the right and wrong places. (Maybe no-one thought this, but I just want to make clear that we don’t have to choose between “she was right about everything” and “she was wrong about everything”.)
Kathy was not ignored by the community. Her accusations were taken seriously enough to be investigated, and some of those investigations led to people being banned from events or groups. Reddit may talk shit about her, but the people in a position to do something listened.
(I should say that what I’m saying is mostly based on what Kathy said in her public writings combined with second-or-third hand accounts, and despite talking a little to Kathy at the time I’m missing almost all the details of what actually happened. Feel free to contradict me if something I said seems untrue.)
(edit 2023-10-09: revised “more than one” to “one” because I’m sure that’s true and am not sure the “more than” is true)
For the record, I knew Kathy for several years, initially through a local Less Wrong community, and considered her a friend for some time. I endorse Scott’s assessment, but I’ll emphasise that I think she believed the accusations she made.
Relevant to this post: Many people tried to help Kathy, from 3 groups that I’m aware of. People gave a lot of time and energy. Speaking for myself and what I observed in our local community, I believe we prioritised helping her over protecting our community and over our own wellbeing.
In the end things went poorly on all three, for the community, other individuals and especially for Kathy. But it wasn’t for lack of caring.
If something similar happened today, we would have much more support, through the EA community health team. (I was more involved in LW at the time, and wasn’t aware of support available through EA. The team might not have existed yet in a formal capacity.)
I don’t take Kathy’s letter at face value. However I’m glad to see Julia’s comment confirming that Kathy’s accusations were investigated (I would expect no less) and in one case acted upon.
As for the analytical vs emotional – it’s hard to express my emotions around this in written words. And especially hard to do so without saying more than I think is appropriate.
(This is the first public comment I’ve made on this subject. I only make it because it’s understandably still an issue of concern, and few people have much context for it.)
Regardless of the accuracy of this comment, it makes me sad that the top comment on this post is adversarial/argumentative and showing little emotional understanding/empathy (particularly the line “getting called out in posts like this one”). I think it unfortunately demonstrates well the point the author made about EA having an emotions problem:
On the forum in particular and in EA discourse in general, there is a tendency to give less weight/be more critical of posts that are more emotion-heavy and less rational. This tendency makes sense based on EA principles… to a certain extent. To stay true to the aforementioned values of scientific mindset and openness, it makes sense that we challenge people’s ideas and are truth-seeking in our comments. However, there is an important distinction between interrogating someone’s research and interrogating someone’s lived experience. I fear that the attitude of truth-seeking and challenging one another to be better has led to an inclination to suspend compassion in the absence of substantial evidence of wrongdoing. You’re allowed to be sorry that someone experienced something without fully understanding it.
To be honest I’m relieved this is one of the top comments. I’ve seen Kathy mentioned a few times recently in a way I didn’t think was accurate and I didn’t feel able to respond. I think anyone who comes across her story will have questions and I’m glad someone’s addressed the questions even if it’s just in a limited way.
I very rarely engage in karma voting, and didn’t do so for this comment either. That said, one relevant point is that the comment with the most karma gets to sit at the top of the comments section. That means that many people probably vote with an intention to functionally “pin” a comment, and it may not be so much that they think the comment should represent the most important reaction to a post, as that they think it provides crucial context for readers. I think this comment does provide context on the part of this otherwise very good and important post that made me most uncomfortable as stated. I also agree that Alexander’s tone isn’t great, though I read it in almost the opposite way from you (as an emotional reaction in defense of his friends who came forward about Forth).
Scott Alexander’s response is the first time I see that there is someone I can contact who has substantial claims of evidence that Kathy Forth’s accusations were false. I’ve heard of Kathy twice in the last month (don’t remember hearing about her at all before then), as have others in my local community. Many find Scott Alexander’s response valuable, which is why it is the top comment. A large part of the EA community appears to only recently be learning about Kathy Forth.
it makes me sad that the top comment on this post is adversarial/argumentative and showing little emotional understanding/empathy (particularly the line “getting called out in posts like this one”). I think it unfortunately demonstrates well the point the author made about EA having an emotions problem
I personally think Scott shows immense emotional maturity responding to this in a context where he is opening himself up to huge scrutiny, including the criticism of being told he is being too adversarial and lacking empathy. He removed the sentence in question after some reflection, updating immediately and explaining his thought process, empathising with another’s perspective and recognizing his own emotional state that led to him to include that sentence. To me these seem the hallmarks of being a well emotionally regulated individual. If it isn’t, what does a person with emotional understanding/empathy do differently in this situation?
Before you answer that question, let’s take a moment to actually highlight what the situation even is:
Kathy Forth was a human, a member of our community, that committed suicide. Given the serious implications of Kathy Forth’s accusations if they were to be true, it seems that we should place a lot of value on anything that can confirm or deny the veracity of Kathy Forth’s story. Do you disagree?
This is the sentence you don’t like that Scott brought up. He removed it.
But they wouldn’t do that, I’m guessing because they were all terrified of getting called out in posts like this one.
OP wrote the following words that, for lack of a better word, triggered Scott. She also has the opportunity to amend or qualify these words:
I read about Kathy Forth, a woman who was heavily involved in the Effective Altruism and Rationalist communities. She committed suicide in 2018, attributing large portions of her suffering to her experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault in these communities. She accuses several people of harassment, at least one of whom is an incredibly prominent figure in the EA community. It is unclear to me what, if any, actions were taken in response to (some) of her claims and her suicide. What is clear is the pages and pages of tumblr posts and Reddit threats, some from prominent members of the EA and Rationalist communities, disparaging Kathy and denying her accusations.
Nowhere in what OP writes above does she even seem to entertain the possibility that at least some of Kathy’s major accusations could be false (she says “It is unclear to me what, if any, actions were taken in response to (some) of her claims and her suicide” but nothing akin to “It is unclear to me whether Kathy Forth’s accusations were true”).
Kathy Forth’s story is a really really serious accusation. One in which whether we believe it is true or false would and should significantly update our priors around how the EA community treats the concerns of women. If viewed to be true, it would frame the experiences of women and the EA community’s prior response to them in a very sinister light. If viewed to be false, then concerns 1+2 don’t have a broader sinister context and could be more optimistically corrected with improved managment and a culture shift in EA. For example...
I agree that Swapcard at EAGs should, in the vast majority of cases, not be used for dating (my dudes in EA… this past weekend at EAGx Berkeley I met a woman that was flat out frustrated that she was hit on through Swapcard one-on-ones twice within 24 hours… facepalm)
I agree profusely that ranking women by how much you want to have sex with them and publicly sharing that casually is creepy as all hell (my dudes in EA… how it is possible that so many of you can be so into “intrumental rationality” and yet act so obviously against your own self-interests when it comes to your behaviour around women is beyond me… facepalm)
These issues seem like something we can come together and fix. But if Kathy Forth’s accusations are true, then it is implied that EA as a community is much more sinister and not interested in addressing the concerns of women. If Kathy Forth’s accusations are true, then there is a deep rot within the EA community. There is no “facepalm” joke I’d be able to light-heartedly say about it, as if it were a thing we can reasonably fix. If Kathy Forth’s accusations are true, OP is right to be scared.
OP’s framing of Kathy Forth’s experience strongly implies they view Kathy Forth’s accusations as more true than false. I don’t know if she believes this because either:
a) She had bad experiences in EA and that made her update more towards “Kathy Forth’s story is probably true” b) She thought Kathy Forth’s story is probably more true than false, and that made her update her experiences in EA as more bad (in a broader sinister context) than they otherwise would be
But the epistemic particulars are beside the point, because either way, if Scott is able to provide compelling evidence that parts of Kathy Forth’s story is false, this could help OP (and everyone else) feel less sad, disappointed and scared and that can only be a good thing.
OP, if you are reading this, I realize the EA community can seem intimidating. I empathize strongly with you when you expressed concern about how others will judge your writing style and take you less seriously if it did not conform to forum standards (why hello there… my still haven’t-made-one-post self… something I am still embarrassed about given how long I’ve been a part of EA). That said, I am confident if you made a very short post just like “Please, what happened to Kathy Forth and why? I need to know, I cant sleep. I feel sad, disappointed, and scared.” the EA community would have responded with compassion—not caring that the post didn’t abide by some set of forum norms. But, regardless, you did put effort into a longer post here so I just want to say I’m glad you posted this.
Responding to the attention on Kathy’s specific case (I’m aware I’m adding more to it) - I think we’re detracting from the key argument that the EA community as a whole is neglecting to validate and support community members who experience bad things in the community
In this post, it’s women and sexual assault primarily. But there are other posts (1,2) exempifying ways the EA community itself can and should prioritise internal community health. To argue the truth of one specific example might be detracting from recognising that this might be a systematic problem.
edit: after discussion below & other comments on this post, I feel less strongly about the claim “EA community is bad at addressing harm”, but stand by / am clarifying my general point, which is that the veracity of Kathy’s claims doesn’t detract from any of the other valid points that Maya makes and I don’t think people should discount the rest of these points.
A suggestion to people who are approaching this from a “was Kathy lying?” lens: I think it’s also important to understand this post in the context of the broader movement around sexual assault and violence. The reason this kind of thing stings to a woman in the community is because it says “this is how this community will react if you speak up about harm; this is not a welcoming place for you if you are a survivor.” It’s not about whether Kathy, in particular, was falsely accusing others.
The way I read Maya’s critique here is “there were major accusations of major harm done, and we collectively brushed it off instead of engaging with how this person felt harmed;” which is distinct from “she was right and the perpetrator should be punished”. This is a call for the EA community to be more transparent and fair in how it deals with accusations of wrongdoing, not a callout post of anybody.
Perhaps I would feel differently if I knew of examples of the EA community publicly holding men accountable for harm to women, but as it stands AFAIK we have a lot of examples like those Maya pointed out and not much transparent accountability for them. :/ Would be very happy to be corrected about that.
(Maya, I know it’s probably really hard to see that the first reply on your post is an example of exactly the problem you’re describing, so I just want to add in case you see this that I relate to a lot of what you’ve shared and you have an open offer to DM me if you need someone to hold space for your anger!)
Predictably, I disagree with this in the strongest possible terms.
If someone says false and horrible things to destroy other people’s reputation, the story is “someone said false and horrible things to destroy other people’s reputation”. Not “in some other situation this could have been true”. It might be true! But discussion around the false rumors isn’t the time to talk about that.
Suppose the shoe was on the other foot, and some man (Bob), made some kind of false and horrible rumor about a woman (Alice). Maybe he says that she only got a good position in her organization by sleeping her way to the top. If this was false, the story isn’t “we need to engage with the ways Bob felt harmed and make him feel valid.” It’s not “the Bob lied lens is harsh and unproductive”. It’s “we condemn these false and damaging rumors”. If the headline story is anything else, I don’t trust the community involved one bit, and I would be terrified to be associated with it.
I understand that sexual assault is especially scary, and that it may seem jarring to compare it to less serious accusations like Bob’s. But the original post says we need to express emotions more, and I wanted to try to convey an emotional sense of how scary this position feels to me. Sexual assault is really bad and we need strong norms about it. But we’ve been talking a lot about consequentialism vs. deontology lately, and where each of these is vs. isn’t appropriate. And I think saying “sexual assault is so bad, that for the greater good we need to focus on supporting accusations around it, even when they’re false and will destroy people’s lives” is exactly the bad kind of consequentialism that never works in real life. The specific reason it never works in real life is that once you’re known for throwing the occasional victim under the bus for the greater good, everyone is terrified of associating with you.
Perhaps I would feel differently if I knew of examples of the EA community publicly holding men accountable for harm to women.
This is surprising to me; I know of several cases of people being banned from EA events for harm to women. When I’ve tried to give grants to people, I have gotten unexpected emails from EA higher-ups involved in a monitoring system, who told me that one of those people secretly had a history of harming women and that I should reconsider the grant on that basis. I have personally, at some physical risk to myself, forced a somewhat-resistant person to leave one of my events because they had a history of harm to women (this was Giego C; I think it was clear-cut enough to be okay to name a name here; I know most orgs have already banned him, and if your org hasn’t then I recommend they do too—email me and I can explain why). I know of some other cases where men caused less severe cases of harm or discomfort to women, there were very long discussions by (mostly female members of) EA leadership about whether they should be allowed to continue in their roles, and after some kind of semi-formal proceeding, with the agreement of the victim, after an apology, it was decided that they should be allowed to continue in their roles, sometimes with extra supervision. There’s an entire EA Community Health Team with several employees and a mid-six-figure budget, and a substantial fraction of their job is holding men accountable for harm to women. If none of this existed, maybe I’d feel differently. But right now my experience of EA is that they try really hard to prevent harm to women, so hard that the current disagreement isn’t whether to ban some man accused of harming women, but whether it was okay for me to mention that a false accusation was false.
Again in honor of the original post saying we should be more open about our emotions: I’m sorry for bringing this up. I know everyone hates having to argue about these topics. Realistically I’m writing this because I’m triggered and doing it as a compulsion, and maybe you also wrote your post because you’re triggered and doing it as a compulsion, and maybe Maya wrote her post because she’s triggered and doing it as a compuIsion. This is a terrible topic where a lot of people have been hurt and have strong feelings, and I don’t know how to avoid this kind of cycle where we all argue about horrible things in circles. But I am geninely scared of living in a community where nobody can save good people from false accusations because some kind of mis-aimed concern about the greater good has created a culture of fear around ever speaking out. I have seen something like this happen to other communities I once loved and really don’t want it to happen here. I’m open to talking further by email if you want to continue this conversation in a way that would be awkward on a public forum.
Thank you, this is clarifying for me and I hope for others.
Responses to me, including yours, have helped me update my thinking on how the EA community handles gendered violence. I wasn’t aware of these cases and am glad, and hope that other women seeing this might also feel more supported within EA knowing this. I realize there are obvious reasons why these things aren’t very public, but I hope that somehow we can make it clearer to women that Kathy’s case, and the community’s response, was an outlier.
I would still push back against the gender-reversal false equivalency that you and others have mentioned. EA doesn’t exist in a bubble. We live in a world where survivors, and in particular women, are not supported, not believed, and victim-blamed. Therefore I think it is pretty reasonable to have a prior that we should take accusations seriously and respond to them delicately. The Forum, if anywhere on earth, should be a place where we can have the nuanced understanding that (1) the accusations were false AND (2) because we live in a world where true accusations against powerful men are often disbelieved, causing avoidable harm to victims, we need to keep that context in mind while condemning said false accusations.
So to clarify my stance: I don’t think it was wrong to mention that the false accusation is false. I think it seems dismissive and insensitive to do so without any acknowledgement of the rest of the post. I don’t think it would have hurt your point to say “yes, EA is a male-dominated culture and we need to take seriously the harms done to women in our community. In this specific instance, the accusations were false, and I don’t believe the community’s response to these accusations is representative of how we handle harm.”
I think the disconnect here is that you are responding / care about this specific claim, which you have close knowledge of. I know nothing about it, and am responding to / care about the larger claim about EA’s culture. I believe that Maya’s post is not trying to to make truth claims about Kathy’s case and is more meant to point out a broad trend in EA culture, and I’m trying to encourage people to read it as such, and not let the wrongness of Kathy’s claims undermine Maya’s overall point.
(edit: basically I agree with your comment above:
if I appear to be implicitly criticizing Maya for bringing that up, fewer people will bring things like that up in the future, and even if this particular episode was false, many similar ones will be true, so her bringing it up is positive expected value, so I shouldn’t sound critical in any way that discourages future people from doing things like that.)
I’m trying to figure out how much of a response to give, and how to balance saying what I believe vs. avoiding any chance to make people feel unwelcome, or inflicting an unpleasant politicized debate on people who don’t want to read it. This comment is a bad compromise between all these things and I apologize for it, but:
I think the Kathy situation is typical of how effective altruists respond to these issues and what their failure modes are. I think “everyone knows” (in Zvi’s sense of the term, where it’s such strong conventional wisdom that nobody ever checks if it’s true ) that the typical response to rape accusations is to challenge and victim-blame survivors. And that although this may be true in some times and places, the typical response in this community is the one which, in fact, actually happened—immediate belief by anyone who didn’t know the situation, and a culture of fear preventing those who did know the situation from speaking out. I think it’s useful to acknowledge and push back against that culture of fear.
(this is also why I stressed the existence of the amazing Community Safety team—I think “everyone knows” that EA doesn’t do anything to hold men accountable for harm, whereas in fact it tries incredibly hard to do this and I’m super impressed by everyone involved)
I acknowledge that makes it sound like we have opposing cultural goals—you want to increase the degree to which people feel comfortable expressing out that EA’s culture might be harmful to women, I want to increase the degree to which people feel comfortable pushing back against claims to that effect which aren’t true. I think there is some subtle complicated sense in which we might not actually have opposing cultural goals, but I agree to a first-order approximation they sure do seem different. And I realize this is an annoyingly stereotypical situation - I, as a cis man, coming into a thread like this and saying I’m worried about a false accusations and chilling effects. My only two defenses are, first, that I only got this way because of specific real and harmful false accusations, that I tried to do an extreme amount of homework on them before calling false, and that I only ever bring up in the context of defending my decision there. And second, that I hope I’m possible to work with and feel safe around, despite my cultural goals, because I want to have a firm deontological commitment to promoting true things and opposing false things, in a way that doesn’t refer to my broader cultural goals at any point.
Thanks, I realize this is a tricky thing to talk about publicly (certainly trickier for you, as someone whose name people actually know, than for me, who can say whatever I want!). I’m coming in with a stronger prior from “the outside world”, where I’ve seen multiple friends ignored/disbelieved/attacked for telling their stories of sexual violence, so maybe I need to better calibrate for intra-EA-community response. I agree/hope that our goals shouldn’t be at odds, and that’s what I was trying to say that maybe did not come across: I didn’t want people to come away from your comment thinking “ah, Maya’s wrong and people shouldn’t criticize EA culture.” I wanted them to come away both knowing the truth about this specific situation AND thinking more broadly about EA culture, because I think this post makes a lot of other very good points that don’t rely on the Kathy claims. (And thinking more broadly could include updating positively like I did, although I didn’t expect that would be the case when I made that comment!)
You’re probably right that it’s not worth giving much more of a response, but I appreciate you engaging with this!
As another data point: I’m a woman, I think I’m the main reason a particular man has been banned from a lot of EA events under certain conditions and I think CEA’s Community Health team have handled this situation extremely well.
But on balance, I’ve found that men in EA treat me with a lot more respect than men do outside of EA. And if anything, I think any complaints I do make are taken too seriously.
This doesn’t excuse bad behaviour of course, even if my experience were typical. But I have always wondered why so much of our energy goes into how women feel in this community vs people with other marginalised characteristics, some of whom no doubt also feel “sad, disappointed, and scared” in EA (e.g. discussions nominally of “diversity and inclusion” often end up just being discussions of how to treat women better).
For what it’s worth, I think “discussions of DEI end up becoming discussions about women” is pretty common—not to say it’s excusable, but I don’t think that’s unique to EA.
In the cases like this I’ve been most closely involved in, the women who have reported have not wanted to publicise the event, so sometimes action has been taken but you wouldn’t have heard about it. (I also don’t think it’s a good habit to try to maximise transparency about interpersonal relationships tbh.)
Yeah, this is very fair and I agree that transparency is not always the right call. To clarify, I’ll say that my stance here, medium confidence, is: (1) in instances which the victim/survivor has already made their accusations public, or in instances where it’s already necessarily something that isn’t interpersonal [e.g. hotness ranking], the process of accountability or repair, or at least the fact that one exists, should be public; (2) it should be transparent what kind of process a victim can expect when harm happens.
There’s some literature around procedural justice and trust that indicates that people feel better and trust the outcomes of a process more when it is transparent and invites engagement, regardless of whether the actual outcome favors them or not.
I am glad to hear that there have been cases where women have felt safe reporting and action has been taken!
(edited to delete a para about CEA community health team’s work that I realized was wrong, after seeing this page linked below)
I’d agree I’d favour systems that help people feel confident in the outcome even when it doesn’t favour them, and would like to see EA do better in these areas!
I’m not too confident about this, but one reason you may not have heard about men being held accountable in EA is that it’s not the sort of thing you necessarily publicize. For example, I helped a friend who was raped by a member of the AI safety research community. He blocked her on LessWrong, then posted a deceptive self-vindicating article mischaracterizing her and patting himself on the back.
I told her what was going on and helped her post her response once she’d crafted it via my account. Downvotes ensued for the guy. Eventually he deleted the post.
That’s one example of what (very partial) accountability looks like, but the end result in this case was a decrease in visibility for an anti-accountability post. And except for this thread, I’m not going around talking about my involvement in the situation.
I don’t know how much of the imbalance this accounts for, nor am I claiming that everything is fine. It’s just something to keep in mind as one aspect of parsing the situation.
Thank you, yeah I think I may be overindexing on a few public examples (not being privy to the private examples that you and others in thread have brought up). Glad to hear that there are plenty of examples of the community responding well to protect victims/survivors.
I still also don’t think everything’s fine, but unsure to what extent EA is worse than the rest of the world, where things are also not fine on this front.
I wonder if it would be helpful to have some kind of (heavily anonymized, e.g. summarizing across years) summary statistics about the number of such incidents brought up to CEA community health (since they are the main group collecting such info) and how they were dealt with / what victims choose to do to balance out the public accounts.
Yeah I think it does! It might be good to highlight that in a way more people would read it (e.g. I read that post + the appendix but forgot it was there!)
I’m strongly in favour of this—it often feels like the need is to make this public so it becomes something the entire community is responsible for—as opposed to how it currently is (private and something CEA’s comm health mainly is responsible for).
I still also don’t think everything’s fine, but unsure to what extent EA is worse than the rest of the world, where things are also not fine on this front.
FWIW this is exactly how I feel about gender-based issues in EA!
Can you link to your post? I’m asking in order to avoid the (probably already existing) situation where people see that “some of Forth’s accusations” are allegedly not true, but they don’t know which, so they just doubt all of them.
If someone has a record of repeatedly making accusations that have been proven false, I think it is reasonable and prudent to “just doubt all” their accusations. This person was clearly terribly ill and did not get the help she needed and deserved. It’s painfully clear from reading her heartbreaking note that she was wildly out of touch with reality.
I wouldn’t want anyone to have the impression that Kathy wasn’t given extensive support, or that she wasn’t offered appropriate help. She definitely was, repeatedly and over a long period of time.
Could more effective help have been given? I honestly don’t know, but it was well beyond my ability and capacity at the time.
It was a painful and heartbreaking situation. I think that’s as much as I can say publicly.
Thank you for clarifying. To be clear, I am basing everything I said on the contents of her note and the publicly available things written since (including Scott Alexander’s and Julia Wise’s commens on this post). I don’t know anything about her situation beyond that. It sounds like an impossible situation—I’m sorry for your loss.
I’m one of the people (maybe the first person?) who made a post saying that (some of) Kathy’s accusations were false. I did this because those accusations were genuinely false, could have seriously damaged the lives of innocent people, and I had strong evidence of this from multiple very credible sources.
I’m extremely prepared to defend my actions here, but prefer not to do it in public in order to not further harm anyone else’s reputation (including Kathy’s). If you want more details, feel free to email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I will figure out how much information I can give you without violating anyone’s trust.
I’m glad you made your post about how Kathy’s accusations were false. I believe that was the right thing to do—certainly given the information you had available.
But I wish you had left this sentence out, or written it more carefully:
It was obvious to me reading this post that the author made a really serious effort to stay constructive. (Thanks for that, Maya!) It seems to me that we should recognize that, and you’re erasing an important distinction when you categorize the OP with imprudent tumblr call-out posts.
If nothing else, no one is being called out by name here, and the author doesn’t link any of the tumblr posts and Reddit threads she refers to.
I don’t think causing reputational harm to any individual was the author’s intent in writing this. Fear of unfair individual reputational harm from what’s written here seems a bit unjustified.
EDIT: After some time to cool down, I’ve removed that sentence from the comment, and somewhat edited this comment which was originally defending it.
I do think the sentence was true. By that I mean that (this is just a guess, not something I know from specifically asking them) the main reason other people were unwilling to post the information they had, was because they were worried that someone would write a public essay saying “X doesn’t believe sexual assault victims” or “EA has a culture of doubting sexual assault victims”. And they all hoped someone else would go first to mention all the evidence that these particular rumors were untrue, so that that person could be the one to get flak over this for the rest of their life (which I have, so good prediction!), instead of them. I think there’s a culture of fear around these kinds of issues that it’s useful to bring to the foreground if we want to model them correctly.
But I think you’re gesturing at a point where if I appear to be implicitly criticizing Maya for bringing that up, fewer people will bring things like that up in the future, and even if this particular episode was false, many similar ones will be true, so her bringing it up is positive expected value, so I shouldn’t sound critical in any way that discourages future people from doing things like that.
Although it’s possible that the value gained by saying this true thing is higher than the value lost by potential chilling effects, I don’t want to claim to have an opinion on this, because in fact I wrote that comment feeling pretty triggered and upset, without any effective value calculations at all. Given that it did get heavily upvoted, I can see a stronger argument for the chilling effect part and will edit it out.
Hi Scott,
Thank you for both of your comments. I appreciate you explaining why you wrote a post about Kathy and I think it’s useful context for people to understand as they are thinking about these issues. My intention was not to call anybody out, rather, to point to a pattern of behavior that I observed and describe how it made me (and could make others) feel.
Hi Maya! Thank you for posting about your experience. I think it is a valuable to have this perspective and I’m sure it wasn’t easy to write and post publicly. I’m not sure if you reached out to Scott, but if you did and made any updates regarding your belief of Kathy Forth’s accusations, then I do think it would be very impactful if you could update your post to reflect that. It seems like this one part of your post triggered a lot of old trauma in the community and likely overshadowed the other concerns contained in the post. I believe an update (no matter in which direction) could really improve trust in the capacity for good-faith discussions around this difficult topic.
Hi Constance!
Thanks for your comment—for all who are interested, I did reach out to Scott and he provided me with an in-depth explanation of some of the context behind Kathy’s accusations and suicide. His explanation provided me with a deeper understanding of the situation and helped me realize that action was taken to check the validity of some of Kathy claims and that there was a more involved and nuanced response to the situation than I realized initially.
Hi Maya, glad to hear that that was the outcome of your deeper dive. If you’re comfortable, I think it might be good if you edited in a comment about this to your top-level post (and maybe that’s what Constance meant?), because a lot of people read posts but then don’t read the comments, and so they might not otherwise know you updated about this (very important-seeming, to me) question (like something like “Edit: after checking out some of the claims raised in the comments, I now think the situation was more like [whatever you think]”)
Yes updating and creating an “Edit:” right after point #4 would be the ideal place to put this update so that it reaches the most readers.
Maya, I’m glad that you talked to Scott and got more information. I hope that the deeper context has provided some reassurance to you that there exist parts of EA as a community that do care about the concerns of women and that there is a path available to change the culture.
Thanks for removing the sentence.
I’m sorry you’ve gotten flak. I don’t think you deserve it. I think you did the right thing, and the silence of other people “in the know” doesn’t reflect particularly well on them. (Not in the sense that we should call them out, but in the sense that they should maybe think about whether they knowingly let a likely-innocent person suffer unjust reputation harm.)
Agreed. I think the culture of fear goes in both directions. Women often seem to fear making accusations.
Not what I was gesturing at, but potentially valid.
My thinking is that attempts to share info “in good faith” should not be punished, regardless of whether that info pushes towards condemnation vs exoneration. (We can debate what exactly counts as “good faith”, but I think it should be defined ~symmetrically for both types of info. I’d like more discussion of what constitutes “good faith”, and fewer implications that [call-outs/denials] are always bad. I’m open to super restrictive definitions of “good faith”, like “only share info with CEA’s community health team and trust them to take appropriate action” or similar.)
In any case, my main goal was to get you to reciprocate what I saw as the OP’s attempt to be less triggered/more constructive, so thanks for that.
I did not know Kathy well, but I did meet and talk with her at length on a number of occasions in EA/aligned spaces. We talked about cultural issues in the movement and for what it is worth, she came across as someone of good character, good judgement and measured takes.
I am not across the particulars of her accusations and I feel matters like this have a place, actual courts and not forums. I don’t think cherry picked criticisms of her claims are appropriate.
I think EA will continue to stumble on this issue, and our downfall as a movement will continue to be handling deontologicaly or virtuously abhorrent behaviour.
I think the author of this forum post has been points of great importance. In particular, their critique of the style of writing required to be taken seriously and understood in the manner intended, is novel.
I want to strong agree with this post, but a forum glitch is preventing me from doing so, so mentally add +x agreement karma to the tally. [Edit: fixed and upvoted now]
I have also heard from at least one very credible source that at least one of Kathy’s accusations had been professionally investigated and found without any merit.
Maybe also worth adding that the way she wrote the post would in a healthy person be intentionally misleading, and was at least incredibly careless for the strength of accusation. Eg there was some line to the effect of ‘CFAR are involved in child abuse’, where the claim was link-highlighted in a way that strongly suggested corroborating evidence but, as in that paraphrase, the link in fact just went directly to whatever the equivalent website was then for CFAR’s summer camp.
It’s uncomfortable berating the dead, but much more important to preserve the living from incredibly irresponsible aspersions like this.
Thanks for flagging that we had a bug affecting voting! It should be fixed now, please let me know if you see any more related issues.
While this is important (clarifying of misinformation), I want to mention that I don’t think this takes away from the main message of the post. I think it’s important to remember that even with a culture of rationality, there are times when we won’t have enough information to say what happened (unlike in Scotts case), and for that reason Mayas post is very relevant and I am glad it was shared.
It also doesn’t seem appropriate to mention this post as “calling out”. While it’s legitimate to fear reputations being damaged with unsubstantiated claims, this post doesn’t strike me as doing such.
I came to the comments here to also comment quickly on Kathy Forth’s unfortunate death and her allegations. I knew her personally (she subletted in my apartment in Australia for 7 months in 2014, but more meaningfully in terms of knowing her, we also we overlapped at Melbourne meetups many times, and knew many mutual people). Like Scott, I believe she was not making true accusations (though I think she genuinely thought they were true).
I would have said more, but will follow Scott’s lead in not sharing more details. Feel free to DM me.
just to draw some attention to the “(some of)”, Kathy claimed in her suicide note that her actions had led to one person being banned from EA events. My understanding is that she made a mixture of accusations that were corroborated and ones that weren’t, including the ones you refer to. I think this is interesting because it means both:
Kathy was not just a liar who made everything up to cause trouble. I would guess she really was hurt, and directed responsibility for that hurt to a mixture of the right and wrong places. (Maybe no-one thought this, but I just want to make clear that we don’t have to choose between “she was right about everything” and “she was wrong about everything”.)
Kathy was not ignored by the community. Her accusations were taken seriously enough to be investigated, and some of those investigations led to people being banned from events or groups. Reddit may talk shit about her, but the people in a position to do something listened.
(I should say that what I’m saying is mostly based on what Kathy said in her public writings combined with second-or-third hand accounts, and despite talking a little to Kathy at the time I’m missing almost all the details of what actually happened. Feel free to contradict me if something I said seems untrue.)
(edit 2023-10-09: revised “more than one” to “one” because I’m sure that’s true and am not sure the “more than” is true)
For the record, I knew Kathy for several years, initially through a local Less Wrong community, and considered her a friend for some time. I endorse Scott’s assessment, but I’ll emphasise that I think she believed the accusations she made.
Relevant to this post: Many people tried to help Kathy, from 3 groups that I’m aware of. People gave a lot of time and energy. Speaking for myself and what I observed in our local community, I believe we prioritised helping her over protecting our community and over our own wellbeing.
In the end things went poorly on all three, for the community, other individuals and especially for Kathy. But it wasn’t for lack of caring.
If something similar happened today, we would have much more support, through the EA community health team. (I was more involved in LW at the time, and wasn’t aware of support available through EA. The team might not have existed yet in a formal capacity.)
I don’t take Kathy’s letter at face value. However I’m glad to see Julia’s comment confirming that Kathy’s accusations were investigated (I would expect no less) and in one case acted upon.
As for the analytical vs emotional – it’s hard to express my emotions around this in written words. And especially hard to do so without saying more than I think is appropriate.
(This is the first public comment I’ve made on this subject. I only make it because it’s understandably still an issue of concern, and few people have much context for it.)
Regardless of the accuracy of this comment, it makes me sad that the top comment on this post is adversarial/argumentative and showing little emotional understanding/empathy (particularly the line “getting called out in posts like this one”). I think it unfortunately demonstrates well the point the author made about EA having an emotions problem:
To be honest I’m relieved this is one of the top comments. I’ve seen Kathy mentioned a few times recently in a way I didn’t think was accurate and I didn’t feel able to respond. I think anyone who comes across her story will have questions and I’m glad someone’s addressed the questions even if it’s just in a limited way.
My point isn’t about the information contained in the comment, it’s about the tone.
I very rarely engage in karma voting, and didn’t do so for this comment either. That said, one relevant point is that the comment with the most karma gets to sit at the top of the comments section. That means that many people probably vote with an intention to functionally “pin” a comment, and it may not be so much that they think the comment should represent the most important reaction to a post, as that they think it provides crucial context for readers. I think this comment does provide context on the part of this otherwise very good and important post that made me most uncomfortable as stated. I also agree that Alexander’s tone isn’t great, though I read it in almost the opposite way from you (as an emotional reaction in defense of his friends who came forward about Forth).
Scott Alexander’s response is the first time I see that there is someone I can contact who has substantial claims of evidence that Kathy Forth’s accusations were false. I’ve heard of Kathy twice in the last month (don’t remember hearing about her at all before then), as have others in my local community. Many find Scott Alexander’s response valuable, which is why it is the top comment. A large part of the EA community appears to only recently be learning about Kathy Forth.
I personally think Scott shows immense emotional maturity responding to this in a context where he is opening himself up to huge scrutiny, including the criticism of being told he is being too adversarial and lacking empathy. He removed the sentence in question after some reflection, updating immediately and explaining his thought process, empathising with another’s perspective and recognizing his own emotional state that led to him to include that sentence. To me these seem the hallmarks of being a well emotionally regulated individual. If it isn’t, what does a person with emotional understanding/empathy do differently in this situation?
Before you answer that question, let’s take a moment to actually highlight what the situation even is:
Kathy Forth was a human, a member of our community, that committed suicide. Given the serious implications of Kathy Forth’s accusations if they were to be true, it seems that we should place a lot of value on anything that can confirm or deny the veracity of Kathy Forth’s story. Do you disagree?
This is the sentence you don’t like that Scott brought up. He removed it.
OP wrote the following words that, for lack of a better word, triggered Scott. She also has the opportunity to amend or qualify these words:
Nowhere in what OP writes above does she even seem to entertain the possibility that at least some of Kathy’s major accusations could be false (she says “It is unclear to me what, if any, actions were taken in response to (some) of her claims and her suicide” but nothing akin to “It is unclear to me whether Kathy Forth’s accusations were true”).
Kathy Forth’s story is a really really serious accusation. One in which whether we believe it is true or false would and should significantly update our priors around how the EA community treats the concerns of women. If viewed to be true, it would frame the experiences of women and the EA community’s prior response to them in a very sinister light. If viewed to be false, then concerns 1+2 don’t have a broader sinister context and could be more optimistically corrected with improved managment and a culture shift in EA. For example...
I agree that Swapcard at EAGs should, in the vast majority of cases, not be used for dating (my dudes in EA… this past weekend at EAGx Berkeley I met a woman that was flat out frustrated that she was hit on through Swapcard one-on-ones twice within 24 hours… facepalm)
I agree profusely that ranking women by how much you want to have sex with them and publicly sharing that casually is creepy as all hell (my dudes in EA… how it is possible that so many of you can be so into “intrumental rationality” and yet act so obviously against your own self-interests when it comes to your behaviour around women is beyond me… facepalm)
These issues seem like something we can come together and fix. But if Kathy Forth’s accusations are true, then it is implied that EA as a community is much more sinister and not interested in addressing the concerns of women. If Kathy Forth’s accusations are true, then there is a deep rot within the EA community. There is no “facepalm” joke I’d be able to light-heartedly say about it, as if it were a thing we can reasonably fix. If Kathy Forth’s accusations are true, OP is right to be scared.
OP’s framing of Kathy Forth’s experience strongly implies they view Kathy Forth’s accusations as more true than false. I don’t know if she believes this because either:
a) She had bad experiences in EA and that made her update more towards “Kathy Forth’s story is probably true”
b) She thought Kathy Forth’s story is probably more true than false, and that made her update her experiences in EA as more bad (in a broader sinister context) than they otherwise would be
But the epistemic particulars are beside the point, because either way, if Scott is able to provide compelling evidence that parts of Kathy Forth’s story is false, this could help OP (and everyone else) feel less sad, disappointed and scared and that can only be a good thing.
OP, if you are reading this, I realize the EA community can seem intimidating. I empathize strongly with you when you expressed concern about how others will judge your writing style and take you less seriously if it did not conform to forum standards (why hello there… my still haven’t-made-one-post self… something I am still embarrassed about given how long I’ve been a part of EA). That said, I am confident if you made a very short post just like “Please, what happened to Kathy Forth and why? I need to know, I cant sleep. I feel sad, disappointed, and scared.” the EA community would have responded with compassion—not caring that the post didn’t abide by some set of forum norms. But, regardless, you did put effort into a longer post here so I just want to say I’m glad you posted this.
Responding to the attention on Kathy’s specific case (I’m aware I’m adding more to it) - I think we’re detracting from the key argument that the EA community as a whole is neglecting to validate and support community members who experience bad things in the community
In this post, it’s women and sexual assault primarily. But there are other posts (1, 2) exempifying ways the EA community itself can and should prioritise internal community health. To argue the truth of one specific example might be detracting from recognising that this might be a systematic problem.
edit: after discussion below & other comments on this post, I feel less strongly about the claim “EA community is bad at addressing harm”, but stand by / am clarifying my general point, which is that the veracity of Kathy’s claims doesn’t detract from any of the other valid points that Maya makes and I don’t think people should discount the rest of these points.
A suggestion to people who are approaching this from a “was Kathy lying?” lens: I think it’s also important to understand this post in the context of the broader movement around sexual assault and violence. The reason this kind of thing stings to a woman in the community is because it says “this is how this community will react if you speak up about harm; this is not a welcoming place for you if you are a survivor.” It’s not about whether Kathy, in particular, was falsely accusing others.
The way I read Maya’s critique here is “there were major accusations of major harm done, and we collectively brushed it off instead of engaging with how this person felt harmed;” which is distinct from “she was right and the perpetrator should be punished”. This is a call for the EA community to be more transparent and fair in how it deals with accusations of wrongdoing, not a callout post of anybody.
Perhaps I would feel differently if I knew of examples of the EA community publicly holding men accountable for harm to women, but as it stands AFAIK we have a lot of examples like those Maya pointed out and not much transparent accountability for them. :/ Would be very happy to be corrected about that.
(Maya, I know it’s probably really hard to see that the first reply on your post is an example of exactly the problem you’re describing, so I just want to add in case you see this that I relate to a lot of what you’ve shared and you have an open offer to DM me if you need someone to hold space for your anger!)
Predictably, I disagree with this in the strongest possible terms.
If someone says false and horrible things to destroy other people’s reputation, the story is “someone said false and horrible things to destroy other people’s reputation”. Not “in some other situation this could have been true”. It might be true! But discussion around the false rumors isn’t the time to talk about that.
Suppose the shoe was on the other foot, and some man (Bob), made some kind of false and horrible rumor about a woman (Alice). Maybe he says that she only got a good position in her organization by sleeping her way to the top. If this was false, the story isn’t “we need to engage with the ways Bob felt harmed and make him feel valid.” It’s not “the Bob lied lens is harsh and unproductive”. It’s “we condemn these false and damaging rumors”. If the headline story is anything else, I don’t trust the community involved one bit, and I would be terrified to be associated with it.
I understand that sexual assault is especially scary, and that it may seem jarring to compare it to less serious accusations like Bob’s. But the original post says we need to express emotions more, and I wanted to try to convey an emotional sense of how scary this position feels to me. Sexual assault is really bad and we need strong norms about it. But we’ve been talking a lot about consequentialism vs. deontology lately, and where each of these is vs. isn’t appropriate. And I think saying “sexual assault is so bad, that for the greater good we need to focus on supporting accusations around it, even when they’re false and will destroy people’s lives” is exactly the bad kind of consequentialism that never works in real life. The specific reason it never works in real life is that once you’re known for throwing the occasional victim under the bus for the greater good, everyone is terrified of associating with you.
This is surprising to me; I know of several cases of people being banned from EA events for harm to women. When I’ve tried to give grants to people, I have gotten unexpected emails from EA higher-ups involved in a monitoring system, who told me that one of those people secretly had a history of harming women and that I should reconsider the grant on that basis. I have personally, at some physical risk to myself, forced a somewhat-resistant person to leave one of my events because they had a history of harm to women (this was Giego C; I think it was clear-cut enough to be okay to name a name here; I know most orgs have already banned him, and if your org hasn’t then I recommend they do too—email me and I can explain why). I know of some other cases where men caused less severe cases of harm or discomfort to women, there were very long discussions by (mostly female members of) EA leadership about whether they should be allowed to continue in their roles, and after some kind of semi-formal proceeding, with the agreement of the victim, after an apology, it was decided that they should be allowed to continue in their roles, sometimes with extra supervision. There’s an entire EA Community Health Team with several employees and a mid-six-figure budget, and a substantial fraction of their job is holding men accountable for harm to women. If none of this existed, maybe I’d feel differently. But right now my experience of EA is that they try really hard to prevent harm to women, so hard that the current disagreement isn’t whether to ban some man accused of harming women, but whether it was okay for me to mention that a false accusation was false.
Again in honor of the original post saying we should be more open about our emotions: I’m sorry for bringing this up. I know everyone hates having to argue about these topics. Realistically I’m writing this because I’m triggered and doing it as a compulsion, and maybe you also wrote your post because you’re triggered and doing it as a compulsion, and maybe Maya wrote her post because she’s triggered and doing it as a compuIsion. This is a terrible topic where a lot of people have been hurt and have strong feelings, and I don’t know how to avoid this kind of cycle where we all argue about horrible things in circles. But I am geninely scared of living in a community where nobody can save good people from false accusations because some kind of mis-aimed concern about the greater good has created a culture of fear around ever speaking out. I have seen something like this happen to other communities I once loved and really don’t want it to happen here. I’m open to talking further by email if you want to continue this conversation in a way that would be awkward on a public forum.
Thank you, this is clarifying for me and I hope for others.
Responses to me, including yours, have helped me update my thinking on how the EA community handles gendered violence. I wasn’t aware of these cases and am glad, and hope that other women seeing this might also feel more supported within EA knowing this. I realize there are obvious reasons why these things aren’t very public, but I hope that somehow we can make it clearer to women that Kathy’s case, and the community’s response, was an outlier.
I would still push back against the gender-reversal false equivalency that you and others have mentioned. EA doesn’t exist in a bubble. We live in a world where survivors, and in particular women, are not supported, not believed, and victim-blamed. Therefore I think it is pretty reasonable to have a prior that we should take accusations seriously and respond to them delicately. The Forum, if anywhere on earth, should be a place where we can have the nuanced understanding that (1) the accusations were false AND (2) because we live in a world where true accusations against powerful men are often disbelieved, causing avoidable harm to victims, we need to keep that context in mind while condemning said false accusations.
So to clarify my stance: I don’t think it was wrong to mention that the false accusation is false. I think it seems dismissive and insensitive to do so without any acknowledgement of the rest of the post. I don’t think it would have hurt your point to say “yes, EA is a male-dominated culture and we need to take seriously the harms done to women in our community. In this specific instance, the accusations were false, and I don’t believe the community’s response to these accusations is representative of how we handle harm.”
I think the disconnect here is that you are responding / care about this specific claim, which you have close knowledge of. I know nothing about it, and am responding to / care about the larger claim about EA’s culture. I believe that Maya’s post is not trying to to make truth claims about Kathy’s case and is more meant to point out a broad trend in EA culture, and I’m trying to encourage people to read it as such, and not let the wrongness of Kathy’s claims undermine Maya’s overall point.
(edit: basically I agree with your comment above:
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
I’m trying to figure out how much of a response to give, and how to balance saying what I believe vs. avoiding any chance to make people feel unwelcome, or inflicting an unpleasant politicized debate on people who don’t want to read it. This comment is a bad compromise between all these things and I apologize for it, but:
I think the Kathy situation is typical of how effective altruists respond to these issues and what their failure modes are. I think “everyone knows” (in Zvi’s sense of the term, where it’s such strong conventional wisdom that nobody ever checks if it’s true ) that the typical response to rape accusations is to challenge and victim-blame survivors. And that although this may be true in some times and places, the typical response in this community is the one which, in fact, actually happened—immediate belief by anyone who didn’t know the situation, and a culture of fear preventing those who did know the situation from speaking out. I think it’s useful to acknowledge and push back against that culture of fear.
(this is also why I stressed the existence of the amazing Community Safety team—I think “everyone knows” that EA doesn’t do anything to hold men accountable for harm, whereas in fact it tries incredibly hard to do this and I’m super impressed by everyone involved)
I acknowledge that makes it sound like we have opposing cultural goals—you want to increase the degree to which people feel comfortable expressing out that EA’s culture might be harmful to women, I want to increase the degree to which people feel comfortable pushing back against claims to that effect which aren’t true. I think there is some subtle complicated sense in which we might not actually have opposing cultural goals, but I agree to a first-order approximation they sure do seem different. And I realize this is an annoyingly stereotypical situation - I, as a cis man, coming into a thread like this and saying I’m worried about a false accusations and chilling effects. My only two defenses are, first, that I only got this way because of specific real and harmful false accusations, that I tried to do an extreme amount of homework on them before calling false, and that I only ever bring up in the context of defending my decision there. And second, that I hope I’m possible to work with and feel safe around, despite my cultural goals, because I want to have a firm deontological commitment to promoting true things and opposing false things, in a way that doesn’t refer to my broader cultural goals at any point.
Thanks, I realize this is a tricky thing to talk about publicly (certainly trickier for you, as someone whose name people actually know, than for me, who can say whatever I want!). I’m coming in with a stronger prior from “the outside world”, where I’ve seen multiple friends ignored/disbelieved/attacked for telling their stories of sexual violence, so maybe I need to better calibrate for intra-EA-community response. I agree/hope that our goals shouldn’t be at odds, and that’s what I was trying to say that maybe did not come across: I didn’t want people to come away from your comment thinking “ah, Maya’s wrong and people shouldn’t criticize EA culture.” I wanted them to come away both knowing the truth about this specific situation AND thinking more broadly about EA culture, because I think this post makes a lot of other very good points that don’t rely on the Kathy claims. (And thinking more broadly could include updating positively like I did, although I didn’t expect that would be the case when I made that comment!)
You’re probably right that it’s not worth giving much more of a response, but I appreciate you engaging with this!
As another data point: I’m a woman, I think I’m the main reason a particular man has been banned from a lot of EA events under certain conditions and I think CEA’s Community Health team have handled this situation extremely well.
But on balance, I’ve found that men in EA treat me with a lot more respect than men do outside of EA. And if anything, I think any complaints I do make are taken too seriously.
This doesn’t excuse bad behaviour of course, even if my experience were typical. But I have always wondered why so much of our energy goes into how women feel in this community vs people with other marginalised characteristics, some of whom no doubt also feel “sad, disappointed, and scared” in EA (e.g. discussions nominally of “diversity and inclusion” often end up just being discussions of how to treat women better).
Thank you for sharing that!
For what it’s worth, I think “discussions of DEI end up becoming discussions about women” is pretty common—not to say it’s excusable, but I don’t think that’s unique to EA.
In the cases like this I’ve been most closely involved in, the women who have reported have not wanted to publicise the event, so sometimes action has been taken but you wouldn’t have heard about it. (I also don’t think it’s a good habit to try to maximise transparency about interpersonal relationships tbh.)
Yeah, this is very fair and I agree that transparency is not always the right call. To clarify, I’ll say that my stance here, medium confidence, is: (1) in instances which the victim/survivor has already made their accusations public, or in instances where it’s already necessarily something that isn’t interpersonal [e.g. hotness ranking], the process of accountability or repair, or at least the fact that one exists, should be public; (2) it should be transparent what kind of process a victim can expect when harm happens.
There’s some literature around procedural justice and trust that indicates that people feel better and trust the outcomes of a process more when it is transparent and invites engagement, regardless of whether the actual outcome favors them or not.
I am glad to hear that there have been cases where women have felt safe reporting and action has been taken!
(edited to delete a para about CEA community health team’s work that I realized was wrong, after seeing this page linked below)
I’d agree I’d favour systems that help people feel confident in the outcome even when it doesn’t favour them, and would like to see EA do better in these areas!
I’m not too confident about this, but one reason you may not have heard about men being held accountable in EA is that it’s not the sort of thing you necessarily publicize. For example, I helped a friend who was raped by a member of the AI safety research community. He blocked her on LessWrong, then posted a deceptive self-vindicating article mischaracterizing her and patting himself on the back.
I told her what was going on and helped her post her response once she’d crafted it via my account. Downvotes ensued for the guy. Eventually he deleted the post.
That’s one example of what (very partial) accountability looks like, but the end result in this case was a decrease in visibility for an anti-accountability post. And except for this thread, I’m not going around talking about my involvement in the situation.
I don’t know how much of the imbalance this accounts for, nor am I claiming that everything is fine. It’s just something to keep in mind as one aspect of parsing the situation.
Thank you, yeah I think I may be overindexing on a few public examples (not being privy to the private examples that you and others in thread have brought up). Glad to hear that there are plenty of examples of the community responding well to protect victims/survivors.
I still also don’t think everything’s fine, but unsure to what extent EA is worse than the rest of the world, where things are also not fine on this front.
I wonder if it would be helpful to have some kind of (heavily anonymized, e.g. summarizing across years) summary statistics about the number of such incidents brought up to CEA community health (since they are the main group collecting such info) and how they were dealt with / what victims choose to do to balance out the public accounts.
Does the appendix in Julia’s post here do what you’re looking for?
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NbkxLDECvdGuB95gW/the-community-health-team-s-work-on-interpersonal-harm-in
Yeah I think it does! It might be good to highlight that in a way more people would read it (e.g. I read that post + the appendix but forgot it was there!)
I’m strongly in favour of this—it often feels like the need is to make this public so it becomes something the entire community is responsible for—as opposed to how it currently is (private and something CEA’s comm health mainly is responsible for).
FWIW this is exactly how I feel about gender-based issues in EA!
Can you link to your post? I’m asking in order to avoid the (probably already existing) situation where people see that “some of Forth’s accusations” are allegedly not true, but they don’t know which, so they just doubt all of them.
If someone has a record of repeatedly making accusations that have been proven false, I think it is reasonable and prudent to “just doubt all” their accusations. This person was clearly terribly ill and did not get the help she needed and deserved. It’s painfully clear from reading her heartbreaking note that she was wildly out of touch with reality.
I wouldn’t want anyone to have the impression that Kathy wasn’t given extensive support, or that she wasn’t offered appropriate help. She definitely was, repeatedly and over a long period of time.
Could more effective help have been given? I honestly don’t know, but it was well beyond my ability and capacity at the time.
It was a painful and heartbreaking situation. I think that’s as much as I can say publicly.
Thank you for clarifying. To be clear, I am basing everything I said on the contents of her note and the publicly available things written since (including Scott Alexander’s and Julia Wise’s commens on this post). I don’t know anything about her situation beyond that. It sounds like an impossible situation—I’m sorry for your loss.