I would like a polling question on this. I think that say 10 − 30% of women have had 2 or more belittling experiences at an EAG and that’s bad. But I read this paragraph and it seems alien to me. What % of women+nb folks have this experience in EA?
I could tell you how tears streamed down my face as I read through accounts of women who have been harmed by people within the Effective Altruism community. I could describe how my fists curled and my jaw clenched as I scrolled through forum comments and Reddit threats full of disbelief and belittlement. I could try to convey the rising temperature of my blood as it boiled; I could explain to you that I could not focus in class for a full two days. But I don’t think that I will. I’m unsure that the Effective Altruism community has room for my anger.
Re:
“But I read this paragraph and it seems alien to me. What % of women+nb folks have this experience in EA?
‘I could tell you how tears streamed down my face as I read through accounts of women who have been harmed by people within the Effective Altruism community.’”
In the interest of reducing alienation, here’s some anecdata and context. Maya’s reaction wasn’t alien to me at all.
Among my female friends, having this type of reaction at some point was basically a developmental milestone. It wasn’t unique to EA. I expect such a survey would be more useful if you did some sort of national poll of women and compared it to women in EA.
Most (85%?) compassionate women I know reached a point in our teens or 20s where we got properly distressed and angry over gender-based* injustices that we and others had experienced. Most of us had experienced something bad or knew someone who did by then and it sucked.
If we happened to be involved in a specific “Good Community” that claimed some moral high ground (eg a church, an EA group, an “honorable family” etc), we hoped bad treatment happened less there and that we were safer there. Finding out, inevitably, that even in such a community, some of our peers and moral heroes also demean, harass, or rape each other is really awful. Our level of emotionality varied by personality type, but it sucked for all of us.
For Maya, this happened at its height about EA. For me, it happened about church. I’m no longer involved in religion. By the time I got to EA though, I expected some bad behavior even from “good people,” so I was just impressed the EA community health team existed to deal with it and didn’t have Maya’s intense reaction. I still do have a visceral reaction to others’ stories of harm though.
I don’t know if there base rate of problems is higher or lower in EA groups compared to other communities. I think the resources dedicated to good responses is higher than in other communities, which I feel good about.
I think we should try to track our base rates if we can, and plan to always dedicate resources to things like the Community Health team’s prevention and response efforts, because that is the price of admission for running healthy human groups.
I don’t mean to be callous or cynical, but I unfortunately now regard gender-based* violence as a gross and terrible part of being human that is present everywhere.
So, all communities and conscientious community members will need to contend with this unfortunate aspect of reality at some point and learn to talk about it in a healthy way, despite the pain. We’ll all need to have conversations like this sometimes, again and again, to address the pain involved, and it will bring up varying degrees of emotion and discomfort with that emotion, that are all pretty “normal”. It’s the price of admission for being alive and part of a social species.
Maybe, hopefully, the base rate of problems stays low within our microcultures and gets lower across the centuries as we keep learning how to human.
I hope saying this doesn’t belittle Maya’s concerns at all. They’re real and I’m glad she raised them so people could respond.
Fwiw, some of the discourse about these issues does seem more pointed, more naïve, more fearful, and less obviously compassionate in EA than eg in my church (maybe because of the gender and rationality skew in EA), so talking about it on the Forum felt worse than talking about it at church overall and has sometimes made me emotional. However, most EAs are less shame-laden than discourse in church, and more nuanced than discourse on eg. Twitter, so sometimes the Forum is preferable. I am more invested invested in EA communities so I’m willing to put more effort into these conversations than I would elsewhere.
To avoid intense frustrations though, I usually choose to talk about this stuff only with EA women or 1:1 with EA men rather then dealing with a Forum furor.
(*tbc, I see the same experiences happen for other characteristics that people realize they may unfairly targeted for, like race, sexuality, neurodivergence, etc).
In real life, I’ve selected to be around very compassionate people in EA and outside EA.
On the Forum… more men who “translate” experiences into ones that other men understand and don’t feel threatened by might help. I’ve noticed Will Bradshaw does this sometimes. Ozzie too. AGB sometimes.
Kirsten, Ivy, and Julia Wise do it often too.
I know that for a lot of women, it’s really frustrating to be treated so skeptically when we raise personal experiences or views that vary from men’s experiences.
When I’m 1:1 with my hyper-rational or autistic male friends in person, we figure out how to understand each other compassionately, so I know these individuals don’t usually mean to be as callous as they sound online.
When I’m with my EA women friends, we talk about our personal experience and the broader social issues with tons of nuance and we appreciate that no one is shamed for not sounding Tribe-y enough (for any given tribe).
But on the Forum, it’s just so often super annoying to engage. I try to simply talk about my actual life sometimes, but I know I’m going to ping someone’s “woke” alarm and end up in a stupid thread of comments.
So I consider the Forum fine for a certain kind of information exchange but mostly a lost cause for mutual understanding of anything that hits interpersonal emotional chords. I only comment here about that sort of thing when I have a lot of downtime and extra emotional bandwidth.
Kind of both here. Do you think that general activities towards building compassion are also helping here if this seems to be the thing you value in people towards making it a more comfortable environment for you? Like I’m wondering if this might be an unintended effect of general compassion building for animal welfare, and if interventions there might have some overlap in those best meant for this.
Sorry for my unfamiliarity, but could you explain what you mean by “translate experiences”? I feel as if I’ve probably interacted with what you’re talking about, but am not sure what exactly that is mapping onto.
I also hear you and am sorry that that has been your experience of the forum. But I really think it might be worth reconsidering that stance, because I think there’s a real chance it has changed in a significant way here, so maybe try it out again and see how it goes, in some small way that wouldn’t be too inconvenient for you if it hasn’t improved? I motivate it only because I think having as many perspectives on here as possible is a great thing, and that generally the emotional things we really care about are some of the best things to interact over.
Also don’t feel the need to respond to questions (even like the ones I’m asking) if it helps increase bandwidth for other things that don’t drain you similarly.
You asked about translation. I feel tired trying to explain this and I know that’s not your fault! But it’s why I just don’t think the Forum works well for this topic.
My guess is that talking about “women’s issues” on the Forum feels as similarly taxing to me as it does for most AI safety researchers to respond to people whose reaction to AGI concerns is, “ugh, tech bros are at it again” or even a well-intentioned, “I bet being in Silicon Valley skews your perspective on this. How many non-SV people have the kinds of concerns you mention?”
Most of us are tired of that naïve convo, esp with someone who thinks they have an informed take. Where do you even start?
Someone they trust has to say, “I’m like you and I’m concerned about this; it’s not just tech bro hype, and here’s why.” They have to translate across the inferential distance, ignorance, trust gap, and knowledge gap. They need to have the patience, time, and investment in bridging the gap.
Agreed that it would be very helpful to have a widely distributed survey about this, ideally with in-depth conversations. Quantitative and qualitative data seem to be lacking, while there seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence. Wondering if CEA or RP could lead such work, or whether an independent organization should do it.
I would mainly like it to be easy to fill out so that the results are representative. I think it’s pretty easy for surveys like this to end up only filled in by people with the strongest opinions.
If it’s worth anything I would expect that figure to be between 28-43%. (I’m anchoring on your estimate, I would probably have guessed somewhere around 40-55% if I hadn’t read your comment )
I would like a polling question on this. I think that say 10 − 30% of women have had 2 or more belittling experiences at an EAG and that’s bad. But I read this paragraph and it seems alien to me. What % of women+nb folks have this experience in EA?
Re: “But I read this paragraph and it seems alien to me. What % of women+nb folks have this experience in EA?
‘I could tell you how tears streamed down my face as I read through accounts of women who have been harmed by people within the Effective Altruism community.’”
In the interest of reducing alienation, here’s some anecdata and context. Maya’s reaction wasn’t alien to me at all.
Among my female friends, having this type of reaction at some point was basically a developmental milestone. It wasn’t unique to EA. I expect such a survey would be more useful if you did some sort of national poll of women and compared it to women in EA.
Most (85%?) compassionate women I know reached a point in our teens or 20s where we got properly distressed and angry over gender-based* injustices that we and others had experienced. Most of us had experienced something bad or knew someone who did by then and it sucked.
If we happened to be involved in a specific “Good Community” that claimed some moral high ground (eg a church, an EA group, an “honorable family” etc), we hoped bad treatment happened less there and that we were safer there. Finding out, inevitably, that even in such a community, some of our peers and moral heroes also demean, harass, or rape each other is really awful. Our level of emotionality varied by personality type, but it sucked for all of us.
For Maya, this happened at its height about EA. For me, it happened about church. I’m no longer involved in religion. By the time I got to EA though, I expected some bad behavior even from “good people,” so I was just impressed the EA community health team existed to deal with it and didn’t have Maya’s intense reaction. I still do have a visceral reaction to others’ stories of harm though.
I don’t know if there base rate of problems is higher or lower in EA groups compared to other communities. I think the resources dedicated to good responses is higher than in other communities, which I feel good about.
I think we should try to track our base rates if we can, and plan to always dedicate resources to things like the Community Health team’s prevention and response efforts, because that is the price of admission for running healthy human groups.
I don’t mean to be callous or cynical, but I unfortunately now regard gender-based* violence as a gross and terrible part of being human that is present everywhere.
So, all communities and conscientious community members will need to contend with this unfortunate aspect of reality at some point and learn to talk about it in a healthy way, despite the pain. We’ll all need to have conversations like this sometimes, again and again, to address the pain involved, and it will bring up varying degrees of emotion and discomfort with that emotion, that are all pretty “normal”. It’s the price of admission for being alive and part of a social species.
Maybe, hopefully, the base rate of problems stays low within our microcultures and gets lower across the centuries as we keep learning how to human.
I hope saying this doesn’t belittle Maya’s concerns at all. They’re real and I’m glad she raised them so people could respond.
Fwiw, some of the discourse about these issues does seem more pointed, more naïve, more fearful, and less obviously compassionate in EA than eg in my church (maybe because of the gender and rationality skew in EA), so talking about it on the Forum felt worse than talking about it at church overall and has sometimes made me emotional. However, most EAs are less shame-laden than discourse in church, and more nuanced than discourse on eg. Twitter, so sometimes the Forum is preferable. I am more invested invested in EA communities so I’m willing to put more effort into these conversations than I would elsewhere.
To avoid intense frustrations though, I usually choose to talk about this stuff only with EA women or 1:1 with EA men rather then dealing with a Forum furor.
(*tbc, I see the same experiences happen for other characteristics that people realize they may unfairly targeted for, like race, sexuality, neurodivergence, etc).
What specific sort of things would you like to see that would make you feel like you were in a more compassionate environment?
On the Forum? Or IRL?
In real life, I’ve selected to be around very compassionate people in EA and outside EA.
On the Forum… more men who “translate” experiences into ones that other men understand and don’t feel threatened by might help. I’ve noticed Will Bradshaw does this sometimes. Ozzie too. AGB sometimes.
Kirsten, Ivy, and Julia Wise do it often too. I know that for a lot of women, it’s really frustrating to be treated so skeptically when we raise personal experiences or views that vary from men’s experiences.
When I’m 1:1 with my hyper-rational or autistic male friends in person, we figure out how to understand each other compassionately, so I know these individuals don’t usually mean to be as callous as they sound online.
When I’m with my EA women friends, we talk about our personal experience and the broader social issues with tons of nuance and we appreciate that no one is shamed for not sounding Tribe-y enough (for any given tribe).
But on the Forum, it’s just so often super annoying to engage. I try to simply talk about my actual life sometimes, but I know I’m going to ping someone’s “woke” alarm and end up in a stupid thread of comments.
So I consider the Forum fine for a certain kind of information exchange but mostly a lost cause for mutual understanding of anything that hits interpersonal emotional chords. I only comment here about that sort of thing when I have a lot of downtime and extra emotional bandwidth.
Kind of both here. Do you think that general activities towards building compassion are also helping here if this seems to be the thing you value in people towards making it a more comfortable environment for you? Like I’m wondering if this might be an unintended effect of general compassion building for animal welfare, and if interventions there might have some overlap in those best meant for this.
Sorry for my unfamiliarity, but could you explain what you mean by “translate experiences”? I feel as if I’ve probably interacted with what you’re talking about, but am not sure what exactly that is mapping onto.
I also hear you and am sorry that that has been your experience of the forum. But I really think it might be worth reconsidering that stance, because I think there’s a real chance it has changed in a significant way here, so maybe try it out again and see how it goes, in some small way that wouldn’t be too inconvenient for you if it hasn’t improved? I motivate it only because I think having as many perspectives on here as possible is a great thing, and that generally the emotional things we really care about are some of the best things to interact over.
Also don’t feel the need to respond to questions (even like the ones I’m asking) if it helps increase bandwidth for other things that don’t drain you similarly.
You asked about translation. I feel tired trying to explain this and I know that’s not your fault! But it’s why I just don’t think the Forum works well for this topic.
My guess is that talking about “women’s issues” on the Forum feels as similarly taxing to me as it does for most AI safety researchers to respond to people whose reaction to AGI concerns is, “ugh, tech bros are at it again” or even a well-intentioned, “I bet being in Silicon Valley skews your perspective on this. How many non-SV people have the kinds of concerns you mention?”
Most of us are tired of that naïve convo, esp with someone who thinks they have an informed take. Where do you even start?
Someone they trust has to say, “I’m like you and I’m concerned about this; it’s not just tech bro hype, and here’s why.” They have to translate across the inferential distance, ignorance, trust gap, and knowledge gap. They need to have the patience, time, and investment in bridging the gap.
Agreed that it would be very helpful to have a widely distributed survey about this, ideally with in-depth conversations. Quantitative and qualitative data seem to be lacking, while there seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence. Wondering if CEA or RP could lead such work, or whether an independent organization should do it.
I would mainly like it to be easy to fill out so that the results are representative. I think it’s pretty easy for surveys like this to end up only filled in by people with the strongest opinions.
If it’s worth anything I would expect that figure to be between 28-43%. (I’m anchoring on your estimate, I would probably have guessed somewhere around 40-55% if I hadn’t read your comment )
I’ve been away from the Forum and just saw this comment. When you say “that figure”, what are you referring to?