What systems/solutions currently exist for “dealing with” misconduct, harassment, or assault after it happens?
What systems should exist?
I feel some hesitation about solutions that involves handing the power to blacklist or “punish” people to one agency.
But it’s really hard for individuals to publicly post about other people’s problematic behavior.
A friend of mine in the EA community told me they had been sexually harassed and stalked by another EA member and were considering posting on social media about it. I encouraged them to post do so. They were scared of potential backlash so they didn’t.
But I didn’t post about it at all. It feels inappropriate for me to do so on someone else’s behalf, especially since I’m not particularly wrapped up in Y’s life.
I wonder if scandal markets could potentially be useful (as Scott Alexander recently discussed in a recent thread), or something else inspired by scandal markets.
I think it’s plausible that we could use scandal markets on high-profile people in the EA community.
Scott writes, and I pretty strongly agree: “I’m tired of bad things happening, and then learning there was a “whisper network” of people who knew about it all along but didn’t tell potential victims. It’s unreasonable to expect suspicious to come out and make controversial accusations about powerful people on limited evidence. But a prediction market seems like a good fit for this use case.”
But the majority of the people who do/will do/have done problematic things are unlikely high-profile enough to have a scandal market made about them.
It seems plausible to me that a well-designed system would be able to effectively deal with the kinds of issues the OP talks about and things like financial misconduct.
But I feel like there are a few challenges:
I can’t think of any community that effectively deals with misconduct that isn’t also authoritarian-esque (the CCP comes to mind). (That being said, please comment what other communities or systems exist that effectively deal with misconduct).
And a well designed system should reflect that different problematic actions require different responses.
I think this points to the weakness of a centralized system: most people agree that things like rape should lead to removal from the community. But a lot of things are debateable (like making a ranked list of women someone wants to hook up with), and if CEA or whomever implemented some response as “the authority”, it would almost certainly be opposed by some for being too lenient and by some for being too harsh.
It almost feels like making public knowledge of these kinds of things is the right thing to do, because then people will react accordingly.
But simply saying “we’re going to publicize every distasteful things others do so so that people can decide for themselves how they should respond” feels bad for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it would erode trust between members if people felt like they might be publicly outed for small infractions.
I actually think people should be complaining to, or even complaining about, the community health team significantly more than they are. People on that team are paid to address problems like misconduct/harassment/assault. Complaints like Maya’s should be a key performance metric for them.
In my view, there should be a stronger default of people like Maya contacting the community health team to say “hey, I heard about women getting ranked in a way that made me uncomfortable”. And the community health team privately contacting the rankers to say “hey, you aren’t helping our goal of a warm professional community that welcomes a wide variety of people and incentivizes them to care about doing good over being hot”. Some might find this draconian—to clarify, I don’t think disciplinary action is justified here. I just think these conversations would be positive expected utility if done well.
What systems/solutions currently exist for “dealing with” misconduct, harassment, or assault after it happens?
What systems should exist?
I feel some hesitation about solutions that involves handing the power to blacklist or “punish” people to one agency.
But it’s really hard for individuals to publicly post about other people’s problematic behavior.
A friend of mine in the EA community told me they had been sexually harassed and stalked by another EA member and were considering posting on social media about it. I encouraged them to post do so. They were scared of potential backlash so they didn’t.
But I didn’t post about it at all. It feels inappropriate for me to do so on someone else’s behalf, especially since I’m not particularly wrapped up in Y’s life.
I wonder if scandal markets could potentially be useful (as Scott Alexander recently discussed in a recent thread), or something else inspired by scandal markets.
I think it’s plausible that we could use scandal markets on high-profile people in the EA community.
Scott writes, and I pretty strongly agree:
“I’m tired of bad things happening, and then learning there was a “whisper network” of people who knew about it all along but didn’t tell potential victims. It’s unreasonable to expect suspicious to come out and make controversial accusations about powerful people on limited evidence. But a prediction market seems like a good fit for this use case.”
But the majority of the people who do/will do/have done problematic things are unlikely high-profile enough to have a scandal market made about them.
It seems plausible to me that a well-designed system would be able to effectively deal with the kinds of issues the OP talks about and things like financial misconduct.
But I feel like there are a few challenges:
I can’t think of any community that effectively deals with misconduct that isn’t also authoritarian-esque (the CCP comes to mind). (That being said, please comment what other communities or systems exist that effectively deal with misconduct).
And a well designed system should reflect that different problematic actions require different responses.
I think this points to the weakness of a centralized system: most people agree that things like rape should lead to removal from the community. But a lot of things are debateable (like making a ranked list of women someone wants to hook up with), and if CEA or whomever implemented some response as “the authority”, it would almost certainly be opposed by some for being too lenient and by some for being too harsh.
It almost feels like making public knowledge of these kinds of things is the right thing to do, because then people will react accordingly.
But simply saying “we’re going to publicize every distasteful things others do so so that people can decide for themselves how they should respond” feels bad for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it would erode trust between members if people felt like they might be publicly outed for small infractions.
See this post: The community health team’s work on interpersonal harm in the community
I actually think people should be complaining to, or even complaining about, the community health team significantly more than they are. People on that team are paid to address problems like misconduct/harassment/assault. Complaints like Maya’s should be a key performance metric for them.
In my view, there should be a stronger default of people like Maya contacting the community health team to say “hey, I heard about women getting ranked in a way that made me uncomfortable”. And the community health team privately contacting the rankers to say “hey, you aren’t helping our goal of a warm professional community that welcomes a wide variety of people and incentivizes them to care about doing good over being hot”. Some might find this draconian—to clarify, I don’t think disciplinary action is justified here. I just think these conversations would be positive expected utility if done well.