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!
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!