This was a hard read, and CEA/EV haven’t investigated these claims, but I thought it was of interest to the community to share.
I found this a very strange post for the CH team to write. Typically a judge, or prosecutor, or HR department (whose roles the CH team seem to combine) would not publicise an allegation they received prior to investigation, and any response to inquiries would be very perfunctory (e.g ‘we are aware of the allegation and are investigating’). In fact I suspect that if a Judge decided to pro-actively share an allegation and described it as ‘a hard read’ they might be expected to recuse themselves from the case because it would raise questions about impartiality. If the issue is of interest, why don’t you investigate first?
It’s not clear there will be an “investigation.” Among other things, Dawn says she will appeal, so this is a pending litigation matter in my book. As a general matter, CHSP should defer in the presence of active litigation, and I don’t see a reason to deviate here.
Thank you for the thoughts. My team was pretty uncertain about whether to post this, and I could have done some things better. It seems helpful to clarify some of my intentions behind the original post:
Various people had mentioned that they were concerned about this in casual conversation. It felt useful to link to a specific reference point for the already- existing discussion rather than have rumours escalate or warp.
Given Peter Singer is someone with a significant influence in EA, and with the context of recent events in our community, I expected many people in EA would want to be aware if concerns had been raised about him, provided they were appropriately hedged.
Given those conversations and considerations happening in private, making it public was the action that felt the most integrity-driven to me at the time.
I could have done better at framing the post. I do think it can be valuable from a community health perspective to link post to things of interest before we have all the facts in, but there’s a balance to get right here.
I found this a very strange post for the CH team to write. Typically a judge, or prosecutor, or HR department (whose roles the CH team seem to combine) would not publicise an allegation they received prior to investigation, and any response to inquiries would be very perfunctory (e.g ‘we are aware of the allegation and are investigating’). In fact I suspect that if a Judge decided to pro-actively share an allegation and described it as ‘a hard read’ they might be expected to recuse themselves from the case because it would raise questions about impartiality. If the issue is of interest, why don’t you investigate first?
It’s not clear there will be an “investigation.” Among other things, Dawn says she will appeal, so this is a pending litigation matter in my book. As a general matter, CHSP should defer in the presence of active litigation, and I don’t see a reason to deviate here.
Thank you for the thoughts. My team was pretty uncertain about whether to post this, and I could have done some things better. It seems helpful to clarify some of my intentions behind the original post:
Various people had mentioned that they were concerned about this in casual conversation. It felt useful to link to a specific reference point for the already- existing discussion rather than have rumours escalate or warp.
Given Peter Singer is someone with a significant influence in EA, and with the context of recent events in our community, I expected many people in EA would want to be aware if concerns had been raised about him, provided they were appropriately hedged.
Given those conversations and considerations happening in private, making it public was the action that felt the most integrity-driven to me at the time.
I could have done better at framing the post. I do think it can be valuable from a community health perspective to link post to things of interest before we have all the facts in, but there’s a balance to get right here.