In my personal experience a good deal of sexual assault/harassment etc. goes unreported (especially at universities) because especially if you personally know the perpetrator as a friend or romantic partner you often have pretty complicated feelings about escalating things.
I think making clear the default outcome of reporting is “you have a conversation with someone a good deal more experience than you about what steps tend to be taken in these cases and if they’ve heard anything else and you get agency around the result” rather than “you set in motion a process against this person you have a very hazy understanding of” helps a lot. (the health team’s policy around confidentiality seems good for this reason).
agunning
Karma: 440
The EA/Rationalist scene in the Bay Area is very large and very heterogeneous/sometimes weird
My brief experiences of it have been that there are some parts of it which were lovely, some parts which did seem to have a well-meaning culture but tolerated questionable people and I have a vague sense some parts were terrible.
yeah from my experience there are at least two clusters of incidents of
people who talk about dark secret psychological/sociological hacks the normies don’t want you to know (these people tend to lean more rationalisty and are going to be an extremely tiny percentage of people who comment on this forum)
(usually much less severe) possibly autistic people who are socially oblivious of how they are throwing their weight around but well meaning
i think there’s probably quite a lot of value in warning people to be cautious around people who seem like they’re in the first cluster (and I’d mostly associate poly/kink types with the second)
if you are mostly talking about the first cluster I think we are to a very real extent talking past each other—especially in the bay area ea/rat circles are extremely ideologically heterogeneous
I suspect a very relevant factor influencing whether people are willing to come forward and talk to the team is “how alienated/ accepted do they feel by EA culture in general”, given that you come across as very much of that culture; for me this is something that helps a lot compared to say your average HR dept?
uh
speaking as a “gender and sex minority”
i would not feel safer if EA regressed to the mean of how we culturally treated sexuality