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Amber Dawn
Karma: 4,315
If you find EA conferences emotionally difficult, you’re not alone
This feels complicated to say, because it’s going to make me seem like I don’t care about abuse and harassment described in the article. I do. It’s really bad and I wish it hadn’t happened, and I’m particularly sad that it’s happened within my community, and (more) that people in my community seemed often to not support the victims.
But I honestly feel very upset about the anti-polyamory vibe of all this. Polyamory is a morally neutral relationship structure that’s practiced happily by lots of people. It doesn’t make you an abuser, or not-an-abuser. It’s not accepted in the wider community, so I value its acceptance in EA. I’d be sad if there was a community backlash against it because of stuff like this, because that would hurt a lot of people and I don’t think it would solve the problem.
I think the anti-poly vibe also makes it kind of...harder to work out what’s happening, and what exactly is bad, or something? Like, the article describes lots of stuff that’s unambiguously bad, like grooming and assault. But it says stuff like ‘Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college’. Like, what does it mean to ‘recruit someone to join your polyamorous relationship’? You mean he asked her out, when he was much older and she was in college, and he happened to be poly? Yet it’s sandwiched between descriptions of two unambiguously awful incidents of sexual harassment and grooming.
There was also a quote from someone who complained about her poly partner being a fuckboy. Which like… maybe this guy was not a good partner, but that’s kind of unrelated to whether he had multiple partners. And ‘this guy I dated was kind of a fuckboy and I wasn’t happy in the relationship’ isn’t in the same ballpark as abuse and harassment!
The inclusion of less-bad things doesn’t negate the broad point of the article, but if we want to actually tackle sexual harassment, it helps to know what exactly the problem is, rather than gesturing at ‘these people have Unconventional Ways and that’s Suspicious’.
Some thoughts on the general discussion:
(1) some people are vouching for Kat’s character. This is useful information, but it’s important to note that behaving badly is very compatible with having many strengths, treating one’s friends well, etc. Many people who have done terrible things are extremely charismatic and charming, and even well-meaning or altruistic. It’s hard to think bad things about one’s friends, but unfortunately it’s something we all need to be open to. (I’ve definitely in the past not taken negative allegations against someone as seriously as I should have, because they were my friend).
(2) I think something odd about the comments claiming that this post is full of misinformation, is that they don’t correct any of the misinformation. Like, I get that assembling receipts, evidence etc can take a while, and writing a full rebuttal of this would take a while. But if there are false claims in the post, pick one and say why it’s false.
This makes these interventions seem less sincere to me, because I think if someone posted a bunch of lies about me, in my first comments/reactions I would be less concerned about the meta appropriateness of the post having been posted, and more concerned to be like “this post says Basic Thing X but that’s completely false, actually it was Y, and A, B and C can corroborate”. On the earlier post where an anonymous account accused Nonlinear of bad behaviour, Kat’s responses actually made me update against her, because she immediately attacked the validity of even raising the critique and talked about the negative effects of gossip (on the meta level), rather than expressing concern about possible misunderstandings at NL (for example). For me, this is reminiscent of the abuse tactic DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender): these early comments meant that much of the conversation on this post has been about the appropriateness of Ben publishing it now, or the appropriateness of Emerson threatening to sue him, rather than the object-level ‘hey apparently there are these people in our community who treated their employees really badly’.
I object to how closely you link polyamory with shitty behaviour. At one point you say this you are not criticizing polyamory, but you repeatedly bring it up when talking about stuff like the overlap of work and social life, or men being predatory at EA meetups.
I think men being predatory and subscribing to ‘redpill’ ideologies is terrible and we shouldn’t condone it in the community.
I feel more complicated about the overlap between social life and work life, but I take your general point that this could (and maybe does in fact) lead to conflicts of interest and exploitation.
But neither of these is strongly related to polyamory, polycules etc. I worry that you are contributing to harmful stereotypes about polyamory.
In (mild) defence of the social/professional overlap in EA
Massive thanks to Ben for writing this report and to Alice and Chloe for sharing their stories. Both took immense bravery.
There’s a lot of discussion on the meta-level on this post. I want to say that I believe Alice and Chloe. I currently want to keep my distance from Nonlinear, Kat and Emerson, and would caution others against funding or working with them. I don’t want to be part of a community that condones this sort of thing.I’m not and never have been super-involved in this affair, but I reached out to the former employees following the earlier vague allegations against Nonlinear on the Forum, and after someone I know mentioned they’d heard bad things. It seemed important to know about this, because I had been a remote writing intern at Nonlinear, and Kat was still an occasional mentor to me (she’d message me with advice), and I didn’t want to support NL or promote them if it turned out that they had behaved badly.
Chloe and Alice’s stories had the ring of truth about them to me, and seemed consistent with my experiences with Emerson and Kat — albeit I didn’t know either of them that well and I didn’t have any strongly negative experiences with them.
It seems relevant to mention that Chloe and Alice were initially reluctant to talk to me about any of this. This is inconsistent with the claim that they are eager to spread vicious lies about NL at any chance they get.I’m glad this is out in the open: it felt unhygienic to have this situation where there were whisperings and rumours but no-one felt empowered to be specific about anything.
As a somewhat separate point: fwiw, I’m a woman and I’ve not experienced this general toxicity in EA myself. Obviously I am not challenging your experience—there are lots of EA sub-communities and it makes sense that some could be awful, others fine. But it’s worth adding this nuance, I think (e.g., from what I’ve heard, Bay Area EA circles are particularly incestuous wrt work/life overlap stuff).
Elements of EA: your (EA) identity can be bespoke
Juan B. García Martínez on tackling many causes at once and his journey into EA
Application forms for EA jobs often give an estimate for how long you should expect it to take; often these estimates are *wildly* too low ime. (And others I know have said this too). This is bad because it makes the estimates unhelpful for planning, and because it probably makes people feel bad about themselves, or worry that they’re unusually slow, when they take longer than the estimate.
Imo, if something involves any sort of writing from scratch, you should expect applicants to take at least an hour, and possibly more. (For context, I’ve seen application forms which say ‘this application should take 10 minutes’ and more commonly ones estimating 20 minutes or 30 minutes).
It doesn’t take long to type 300 words if you already know what you’re going to say and don’t particularly care about polish (I wrote this post in less than an hour probably). But job application questions —even ‘basic’ ones like ‘why do you want this job?’ and ‘why would you be a good fit?’—take more time. You may feel intuitively that you’d be a good fit for the job, but take a while to articulate why. You have to think about how your skills might help with the job, perhaps cross-referencing with the job description. And you have to express everything in appropriately-formal and clear language.Job applications are also very high-stakes, and many people find them difficult or ‘ugh-y’, which means applicants are likely to take longer to do them than they “should”, due to being stuck or procrastinating.
Maybe hirers put these time estimates because they don’t want applicants to spend too long on the first-stage form (for most of them, it won’t pay off, after all!) This respect for people’s time is laudable. But if someone really wants the job, they *will* feel motivated to put effort into the application form.
There’s a kind of coordination problem here too. Let’s imagine there’s an application for a job that I really want, and on the form it says ‘this application should take you approximately 30 minutes’. If I knew that all the other applicants were going to set a timer for half an hour, write what came to mind, then send off the form without polishing it too much, I also might do that. But as far as I know, they are spending hours polishing their answers. I don’t want to incorrectly seem worse than other candidates and lose out on the job just because I took the time estimates more literally than other people!‘Aren’t you just unusually slow and neurotic?’
-No; I’d guess that I write faster than average, and I’m really not perfectionist about job applications.Suggestion: if you’re hiring, include a link at the end of the application form where people can anonymously report how long it actually took them.
The evidence collected here doesn’t convince me that Alice and Chloe were lying, or necessarily that Ben Pace did a bad job investigating this. I regret contributing another long and involved comment to this discourse, but I feel like “actually assessing the claims” has been underrepresented compared to people going to the meta level, people discussing the post’s rhetoric, and people simply asserting that this evidence is conclusive proof that Alice and Chloe lied.
My process of thinking through this has made me wish more receipts from Alice and Chloe were included in Ben’s post, or even just that more of the accusations had come in their own words, because then it would be clear exactly what they were claiming. (I think their claims being filtered through first Ben and then Kat/Emerson causes some confusion, as others have noted).
I want to talk about some parts of the post and why I’m not convinced. To avoid cherry-picking, I chose the first claim, about whether Alice was asked to travel with illegal drugs (highlighted by Kat as “if you read just one illustrative story, read this one”), and then I used a random number generator to pick two pages in the appendix (following the lead of other commenters).
I worry that the following will seem maximally negative. But I don’t mean I am strongly convinced of the more negative interpretations I suggest; just that a lot of the screenshots are consistent with Alice and Chloe’s claims being true. This should be read in the spirit of red-teaming or spot-checking, rather than me offering a figured-out narrative.
Was Alice asked to bring drugs across borders illegally?
Ben wrote: ‘Before she went on vacation, Kat requested that Alice bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border for her (some recreational, some for productivity). Alice argued that this would be dangerous for her personally, but Emerson and Kat reportedly argued that it is not dangerous at all and was “absolutely risk-free”. Privately, Drew said that Kat would “love her forever” if she did this. I bring this up as an example of the sorts of requests that Kat/Emerson/Drew felt comfortable making during Alice’s time there.’
As evidence against this, Kat offers screenshots showing Drew asking Alice to pick up some medicine. When Alice reports that a prescription is needed and says she is too sick to ask around extensively, Drew says not to worry, and hopes she gets better soon.
Does this prove that Alice wasn’t asked to bring drugs across borders illegally?
No: just because on this occasion Drew didn’t push the issue, doesn’t mean she wasn’t asked to do illegal things on other, different occasions.Note that the exchange is with Drew, who was dating Alice for some of the time, and who as far as I know no-one has made any negative allegations about. This exchange doesn’t have any bearing on whether similar exchanges with Kat or Emerson involved more pressure on Alice. The texts also don’t show whether it would have been legal for her to travel with the medicine to where Nonlinear were based, even if she could purchase it without a prescription where she was.
I realise that it’s actually nigh-on impossible for Nonlinear to prove they never asked Alice to do anything illegal! They’d have to show their entire message history, and even then, Alice could claim that the conversation happened in person. So maybe this is the best evidence they could have included. But just because it’s the best evidence we could hope for, doesn’t mean we should accept it as knock-down, irrefutable evidence that Alice lied; that requires believing that this is the incident Alice was referring to in her conversations with Ben, which is not clear to me.
Spot checks: p 52
From the appendix:
‘Alice says “look at this screenshot—it’s proof that Kat is trying to silence me by withholding my pay!” But Alice strategically cropped this screenshot.’
This is the screenshot that was included in Ben’s original post, when Alice says she is figuring out ‘survival stuff’ and Kat appears to make her silence about her experience a condition of offering her help. In the appendix, Kat shows more context; she shows that she proactively reached out to Alice, suggested some free accommodation (like the EA hotel) and a mental health resource. She comments:
“This, by the way, is a perfect example of how Alice spreads falsehoods. They’re mostly lying by omission. She’ll say something that is true (the cropped screenshot), but not show the rest. And the rest will totally flip the sign of the whole accusation.”I disagree that the rest flips the sign of the accusation. I think these messages are consistent with Kat’s story: that Alice was mentally unwell and spreading (false) bad stories, and Kat genuinely wanted to help her while preventing her from spreading lies. I also think they’re consistent with Alice’s story; that Kat had found out that Alice was telling (true) stories about bad experiences she’d had at Nonlinear, and Kat was trying to persuade her to stop. If you want to persuade someone to stop telling negative stories about you —whether true or false —being helpful and friendly is a good way to do it! Ime it’s much harder to say negative things about someone who is being explicitly very generous to you.
I guess something that confuses me here about Kat’s story is, if Alice was telling lies because of mental illness or a lack of contact with reality, then I’m not sure why Kat expected a commitment from her to mean anything anyway.
I think it’s right that Ben’s claim that Alice was “in a position of strong need” was stretching it: she does say she’s safe, and ‘figuring out basic survival stuff’ *could* mean being very needy, but could also mean something less extreme than that.
Spot check: p. 104
from the appendix:
”Kat: It’s incredibly unwise to date your colleague/roommate/boss’s brother who has a different relationship orientation, but it’s up to you.
Alice: Kat’s trying to force me to not be poly!”
Here Kat gives some evidence that she’s not anti-poly and would never try to interfere with someone’s dating life:‘For example, around the time Alice alleges that Kat said she couldn’t be poly around her, Kat suggested that Alice might like dating two of her poly friends coming to visit who she knows are looking for a third to form a triad. Also, we’ve invited many poly people to travel with us. Including Alice, who was practicing polyamory the entire time she lived with us. We knew she was poly before she even arrived and were 100% fine with it. She started polyamorously sleeping with multiple of our friends within a week of joining us in Puerto Rico. So clearly we don’t mind having poly people live with us.’
To say ‘we can’t be anti-poly because we invited polyamorous Alice to travel with us’ is begging the question, since Alice claimed that Kat asked her to stop being poly and wasn’t ’100% fine with it’.
The other parts aren’t strong evidence that Kat did not have the conversation Alice reported. Someone can have a bias or discomfort without that affecting them literally all the time. Lots of people in the EA and AI safety community are poly, so it would be difficult for Nonlinear to avoid asking poly people to travel with them.
I think it’s reasonable for Kat to discourage Alice from dating Drew —albeit arguably hypocritical, given that Kat and Emerson are a couple and also colleagues, so they clearly can’t think it’s inappropriate in all cases.
Again, there is probably no way that Kat could actually prove that she never told Alice she shouldn’t be poly! But again, just because this is the best evidence we could reasonably hope for, doesn’t mean it’s actually that strong.
General thoughts
This is all tricky, because my impression is that this was always very much about…vibes? (Which partly comes from the fact that I heard about it from Alice and Chloe, rather than Ben’s post). It’s understandable that lots of discussion has been about legible, concrete things: how much were they paid? Were they asked to bring illegal drugs across borders or not? But that legible stuff has always seemed less central than ‘there were just super toxic interpersonal dynamics at play’. And that’s tricky either way: if Alice and Chloe are telling the truth, it’s tricky because it’s really hard to express ‘why was it so bad’ (I thought Chloe’s comment about her experience on the weekend day trip was really useful here). And if Kat and Emerson are telling the truth, it’s hard to argue against a vibe, or to argue that the vibe came from unreasonable interpretations or expectations on the part of Alice and Chloe. In general, it just seems really, really hard to think clearly about situations like this. My sympathies to everyone involved.
I feel kind of complicated about my previous comments on this post. I do still stand by what I said. But I feel kind of bad that my comments have got more karma than the post itself, because I do think that we should worry about toxicity towards women in the community, and many of the things Keerthana describes are really bad and on balance, I think I’m happy she wrote this post.
The reaction to this post (and my comments) exemplifies a dynamic I’ve seen before on the Forum, where people’s posts are disregarded, criticized, downvoted etc because they are emotional, impressionistic, openly angered or outraged, emphatic… etc, and praised for being detached, dry, measured, caveat-ed… We should care about epistemics, but I think sometimes readers of the Forum are not charitable enough to people who communicate in different ways to them.
You don’t have to be an asshole just because you value honesty
In Kirsten’s recent EA Lifestyles advice column (NB, paywalled), an anonymous EA woman reported being bothered about men in the community whose “radical honesty” leads them to make inappropriate or hurtful comments:
For example: radical honesty/saying true things (great sometimes, not fun when men decide to be super honest about their sexual attraction or the exact amount they’re willing to account for women’s comfort until the costs just “aren’t justified.” This kind of openness is usually pointless: I can’t act on it, I didn’t want to know, and now I’m feeling hurt/wary).
An implication is that these guys may have viewed the discomfort of their women interlocutors as a (maybe regretful) cost of them upholding the important value of honesty. I’ve encountered similar attitudes elsewhere in EA—ie, people being kinda disagreeable/assholeish/mean under the excuse of ‘just being honest’.
I want to say: I don’t think a high commitment to honesty inevitably entails being disagreeable, acting unempathetically, or ruffling feathers. Why? Because I don’t think it’s dishonest not to say everything that springs to mind. If that were the case, I’d be continually narrating my internal monologue to my loved owns, and it would be very annoying for them, I’d imagine.
If you’re attracted to someone, and they ask “are you attracted to me?”, and you say “no”—ok, that’s dishonest. I don’t think anyone should blame people for honestly answering a direct question. But if you’re chatting with someone and you think “hmm, I’m really into them”, and then you say that—I don’t think honesty compels that choice, any more than it compels you to say “hold up, I just was thinking about whether I’d have soup or a burger for dinner”.
I don’t know much about the Radical Honesty movement, but from this article, it seems like they really prize just blurting out whatever you think. I do understand the urge to do this: I really value self-expression. For example, I’d struggle to be in a situation where I felt like I couldn’t express my thoughts online and had to self-censor a lot. But I want to make the case that self-expression (how much of what comes to mind can you express vs being required to suppress) and honesty are somewhat orthogonal, and being maximally honest (ie, avoiding saying false things) doesn’t require being maximally self-expressive.
Where I’m at with AI risk: convinced of danger but not (yet) of doom
Tyler Johnston on helping farmed animals, consciousness, and being conventionally good
I agree with the vibe of this but disagree with the specific advice, maybe? I think if we discourage people from commenting when they’re feeling strong emotions, we miss out on valuable information. You suggest waiting for a few hours, but first, I think emotional first reactions are information (it’s information if something makes people angry! info about the values of the EA movement, or about how bad Bostrom’s comments are, for example); and secondly, some people might just not come back, or they might never cease to be emotional about the issue. Communicating in the standard detached Forum way might just feel dishonest to them. This means that the consensus becomes skewed to those who are less emotionally-activated by the issue. So in situations like this, people who are more forgiving or who think it’s not that bad or who just have more muted emotions or more reserved communication styles will dominate the discussion.
(I’m making a separate comment for a separate point)
Something I think about a lot, with regard to this, is secrecy. I feel like there’s a big culture of secrecy or confidentiality around both questions of sexual misconduct, and other issues in the community, and I wonder whether we might be a healthier community if there was just more open, specific, name-attached discussion of bad things that people in the community have done. The problem, of course, is that calling for survivors to make open accusations plays into the same dynamic you are criticizing here—of placing most of the burden of getting justice on survivors.
For example: I personally know of someone in the community who has done some bad stuff. Not ‘calling-the-police’ bad, but ‘I kinda wanna hang a red flag on him’ bad. And part of me wants to just, idk, make a public post about this, or tell everyone I know: not because I want to ruin his life, or because I’m angry/vengeful, but because I want to protect others, and I think others might want to change their interactions with him, if they knew. And part of what prevents me from doing that is that it’s not my story to tell; but part of it, I think, is a feeling that ‘call-outs’ of that kind are too big and dramatic and overkill-y, if the harm hasn’t crossed over a certain threshold. But is that right? Do people have the right to be protected from people’s reactions to their actions?
Similarly, I notice that when you described two (!) instances of sexual harassment you experienced at the recent EAG, you didn’t say who it was. And it’s completely your right not to reveal that and I really don’t intend to pressure you to do so, but I have to confess part of me is like ‘what the FUCK, after ALL that’s happened and all the discussions we’ve been having, people had the audacity to behave like that?! Name and shame!’
And I have similar questions in my mind about stuff NOT related to sexual misconduct. For example, I’ve heard some bad stories about people’s experiences working for EA organisations, and I wonder whether we might be a healthier community if more of these conversations were openly had.
Anyway, this makes me think that something the community could do is ensure to survivors (and others who’ve suffered bad behaviour) that telling people what happened, with their own and the perpetrator’s name attached, won’t harm their career. I’m not sure how to do this. One part is probably just expressing support for survivors and believing reports of misconduct by default (rather than having scepticism as a default). This might be another reason to distribute power more equitably within the community—if more people run organisations, control money, and have social power, then it might feel less costly to piss off one powerful person. Another part is perhaps for powerful people to make convincing signals that they won’t punish people who criticize them and call them out for bad behaviour.
Anyway, very confused about all this. I’m interested in people’s thoughts.
Thank you so much for writing this! I don’t have much of substance to add, but this is a great post and I agree with pretty much everything.
I think I do see “all people count equally” as a foundational EA belief. This might be partly because I understand “count” differently to you, partly because I have actually-different beliefs (and assumed that these beliefs were “core” to EA, rather than idiosyncratic to me).
What I understand by “people count equally” is something like “1 person’s wellbeing is not more important than another’s”.
E.g. a British nationalist might not think that all people count equally, because they think their copatriots’ wellbeing is more important than that of people in other countries. They would take a small improvement in wellbeing for Brits over a large improvement in wellbeing for non-Brits. An EA would be impartial between improvements in wellbeing for British people vs non-British people.
“most QALY frameworks value young people more than older people, many discussions have been had about hypothetical utility monsters, and about how some people might have more moral patienthood due to being able to experience more happiness or more suffering, and of course the moral patienthood of artificial systems immediately makes it clear that different minds likely matter differently in moral calculus”
In all of these situations, I think we can still say people “count” equally. QALY frameworks don’t say that young people’s wellbeing matters more—just that if they die or get sick, they stand to lose more wellbeing than older people, so it might make sense to prioritize them. This seems similar to how I prioritize donating to poor people over rich people—it’s not that rich people’s wellbeing matters less, it’s just that poor people are generally further from optimal wellbeing in the first place. And I think this reasoning can be applied to hypothetical people/beings with greater capacity for suffering. I think greater capacity for happiness is trickier and possibly an object-level disagreement—I wouldn’t be inclined to prioritize Happiness Georg’s happiness above all else, because his happiness outweights the suffering of many others, but maybe you would bite that bullet.