Data analyst at a consulting firm, previously ran an EA university group.
Rebecca
Re “work like incubating new charities, advising inexperienced charity entrepreneurs, and influencing funding decisions should be done by people with particularly good judgement about how to run strong organisations, in addition to having admirable intentions”, I think this is the single best sentence that has been written on this so far.
Yeah I believe they were the only in person employees—so 0⁄2 not 19⁄21
I think a crux in this is what you think the reason is for Alice being so unassertive towards Kat in the messages—was it because she’s worried, based on experience, about angering her employers and causing negative consequences for herself, e.g. them saying she’s being too difficult and refuse to help her at all, or some other, more favourable to Kat and Emerson, reason?
I think Jason’s point is more that CEA’s statement isn’t really an attempt to ‘communicate with the EA community’, so your criticisms don’t apply in this case. E.g. this statement could be something for EAs to link to when talking about it with people looking in, who are trying to make an informed judgement (i.e. busy, neutral people lacking information, not committed critics).
I don’t know how I feel about applying that standard in this case, given that lack of communication is the thing at issue
I tick 2.5 of the DEI boxes you’ve identified, and I found this post quite off-putting. It’s hard for me to evaluate the examples as the box you’ve reasonably chosen to focus on I don’t tick, but the anecdote about your experience on the plane I found quite alarming. You say “I get it”, but I don’t get it. Airport security is overly stringent, and I’d be very surprised if I’d react that way in similar circumstances. Should I be offended that you think it’s representative of the average white person’s feelings? So I wonder if you might be projecting your own biases onto other white people/men/etc.
It’s not accurate to say that EVF didn’t disclose it publicly. I first learnt about Wytham Abbey a while before Torres’ article, after reading this job ad: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/office-manager-oxford-ea-hub.
The first one is a commitment, but the second one isn’t—it’s rather a prediction. Perhaps there is a language familiarity issue?
Cotton-Barratt has been de fact ostracised for months now. Seems like this should count towards the ban time.
Just wanted to note that ~1 year of the 2-year ban is retroactive so this has happened
It seems like they weren’t friends, only professional acquaintances up until 5 years ago, and then more recently journalist-subject. So it’s a bit disingenuous to say he was ‘talking with a friend’ as though they had anything resembling a DMing relationship within the past 5 years.
The line I’m referring to is “if published as is we intend to pursue legal action”. That is consistent with being fine with him publishing at all, but not consistent with being fine if he decides to not change anything in the post after getting all the facts in a week.
Combining this line with the ones you mentioned gives the impression that the message you’re trying to convey is ‘what Ben has written is false and libellous, we have asked him to wait a week so he can correct his post before publishing, after getting all the facts. If he doesn’t do both these things, we intend to sue’, and I think it’s reasonable for anyone to have interpreted it this way, even if that’s not what you intended.
- 20 Dec 2023 20:54 UTC; 14 points) 's comment on Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by (
- 21 Dec 2023 4:55 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by (
I don’t think it’s true that EA is plagued by sexism, racism and abuse, or that women need to be more vigilant about protecting themselves from sexual abuse in EA than in the wider community. And I don’t think the info in the post indicates this is true.
My main takeaway from the post and from Lucretia’s experience is that male EAs, especially researcher-types in SF who lack worldly experience, should get training around sexual assault in order to better identify bad actors when they do appear, and prevent them from causing harm (rather than accidentally supporting them (!)), and to just generally be halfway-decent allies.
But this is very different from the picture you paint, a picture that I worry could result in a greater gender imbalance in EA, by inaccurately putting off women who are considering getting involved.
Personally I find myself worrying much less about sexism, abuse or physical aggression from male EAs than I do from men more broadly.
What are some instances of this: “historically EV has aggressively censored its staff on important topics”?
The forum seems as good a place as any?
I think that sort of long writeup can help signal thoughtfulness even if people aren’t actually going to read through it
In my experience people update less from positive comments and more from negative comments intuitively to correct for this asymmetry (that it’s more socially acceptable to give unsupported praise than unsupported criticism). Your preferred approach to correcting the asymmetry, while I agree is in the abstract better, doesn’t work in the context of these existing corrections.
My interpretation of the refusal was that the investigation hadn’t got to hearing all that information yet.
Was that lying or misremembering though? Lying is a fairly big accusation to make.
I think it’s that you’re not factoring in the bigger point that Tracing and the journalist were making—that it is a clear error to promise a hard deadline to sources and so get into a situation where the you are having to make the judgement call about delaying
I agree. I would actually go further and say that bringing imposter syndrome into it is potentially unhelpful, as it’s in some ways the opposite issue—imposter syndrome is about when you are as smart/competent/well-suited to a role as your peers, but have a mistaken belief that you aren’t. What Olivia’s talking about is actual differences between people that aren’t just imagined due to worry. I could see it come off as patronising/out-of-touch to some, although I know it was meant well.