I’m one of the Community Liaisons for the EA community (alongside Julia Wise and Charlotte Darnell).
I’m a contact for community health support for EA groups, and I also works on assessing and mitigating risks to the EA community.
I initially studied a lot of physics, then was a high school teacher for 11 years before moving full time into EA community building. I ran local and national EA groups and worked on EA outreach projects, before joining CEA’s Groups Team in early 2020 to support EA groups worldwide. I started working for the Community Health team mid 2021.
Catherine Low
Advice for EA org staff and EA group organisers interacting with political campaigns
I’d like for Marisa to be remembered for all the many ways she contributed to the EA Community, and the causes we all care about.
She contributed in so many ways, that I know I’m going to miss a bunch of things. I guess that was one striking feature of Marisa – she saw things that needed to be done, or heard people’s requests for help or advice, and she didn’t hesitate to leap in to help. In particular, she did an impressive amount to help us be a welcoming, inclusive and supportive community for newcomers to EA and to people of backgrounds underrepresented in EA.
I think she really embodied the EA principles. Many of the things she did were unpaid, unglamorous, and sometimes tedious. But she took on all these tasks with eagerness because they were important and needed doing.This is certainly not a full list—please feel free to add more information if you know it.
In her early EA days (2017) Marisa volunteered at Rethink Charity, helping out across a number of Rethink Charity projects, and was hired part time to work on operations. We could throw her a wide variety of problems and could deeply trust that she’d somehow manage to work them all out.
During this time she studied Sociology at Loyola University in New Orleans (with a semester in Ghana), and wrote an undergrad thesis on Value Drift in EA. This was shared and discussed a bunch over the years and was awarded an EA Forum prize. She also spent some time during this period in Uganda, volunteering at an agricultural development charity.
When she finished her degree, she worked full time at Rethink Charity – keeping the org running smoothly; helping run RC Forward, a charity that allows Canadian donors to donate to the world’s most effective charities; and Giving Tuesday coordination, among other things.
Alongside her work she helped coordinate ops information sharing through Ops Slack, offered her time readily to have calls and EAG meetings with community members interested in working in ops.
She helped run a bunch of online things during Covid, including the EA Student Summit (a 2 day online conference during Covid), and EAGxAsia-Pacific.
She volunteered for ALLFED doing operations work.
With SamiM, she started EA Anywhere, a virtual group for people who don’t live near or can’t attend local EA group meetups. She mostly ran this in her free time – running online meetups, having 1:1s with folks new to EA, and coordinating the other EA Anywhere volunteers. She secured funding in order to hire a new full time community organiser (Sasha) so she could work on other things.
On the back of her experience with EA Anywhere, she worked part time for several months with me on the CEA Groups team, creating resources for EA Groups and writing the monthly EA Groups Newsletter.
In the last few years Marisa studied for a Masters in Public Policy at Georgetown University in DC, while also
Working on operations and community building at the Legal Priorities Project
Working on operations for Effective Institutions Project
Acting as a research assistant at fp21
Interning with the Department of State’s Knowledge Management Program.
I’m devastated by this news. From the first time I worked with Marisa, 7 years ago, it was clear she had a deep compassion for others (human and animal), an ability to authentically connect with a wide range of people, a sharp mind, fantastic sense of humour, and unwavering motivation.
During these last couple of years where Marisa was desperately unwell, I always hoped that she would one day hit on some successful treatment for her agonising illness and she’d make her way back to the optimistic, future focussed, extraordinarily driven person I first got to know and love.
It is just so sad – for her, for all those who cared about her, and for those lives she was yet to touch. My heart goes out to all her friends, family, her former colleagues, and her dog Chance.
Marisa with a dog (a different dog, not Chance)This is Chance
Marisa at an EA Anywhere meetup.
I think the general question of whether enlightenment is real, and if so how could more people achieve it, is a very interesting one and I’d be interested in reading more about.
I did want to note that I don’t think that Spencer’s twitter poll is much evidence for your headline statement “More than 50% of EAs probably believe Enlightenment is real”. I think the EAs people who follow Spencer, and choose to respond to this poll are going to be a reasonably skewed section of the community.
Given that EAGx Utrecht might be the most convenient EAGx for a good chunk of Western Europe, I’m not sure how important it is to have a goal for a % speakers with strong Dutch connections rather than Europe connections. But the density of talented Dutch folk in the community is very high, so you might hit 35% without any specific goal to do so.
Thanks for the public update. Some readers might also be interested in what actions and decisions EV and the Community Health team have been taking around this.
Over the last 9 months Owen has not been allowed to attend EV-run events and in-person spaces (like EA Global and EV run offices). EV exec is currently deciding how EV will interact with Owen going forward, and are planning to publish that in the future. They have sought external advice and advice from our team.
We are in communication with Owen about professional updates on his end so we can check in about safeguards where relevant. We have given him some advice aimed to prevent possible future harm.
People actively considering the choice of whether to work with Owen based on the balance of information available are welcome to reach out to us for input as part of their decision making process. Feel free to reach out to me (catherine@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) if you are in this position.
Thanks for sharing all this information Kat. It seems like this situation has been very difficult for everyone involved. Members of the community health team will look through the post, comments and appendix and work out what our next steps (if any) will be.
Congrats on the new job, and a warm welcome to our community!
I encourage you to reach out to Kathryn from Magnify Mentoring (I’m one of the board members). We support and connect women, non-binary and trans people interested in having a large impact. We have dozens of great mentors, many of whom are young women in leadership positions at orgs funded by EA motivated donors. (You also might be a good fit for becoming a mentor in the future once you have your bearings!)
Good luck!
Here’s where CEA staff are donating in 2023
Catherine from Community Health here. I was aware of this grant application. After discussion with my colleagues in Community Health who were also aware of the same concerns about Nonlinear mentioned in this post, I decided not to advise EAIF to decline this application. Some of the reasons for that were:
The funding was for a project run by three other people (not Nonlinear staff), and I had no concerns about those people working on this project
The three people were not going to be living with Kat and Emerson, which made risks to them lower
At that stage, I had heard some but not all of the complaints listed in this post, so I didn’t have the same picture as I do now. The complaints were confidential, which constrained the possible moves I could make – I wasn’t able to get more information, and I couldn’t share information with the EAIF team that might lead to someone identifying the complainant or Nonlinear guessing that someone complaining had affected their grant decision.
I could and did put some risk mitigation measures in place, in particular, by requiring the grant to be made on the condition that they set up an incubation contract to formalise the roles, reducing the risk that the incubatees and Nonlinear would have different expectation of access to funds and ownership of the project (which was one of the problems Alice reported).
I didn’t request that EAIF send the money directly to the three people involved in the project, rather than Nonlinear, but I was pleased that it happened
Looking back, given the information and constraints I had at the time, I think this was a reasonable decision.
The situation with person L was deeply tragic. This comment explains some of the actions taken by CEA’s Community Health team as a result of their reports.
The situation with person L was deeply tragic. This comment explains some of the actions taken by CEA’s Community Health team as a result of their reports.
Hi Mandelbrot,
Thanks for sharing. The stories of individual women from Silicon Valley are very harrowing.
This point in struck me:
> The men who victimized us are shaping the world. We are canaries for their disregard for human dignity.
It is a deeply sad thing about the world that those who wield power are often unethical or ignorant of the plight of those who they affect. With the improvement in AI technology, I’m expecting rapid changes in who (or what) wields power, so I’m feeling very anxious about this getting worse.
I encourage victims of sexual misconduct to reach out to others for support, and to seriously consider reporting the incident.
People you can report to or seek support from:
If the incident relates to someone involved in the EA community in some way, you can contact the Community Liaisons (Julia Wise, Charlotte Darnell and me), anonymously if you wish.
University authorities if the misconduct involved university staff or students, or a university affiliated group
Police
Human resources staff or managers, if the misconduct was associated with a workplace
The organiser of the event, if the incident happened at an event.
A lawyer—one option with an advice line is Bay Area Legal Aid, or this guidance from Women’s Law on finding a lawyer
And friends and family
Many countries have free sexual misconduct advice available. Some people find it helpful to talk to one of these support services to learn more about what is likely to happen if you report to the police. Here are some resources that may be useful for the US, UK and Australia. We don’t have experience working with these organisations.Information and Support for Sexual Harassment Survivors - mostly US
RAINN—US
Free legal advice on sexual assault or sexual harassment (US only)
List of sexual assault services—Australia
Respect@Work—Australia (workplace)
We also encourage victims to seek mental health support. EA Mental Health Navigator can help people in our community access support.
In case you missed it, and you’re interested. I’ve put some updates relating to the the Community Health and Special Projects Team thinking and actions about concerns about Nonlinear on Ben’s initial post.
General statement (10th Sept)
An incomplete list of actions we’ve taken to reduce risk of other people ending up in similarly bad situations (11th Sept)
Rough timeline and thinking (New − 20th Sept)
Some confidentiality constraints have been lifted in the last few days, so I’m now able to share more information from the Community Health and Special Projects team to give people a sense of how this case went from our perspective, and how we think about these things.
Previous updates:
An incomplete list of actions we’ve taken to reduce risk of other people ending up in similarly bad situations.
To give a picture of how things happened over time:
Starting mid last year, our team heard about many of the concerns mentioned in this post.
At the time of our initial conversations with former staff/associates of Nonlinear, they were understandably reluctant for us to do anything that would let on to Nonlinear that they were raising complaints. This limited our ability to hear Nonlinear’s side of the story, though members of our team did have some conversations with Kat that touched on some of these topics. It also meant that the former staff/associates did not give permission at that time for us to take some steps that we suggested. They also suggested some steps that we didn’t see as feasible for us.
At one point we discussed the possibility of the ex-staff writing a public post of some kind, but at that time they were understandably unwilling to do this. Our impression is that the impetus for that eventually coming together was Ben being willing to put in a lot of work.
Over time, confidentiality became less of a constraint. The people raising the concerns became more willing to have information shared, and some people made public comments, meaning we were able to take some more actions without compromising confidentiality. We were then able to take some steps including what we describe here, and pointing various people to the publicly available claims, to reduce the risk of other people ending up in bad situations.
We had been considering taking more steps when we heard Ben was working with theformer staff/associates on a public post. We felt that this public post might make some of those steps less necessary. We kept collecting information about Nonlinear, but did not do as much as we might have done had Ben not been working on this.
We continued to track Nonlinear and were ready to prioritise the case more highly if it seemed that the risk to others in the community was rising.
- Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by 19 Dec 2023 12:00 UTC; 340 points) (
- Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by 19 Dec 2023 12:00 UTC; 168 points) (LessWrong;
- 14 Dec 2023 7:19 UTC; 123 points) 's comment on Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims by (
- 20 Sep 2023 20:08 UTC; 33 points) 's comment on Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation by (
Catherine from CEA’s Community Health and Special Projects Team here. I have a different perspective on the situation than Jaime does and appreciate that he noted that “these stories have a lot of nuance to them and are in each case the result of the CHT making what they thought were the best decisions they could make with the tools they had.”
I believe Jaime’s points 1, 2 and 3 refer to the same conflict between two people. In that situation, I have deep empathy for the several people that have suffered during the conflict. It was (and still is) a complex and very upsetting situation.
Typically CEA’s Groups team is the team at CEA that interfaces most closely with EA groups. The conflict mentioned here was an unusual situation which led the Community Health team to have more contact with that group than usual. From the information we gathered after talking to several individuals affected, this was an interpersonal conflict. We made a judgement call about what was best given the information, which Jaime disagrees with. To be clear, based on the information we had, there were no threats of violence, sexual harassment, or other forms of seriously harmful behavior that would warrant us to take the steps that Jaime suggests.
Ultimately, I think both Jaime and I had the same goals of increasing the chances that the group thrives and continues to do its important work over the long term, but we had a different perspective on how to move towards that goal in this situation.
I don’t recognise the situation in 4. I’m not sure if that is because I’m unaware, or if I have a different understanding of the situation. If anyone reading knows and wants to share information or give us feedback I’d be very grateful. There are ways you can contact our community liaisons or managers Chana and Nicole anonymously.
Mistakes, flukes, and good calls I made in my multiple careers
Hey Morpheus. This comment provides a partial answer to your question.
Hey Agrippa, this comment provides a partial answer.
The EA donation swap project has had very little usage over the last couple of years and has been officially discontinued.
You can find out about tax deductible effective giving options in your country by checking out Giving What We Can’s guide.