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
Hey Maya, I’m Catherine - one of the contact people on CEA’s community health team (along with Julia Wise). I’m so so sorry to hear about your experiences, and the experiences of your friends. I share your sadness and much of your anger too. I’ll PM you, as I think it could be helpful for me to chat with you about the specific problems (if you are able to share more detail) and possible steps.
If anyone else reading this comment who has encountered similar problems in the EA community, I would be very grateful to hear from you too. Here is more info on what we do.Ways to get in touch with Julia and me :
Email: Julia: julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org, Catherine: catherine@centreforeffectivealtruism.org
Form (you can choose to be anonymous)
I’m one of the Community Liaisons for CEA’s Community Health and Special Projects team. The information shared in this post is very troubling. There is no room in our community for manipulative or intimidating behaviour.
We were familiar with many (but not all) of the concerns raised in Ben’s post based on our own investigation. We’re grateful to Ben for spending the time pursuing a more detailed picture, and grateful to those who supported Alice and Chloe during a very difficult time.
We talked to several people currently or formerly involved in Nonlinear about these issues, and took some actions as a result of what we heard. We plan to continue working on this situation.
From the comments on this post, I’m guessing that some readers are trying to work out whether Kat and Emerson’s intentions were bad. However, for some things, intentions might not be very decision-relevant. In my opinion, meta 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’m looking forward to seeing what information Nonlinear shares in the coming weeks.
- 20 Sep 2023 19:53 UTC; 67 points) 's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by (
- 20 Oct 2023 14:37 UTC; 42 points) 's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by (
- 20 Sep 2023 20:08 UTC; 33 points) 's comment on Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation by (
Hi all -
This post has now been edited, but we would like to address some of the original claims, since many people have read them. In particular, the author claims:
They have identified 30 incidents of rape or abuse with strong ties to EA, as well as 14 that are “EA adjacent”
They have been fighting assault in EA since 2016
Here is some context:
The author emailed the Community Health team about 7 months ago, when she shared some information about interpersonal harm; someone else previously forwarded us some anonymous information that she may have compiled. Before about 7 months ago, we hadn’t been in contact with her.
The information from her included serious concerns about various people in the Bay Area, most of whom had no connection to EA as far as we know. 4 of the accused seemed to be possibly or formerly involved with EA. CEA will not allow those 4 people at our events (though for context most of them haven’t applied). As we’ve said before, we’re grateful to her for this information.
In addition, she later sent us some information that we had also previously received from other sources and we were already taking action on. We appreciate people sharing information even when it turns out we already have it, but it is relevant for clarifying the degree to which she is counterfactually responsible for our actions.
Based on our records, this is the extent of the relevant information she has shared with us.
She referred to some other situations both on the Forum and privately, which did not contain enough information for us to identify the situation or learn more.
We have emailed the author to tell her we will not be contracting her services.
We don’t think it’s productive to go into more depth about the author’s specific claims or engage in a back and forth with her, but we wanted to publicly flag that we disagree with many of her claims.
If you have concerns about our approach here, our reasoning etc., please let us know. Please reach out to me by email (catherine@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) or fill in this form (anonymously if you wish) to reach the whole Community Health team. You can read more about Julia Wise and my roles as contact people for the EA community here.- 11 Apr 2023 16:49 UTC; 22 points) 's comment on EA, Rationality, Sexual Assault, and Liability by (
- 11 Apr 2023 15:48 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on EA, Rationality, Sexual Assault, and Liability by (
I’m glad that FLI put this FAQ out, but I’m nervous that several commenters are swinging from one opinion (boo, FLI) to the opposite (FLI is fine! Folks who condemned FLI were too hasty!) too quickly.
This FAQ only slightly changed my opinion on FLI’s grantmaking process. My best guess is that something went very wrong with this particular grant process. My reasoning:
I’d be surprised if FLI’s due diligence step is intended to be a substantial part of the assessment process. My guess it that due diligence might usually be more about formalities like answering—can we legally pay this person? Is the person is who they say they are? And not—Is this a good grant to make?
It seems like FLI would be creating a huge hassle if they regularly sent out “intention to issue a grant” to prospective grantees (with the $ amount especially), only to withdraw support later. It would be harmful for the prospective grantees by giving them false hopes (could cause them to change their plans thinking the money is coming), and annoying for the grant maker because I suspect they’d be asked to explain why they changed their mind.
If indeed FLI does regularly reject grants at due diligence stage, that would update me towards thinking nothing went too badly with this particular grant (and I’d like to know their reasons for doing that as I’m probably missing something).
Note—I’m speaking for myself not CEA (where I work).- 21 Jan 2023 13:57 UTC; 10 points) 's comment on FLI FAQ on the rejected grant proposal controversy by (
I’m so sorry to hear about your negative experiences in EA community meetups. It is totally not okay for people to feel pressured or manipulated into sexual relationships. The community health team at CEA is available to talk, and will try to help resolve the situation. You can use this form to contact the team (you can be anonymous) or contact Julia Wise julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org or Catherine Low catherine@centreforeffectivealtruism.org directly.
If a crime has been committed (or you have reason to suspect a crime has been committed), we encourage people to report the crime to the police.
In the future I’d also be happy to talk with community members about the codes of conducts and other processes that CEA and the wider EA community has in place, and listen to their suggestions.
Hey Aella, I appreciate you telling your story. I’m really sorry that you’ve experienced people lying about you, and making harmful assumptions about your intent . That really really sucks.
I’ve put more information about most (not all) of the Community Health team’s understanding of the TIME cases in this comment:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=jKJ4kLq8e6RZtTe2P
It might clarify some of your questions about individual cases.
Thanks for asking Yadav. I can confirm that:
Nonlinear has not been invited or permitted to run sessions or give talks relating to their work, or host a recruiting table at EAG and EAGx conferences this year.
Kat ran a session on a personal topic at EAG Bay Area 2023 in February. EDIT: Kat, Emerson and Drew also had a community office hour slot at that conference.
Since then we have not invited or permitted Kat or Emerson to run any type of session.We have been considering blocking them from attending future conferences since May, and were planning on making that decision if/when Kat or Emerson applied to attend a future conference.
- Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by 19 Dec 2023 12:00 UTC; 337 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 19:53 UTC; 67 points) 's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by (
- 20 Sep 2023 20:08 UTC; 33 points) 's comment on Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation by (
- 11 Sep 2023 16:43 UTC; 8 points) 's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by (
- 11 Sep 2023 16:46 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by (
- 12 Sep 2023 12:51 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by (
- 12 Sep 2023 12:48 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Sharing Information About Nonlinear by (
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.
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.
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; 337 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 (
I admit I was a bit sad when Jonathan took this role because I thought he’d do more good in Community Building (my field of work). “Surely an Office Manager couldn’t be as impactful!” I bemoaned. But now that I’ve worked a while in Trajan house my eyes have been opened to the value of an outstanding office manager, and I’ve had to eat my words (and arrange to move to Oxford so I can work there permanently). So I think this role is surprisingly high value.
Good question Ozzie. In the start of 2018 we mostly focussed on getting into schools and on the surveys (metrics 1 and 2 above), because they were our first hurdles and we were very uncertain on how these would go until we started the project.
However that meant we didn’t optimise our workshops for engaging students long term (metric 3) for several months after starting the project. That meant we weren’t confident in making decisions based on the first indications that we were not meeting metric 3, and ran the project for several more months as a result. If we had planned our long term engagement strategy at the start of 2018 and set success criteria earlier we could have learnt what we needed to in less time.
Thanks for this lovely post. I have SO many reasons to love effective altruism, here’s one (maybe I’ll write more later):
TruthseekingnessI’ve been seeking out truthseeking communities all my life, but they all fell short of my goals until I found EA. Some examples:
I studied particle physics—what could be more truthseeky than trying to find the fundamental nature of the universe? Back then, a bunch of particle physicists claimed to believe in a class of theories called “supersymmetry”—and I never understood why—there was no evidence for it, and I never really grokked why people thought the theoretical arguments were so compelling. At the time I just thought I wasn’t intelligent or knowledgeable enough to get it, but I might have undersold myself. The Large Hadron Collider has since ruled out all the then most popular versions of supersymmetry, and it isn’t cool any more. I think there might have been some sort of shared delusion because people wanted it to be true, partly because it was testable by the particle accelerator that was under construction.
When I was a science teacher it used to drive me BONKERS that students were taught (and required to regurgitate in national exams) incorrect force diagrams. (E.g. for a car accelerating on a flat, level road, students were required to draw the “friction” arrow pointing backwards—whereas in reality, friction is forward and without it the wheels would just spin and the car wouldn’t go anywhere). I get the need for simplification as much as the next guy, but you can’t tell me that “point the arrow in the exact opposite direction” counts as simplification. I talked to a bunch of teachers, the national qualifications authority, the ministry of education, and created draft alternative (and equally simple) resources for them to review. But no one else seemed to care at all about whether what we were teaching was accurate—or at least didn’t care enough to do anything about it.
But EA seems to be very different—this community seems to be unusually good at seeking the truth, even (or especially?) when it is inconvenient, scary, or even shameful. One of the first EA talks I went to blew my mind by questioning whether we are currently wasting our donations, by doing and then undoing good. Then I read GiveWell’s noodling on whether or not some of their (then) top charities are likely to have no impact, and discussions on whether becoming vegetarian increases animal suffering. More recently I’ve seen commentary about whether our community has accelerated dangerous AI capabilities or whether our community contributed to an environment that led to multi-billion dollar fraud. We should take these possible negatives very seriously. The fact that we do take these negatives seriously, and that we continue to try to get better a truth seeking gives me a whole bunch of hope.
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.
Hey AllAmericanBreakfast. I’m Catherine from the Community Health team. I’m so so sorry to hear that your friend was raped. If at all possible, I want to make sure they have support, justice, and that the perpetrator doesn’t have the opportunity to do this again. It doesn’t matter if your friend doesn’t identify as EA, if your friend, or the perpetrator are involved in the EA community in anyway we’re here to do our best to help. I’ll reach out via PM.
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)
This bill does seem very important. It is hard to know what will help or hinder the political process, so I recommend that folks in the EA community don’t try to do a public coordinated effort try to influence the content or outcome of this proposed bill—at least for now.
My understanding is that the people involved in drafting this bill are aware of the EA community, so they know they can reach out when and if they think that would be helpful.
I’m aware that more people apply for EAG SF and London than are accepted. That makes me wonder if there is value to also having additional EAGxs on the West Coast of North America or in the UK, so there are opportunities for these people (and anybody who didn’t apply because they didn’t think they would get in) to attend an accessible conference, which may be a more friendly introduction to EA than an EAG would be. It could also soften the blow of rejection to be able to say “sorry, you aren’t invited to EAG, but if you can, go to this EAGx and please apply again next year”.
Do you think that would be worthwhile? Do you have an idea of the numbers of people in this category?
Thanks Keerthana. I’m afraid I don’t know anything about CFAR’s processes. It might be worth you reaching out to CFAR directly: contact@rationality.org.
I look forward to reading your
> women-friendly culture updates a movement can take
If and when you choose to share.
We (the Community Health team at CEA) would like to share some more information about the cases in the TIME article, and our previous knowledge of these cases. We’ve put these comments in the approximate order that they appear in the TIME article.
Re: Gopalakrishnan’s experiences
We read her post with concern. We saw quite a few supportive messages from community members, and we also tried to offer support. Our team also reached out to Gopalakrishnan in a direct message to ask if she was interested in sharing more information with us about the specific incidents.
Re: The man who
Expressed opinions about “pedophilic relationships”
“Another woman, who dated the same man several years earlier in a polyamorous relationship, alleges that he had once attempted to put his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping.”
We don’t know this person’s identity for sure, but one of these accounts resembles a previous public accusation made against a person who used to be involved in the rationality community. He has been banned from CEA events for almost 5 years, and we understand he has been banned from some other EA spaces. He has been a critic of the EA movement for some time.
We were aware of the second allegation and were in contact with the woman. We did not know about the first allegation until recently.
Re: Masturbation comment
Time magazine described it as “After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.””
We know lots of people are particularly concerned about this, which makes sense. Our understanding is that more information will be forthcoming, and we hope to be able to say more about it next week.
Re: Rochelle Shen “says she has firsthand experience of the ways the movement dismisses allegations. “They want to keep it all in the family.””
As far as we know, we hadn’t interacted with Shen at the time this was written. We don’t have a complete picture of how others in the community have handled allegations that have come to them. In general, the community health team encourages people to consider all their options for handling a problem, including getting legal advice if they think a crime may have happened.
Re: The Bay Area House
The TIME article describes the house as “roughly a third of the residents were EAs, and the house regularly hosted EA events.” We were aware of the existence of this house after some concerns were raised about a year ago. We weren’t aware of EA events hosted in the house, but it is common for people in the EA community to invite other community members around to their houses.
Re: “male co-leader of the house was accused of sexual misconduct by an ex-girlfriend who says she met him at an EA conference”
Community Health became aware of concerns about this person about a year ago. He had been to an EA Global conference around 5 years ago, and we decided not to admit him to any future CEA-run events. We reached out to the accuser asking if we could help.
Re: “the other residents of the house started a Google Doc to collectively discuss how to handle them.”
Community Health was not aware of this document or the process in the house generally.
Re: “an EA living in the house suggested bringing in a mediator named Aurora Quinn-Elmore”
Community Health has not referred people to Quinn-Elmore. She last attended an EA conference around 5 years ago.
Re: “a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college”
To our knowledge, we don’t know about this specific situation
Re: Man who “asked how old she was, she recalls, then quickly suggested she join his polyamorous relationship. Shortly after agreeing to date him, “He told me that ‘I could sleep with you on Monday,’ but on Tuesday I’m with this other girl,”
To our knowledge, we don’t know about this specific situation.
Re: other concerns raised in the comments section
A commenter wrote that they had heard some very serious allegations. They later removed their own comments about this.
We were aware of one of these situations and had already taken action to ban the accused from CEA events (although the accused doesn’t seem to have been involved with the EA community in some time).
Some of the other situations this commenter referred to were not ones we had heard about, and did not contain enough information for us to identify the situation or learn more. We have asked the commenter for more information. If anyone has specific information about these or other problems in the community, our door is very much open.
…….
If you have more information about these cases, or other situations of harassment or abuse in the EA community, we would really like to help.
Please reach out to me by email (catherine@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) or fill in this form (anonymously if you wish) to reach the whole Community Health team. You can read more about Julia Wise and my roles as contact people for the EA community here.
If the situation may have involved a crime, you may wish to reach out to
Legal help. Many countries have free hotlines that can help people navigate the legal and justice systems (e.g. sexual violence hotline in US, resources for crime victims in the US, this list of legal hotlines in the UK)
The police
If the situation involves mental health issues, you may wish to seek professional help