I’ve found that communicating feedback/corrections often works best when I write something that approximates what I would’ve wished the other person had originally written.
Because of the need to sync more explicitly on a number of background facts and assumptions (and due to not having time for edits/revisions), my draft is longer than I think a moderator’s comment would need to be, were the moderation team to be roughly on the same page about the situation. While I am the Cathleen being referenced, I have had minimal contact with Leverage 2.0 and the EA Forum moderation team, so I expect this draft to be imperfect in various ways, while still pointing at useful and important parts of reality.
Here I’ve made an attempt to rewrite what I wish Ben West had posted in response to Kerry’s tweet thread:
The Forum moderation team has been made aware that Kerry Vaughn published a tweet thread that, among other things, accuses a Forum user of doing things that violate our norms. Most importantly:
Where he crossed the line was his decision to dox people who worked at Leverage or affiliated organizations by researching the people who worked there and posting their names to the EA forum.
We care a lot about ensuring that the EA Forum is a welcoming place where people are free to discuss important issues related to world improvement. While disagreement and criticism are an important part of that, we want to be careful not to allow for abuse to take place on our platform, and so we take such reports seriously.
After reviewing the situation, we have compiled the following response (our full review is still in process but we wanted to share what we have so far while the issue is live):
While Leverage was not a topic that we had flagged as “sensitive” back in Sept 2019 when the then-anonymous user originally made his post, the subsequent discussion around the individuals and organizations who were part of the Leverage/Paradigm ecosystem prior to its dissolution in June 2019 has led it to be classified as a sensitive topic to which we expend more scrutiny and are more diligent about enforcing our norms.
In reviewing the particular post referenced above, we found a number of odd elements:
In posing and then answering his own “Question” on the EA Forum, the user makes his accusation of Paradigm (the org) being a front or a secret replacement for Leverage (the org) despite having previously acknowledged the recent dissolution of the Leverage/Paradigm ecosystem (and in a context where the two organizations were publicly known to be closely connected).
The user largely acts as if he is sharing work history discovered on LinkedIn as his primary argument despite only 2 of the 13 named individuals having Leverage listed on their LinkedIn profiles.
The user names 4 additional people as having worked at Leverage despite citing no evidence of that fact (they did not have Leverage on their LinkedIn profiles).
The user then names 7 additional individuals who did not have Leverage on their LinkedIn profiles and who the user also did not believe to have originally worked at Leverage.
The user neglects to include any context or timelines from LinkedIn, e.g. whether there had been a recent change in work history at the point of the ecosystem dissolution, whether the individuals in question started at Leverage and then moved to Paradigm, started at Paradigm and then moved to Leverage, or started at either Leverage or Paradigm and then moved on to other projects. It is also unclear which, if any, continued to work at either Leverage or Paradigm after the ecosystem dissolution.
More than 2 years later, after reading a clarifying and detailed post about the relevant history of Leverage and Paradigm (which included a request to protect people’s identities) and discovering that the Forum mods had removed the named individuals from his comment, the only edit the user decided to make was to deanonymize the names he’d compiled of people previously affiliated with the Leverage ecosystem.
When this post was initially brought to our attention in July of 2020, along with an explanation of possible negative consequences for the people listed (including ~4 individuals who the user was spreading potential misinformation about), we tried to get in touch with the then-anonymous user, and when we were unable to, we redacted the names from the comment and left an explanation for how the comment could make its point without using the personal information of the named individuals.
At the time, we had been informed that the user was mistaken about the work history for some of the people he listed, in large part due to relying on his incorrect personal assumptions. We did not consider the way that some of the 4 (and possibly others) might’ve intentionally excluded Leverage from their work histories, as we were focused on the ones who were incorrectly identified as having worked at Leverage and the potential consequences of that misinformation. Without yet knowing or investigating the full extent of the anonymous user’s posting history across multiple accounts, we did not suspect a pattern of hostile posts. Because of these factors, we did not evaluate whether this post might be a case of doxing.
In Dec 2021, Cathleen, one of the 4 who had been listed as working at Leverage (despite no record on LinkedIn), published a detailed account of her experience at Leverage/Paradigm. In it, she shared her perspective on harassment and ill-will that had come from the EA and Rationalist community members, and the negative effects of misinformation spread via public community forums. She explained why she had intentionally excluded Leverage from her LinkedIn many years prior and asked that people protect her identity as well as the identities of others from the Leverage ecosystem due to the risk of cancellation and harassment.
A few days later, the EA Forum user (who had revealed his real identity a couple months prior) returned to his anonymous post from Sept 2019 and deanonymized the first and last names of all 13 individuals he had previously named. This included Cathleen as well as the other 3 individuals who he attributed to Leverage (despite no record on LinkedIn). He accompanied the edits with a false/misleading comment (using the anonymous account) minimizing the substantive merit of prior requests for corrections to his post and claiming that all of the relevant information had actually been originally drawn from LinkedIn.
(At a cursory glance, it’s difficult to determine the most natural interpretation of the scope of Cathleen’s request, in order to assess the likelihood that the user was knowingly violating her wishes. We initially had a quite narrow interpretation, reading the quote out of context, but I think the situation becomes clearer if you take the time to read her entire post or the section that the quote was pulled from, entitled “We want to move forward with our lives (and not be cancelled)”, which includes a direct reference to LinkedIn/her intent to keep her work history private.)
After receiving a new complaint about the potential harm of listing individuals’ names, including the spread of misinformation caused by the user’s updated post, we reviewed the case and this time found no violation. As a compromise, we did offer to ask the user if they would be willing to encode the full names to help protect the individuals from potential negative effects arising from a simple google search.
We have since realized that many people (including people on our moderation team) took the user at his word without carefully reviewing the post. We had become confused about the specifics (falsely believing that he was sharing publicly available information from LinkedIn and thus believing that the information could be reasonably treated as true and that the objections raised were splitting hairs). We also did not accurately recognize the general nature/intent of his original post nor the potential negative effects of allowing the information to stand, and we did not evaluate the deanonymizing edits in the context of Cathleen’s recent public request and voiced concerns.
In Oct 2021, when the user had revealed his identity and his use of multiple anonymous accounts, we also failed to review the complete body of evidence and the ways that his actions had potentially violated our norms (e.g. using multiple anonymous accounts to convey similar views on a topic), as well as notice that the full pattern of posts indicated a type of ill-will that we discourage and that is especially relevant given the sensitive nature of the topic of Leverage/Paradigm.
In retrospect, we recognize that while we would like to give users the benefit of the doubt, when there are complaints of doxing, harassment, or other poor behavior, it makes sense for us to look more carefully at the situation and potentially draw on CEA’s Community Health team’s expertise in assisting individuals who flag that they’ve been wronged by a user on the Forum.
Something else we did not consider (because we unfortunately don’t have the bandwidth to track all the goings on in the EA and Rationalist communities) is that the level of threat experienced by people who had previously been part of the Leverage ecosystem had become quite high. In evaluating cases of disclosing private information or even assembling and publishing public information, context matters.
As an example:
On the face of it, it seems fine to have openly communist views or be LGBTQ, but history has shown us that during certain eras, e.g. the Second Red Scare in the US, creating and posting lists of such people (even if true or otherwise individually knowable) would likely subject them to harassment or worse.
It is not an excuse if someone else could create a similarly damaging list, and it doesn’t seem right to ask people to hide their work history from potential employers on a professional networking platform for the sole purpose of protecting themselves from being subject to defamatory public posts from ill-willed and/or ill-informed EAs and Rationalists. It is already unfortunate that the damage to the reputation of the relevant orgs has made it difficult for individuals to decide when and how to associate themselves with their former projects.
Guilt by association is not a good faith argument here, and at a minimum, it seems reasonable to honor individual wishes for Forum users to refrain from using their full names in affiliation with prior projects when requested (and to be careful not to do so in a way that falsely implies that the person is (or should be) ashamed of their affiliation).
After reviewing the overall situation, we think it’s important for users as well as moderators to recognize that posts about former Leverage/Paradigm staff do not happen in a vacuum. We strongly condemn the sharing of information about an individual’s prior professional or social affiliation in a way that intentionally or negligently exposes them to undue negative consequences.
If people are proud of their work at an organization but feel the need to disassociate themselves from that org publicly, it seems like something has gone wrong.
Given the overall pattern of posts from this user’s accounts across the EA Forum as well as Less Wrong from 2018-2021, it seems plausible to our team that the actions of this user may have actually been a significant contributing factor in fomenting negative sentiment towards this group of people. In light of that, making the decision to list their full names in this comment in 2019 and then editing the comment to include them again in 2021, after Cathleen’s detailed post (which includes information relevant to the comment’s hypothesis as well as a request and argument for privacy), we find it harder to defend an interpretation where there was not an intent to cause harm to the named individuals.
Further, it is our understanding that only a fraction of those named worked for Leverage or Paradigm at the time of the original post, and only ~1 to 2 of those named worked for Leverage or Paradigm at the time of the subsequent deanonymizing edit; given that, and with the assumption that the argument for both relevancy of the post on the EA Forum as well as the argument for wrongdoing relies solely on the pattern of employment at these orgs, the weighing of potential benefit/value vs. cost/harm to prior project members seems particularly clear.
Intimidation and harassment can be executed in subtle ways, and while intent can be hard to ascertain, we encourage participants on the Forum to put in extra effort to ward against their posts landing in a gray area.
We don’t think that every case of bad behavior needs to fit neatly into our listed norms (and in evaluating cases like these, we also think it makes sense to revisit our listed norms to see if we should make changes for clarity or scope)[1], but it seems clear to us that the type of behavior exhibited by this user across their anonymous accounts is neither generous nor collaborative and it also seems likely to interfere with good discourse (not least of all by creating a hostile environment for some members of the community).
While we wish we would’ve done better, given our knowledge at the time, we don’t see this as a major failing, but we do recognize the harm that was caused and we want to emphasize that the use of anonymous accounts to harass individuals or groups is not something that we tolerate.
We have referred this case to the CEA Community Health team for further review. They will look at the totality of content from this user on this and related topics, examining patterns, severity, as well as the time period spanned by relevant posts and comments on the EA Forum as well as LW, as a way of assessing potential and actual negative impacts and intent. With the permission of relevant parties, they will also review registered complaints about the user’s behavior. With their input, we will deliberate further and decide whether there is mitigating action that the Forum moderators can and should take in this particular case.
If you have a world improvement related issue that you believe needs public attention but aren’t sure how to navigate it while minimizing unnecessary harm, we encourage you to reach out to the CEA Community Health team who can help organize your thoughts and perhaps mediate a discussion where more information can be exchanged before escalating to a public post. We recognize that in a situation where you suspect a conspiracy or are otherwise suspicious of others’ actions, it may be harder to prioritize the discussion norms of the Forum, but it is in those moments that the norms are most important to respect.
Be kind.
Stay civil, at the minimum. Don’t sneer or be snarky. In general, assume good faith. We may delete unnecessary rudeness and issue warnings or bans for it.
Substantive disagreements are fine and expected. Disagreements help us find the truth and are part of healthy communication.
Stay on topic.
No spam. This forum is for discussions about improving the world, not the promotion of services.
Be honest.
Don’t mislead or manipulate.
Communicate your uncertainty and the true reasons behind your beliefs as much as you can.
*(The Forum moderators are currently grappling with an issue that may be relevant to situations involving sensitive topics like these: it does not violate our norms to inadvertently publish false or misleading information – but in the case that a correction or material clarification is made and the OP doesn’t update their post or comment, an argument could be made that the user is either in violation of the norm of scout mindset/willingness to update their view, or (if they do update their understanding but don’t update their post) they could be in violation of knowingly/deliberately spreading misinformation. We generally have not wanted to act as the arbiters of truth, so it’s not yet clear how to best moderate a situation like this.)
How I wish the EA Forum had responded
I’ve found that communicating feedback/corrections often works best when I write something that approximates what I would’ve wished the other person had originally written.
Because of the need to sync more explicitly on a number of background facts and assumptions (and due to not having time for edits/revisions), my draft is longer than I think a moderator’s comment would need to be, were the moderation team to be roughly on the same page about the situation. While I am the Cathleen being referenced, I have had minimal contact with Leverage 2.0 and the EA Forum moderation team, so I expect this draft to be imperfect in various ways, while still pointing at useful and important parts of reality.
Here I’ve made an attempt to rewrite what I wish Ben West had posted in response to Kerry’s tweet thread:
The Forum moderation team has been made aware that Kerry Vaughn published a tweet thread that, among other things, accuses a Forum user of doing things that violate our norms. Most importantly:
We care a lot about ensuring that the EA Forum is a welcoming place where people are free to discuss important issues related to world improvement. While disagreement and criticism are an important part of that, we want to be careful not to allow for abuse to take place on our platform, and so we take such reports seriously.
After reviewing the situation, we have compiled the following response (our full review is still in process but we wanted to share what we have so far while the issue is live):
While Leverage was not a topic that we had flagged as “sensitive” back in Sept 2019 when the then-anonymous user originally made his post, the subsequent discussion around the individuals and organizations who were part of the Leverage/Paradigm ecosystem prior to its dissolution in June 2019 has led it to be classified as a sensitive topic to which we expend more scrutiny and are more diligent about enforcing our norms.
In reviewing the particular post referenced above, we found a number of odd elements:
In posing and then answering his own “Question” on the EA Forum, the user makes his accusation of Paradigm (the org) being a front or a secret replacement for Leverage (the org) despite having previously acknowledged the recent dissolution of the Leverage/Paradigm ecosystem (and in a context where the two organizations were publicly known to be closely connected).
The user largely acts as if he is sharing work history discovered on LinkedIn as his primary argument despite only 2 of the 13 named individuals having Leverage listed on their LinkedIn profiles.
The user names 4 additional people as having worked at Leverage despite citing no evidence of that fact (they did not have Leverage on their LinkedIn profiles).
The user then names 7 additional individuals who did not have Leverage on their LinkedIn profiles and who the user also did not believe to have originally worked at Leverage.
The user neglects to include any context or timelines from LinkedIn, e.g. whether there had been a recent change in work history at the point of the ecosystem dissolution, whether the individuals in question started at Leverage and then moved to Paradigm, started at Paradigm and then moved to Leverage, or started at either Leverage or Paradigm and then moved on to other projects. It is also unclear which, if any, continued to work at either Leverage or Paradigm after the ecosystem dissolution.
More than 2 years later, after reading a clarifying and detailed post about the relevant history of Leverage and Paradigm (which included a request to protect people’s identities) and discovering that the Forum mods had removed the named individuals from his comment, the only edit the user decided to make was to deanonymize the names he’d compiled of people previously affiliated with the Leverage ecosystem.
When this post was initially brought to our attention in July of 2020, along with an explanation of possible negative consequences for the people listed (including ~4 individuals who the user was spreading potential misinformation about), we tried to get in touch with the then-anonymous user, and when we were unable to, we redacted the names from the comment and left an explanation for how the comment could make its point without using the personal information of the named individuals.
At the time, we had been informed that the user was mistaken about the work history for some of the people he listed, in large part due to relying on his incorrect personal assumptions. We did not consider the way that some of the 4 (and possibly others) might’ve intentionally excluded Leverage from their work histories, as we were focused on the ones who were incorrectly identified as having worked at Leverage and the potential consequences of that misinformation. Without yet knowing or investigating the full extent of the anonymous user’s posting history across multiple accounts, we did not suspect a pattern of hostile posts. Because of these factors, we did not evaluate whether this post might be a case of doxing.
In Dec 2021, Cathleen, one of the 4 who had been listed as working at Leverage (despite no record on LinkedIn), published a detailed account of her experience at Leverage/Paradigm. In it, she shared her perspective on harassment and ill-will that had come from the EA and Rationalist community members, and the negative effects of misinformation spread via public community forums. She explained why she had intentionally excluded Leverage from her LinkedIn many years prior and asked that people protect her identity as well as the identities of others from the Leverage ecosystem due to the risk of cancellation and harassment.
A few days later, the EA Forum user (who had revealed his real identity a couple months prior) returned to his anonymous post from Sept 2019 and deanonymized the first and last names of all 13 individuals he had previously named. This included Cathleen as well as the other 3 individuals who he attributed to Leverage (despite no record on LinkedIn). He accompanied the edits with a false/misleading comment (using the anonymous account) minimizing the substantive merit of prior requests for corrections to his post and claiming that all of the relevant information had actually been originally drawn from LinkedIn.
(At a cursory glance, it’s difficult to determine the most natural interpretation of the scope of Cathleen’s request, in order to assess the likelihood that the user was knowingly violating her wishes. We initially had a quite narrow interpretation, reading the quote out of context, but I think the situation becomes clearer if you take the time to read her entire post or the section that the quote was pulled from, entitled “We want to move forward with our lives (and not be cancelled)”, which includes a direct reference to LinkedIn/her intent to keep her work history private.)
After receiving a new complaint about the potential harm of listing individuals’ names, including the spread of misinformation caused by the user’s updated post, we reviewed the case and this time found no violation. As a compromise, we did offer to ask the user if they would be willing to encode the full names to help protect the individuals from potential negative effects arising from a simple google search.
We have since realized that many people (including people on our moderation team) took the user at his word without carefully reviewing the post. We had become confused about the specifics (falsely believing that he was sharing publicly available information from LinkedIn and thus believing that the information could be reasonably treated as true and that the objections raised were splitting hairs). We also did not accurately recognize the general nature/intent of his original post nor the potential negative effects of allowing the information to stand, and we did not evaluate the deanonymizing edits in the context of Cathleen’s recent public request and voiced concerns.
In Oct 2021, when the user had revealed his identity and his use of multiple anonymous accounts, we also failed to review the complete body of evidence and the ways that his actions had potentially violated our norms (e.g. using multiple anonymous accounts to convey similar views on a topic), as well as notice that the full pattern of posts indicated a type of ill-will that we discourage and that is especially relevant given the sensitive nature of the topic of Leverage/Paradigm.
In retrospect, we recognize that while we would like to give users the benefit of the doubt, when there are complaints of doxing, harassment, or other poor behavior, it makes sense for us to look more carefully at the situation and potentially draw on CEA’s Community Health team’s expertise in assisting individuals who flag that they’ve been wronged by a user on the Forum.
Something else we did not consider (because we unfortunately don’t have the bandwidth to track all the goings on in the EA and Rationalist communities) is that the level of threat experienced by people who had previously been part of the Leverage ecosystem had become quite high. In evaluating cases of disclosing private information or even assembling and publishing public information, context matters.
As an example:
On the face of it, it seems fine to have openly communist views or be LGBTQ, but history has shown us that during certain eras, e.g. the Second Red Scare in the US, creating and posting lists of such people (even if true or otherwise individually knowable) would likely subject them to harassment or worse.
It is not an excuse if someone else could create a similarly damaging list, and it doesn’t seem right to ask people to hide their work history from potential employers on a professional networking platform for the sole purpose of protecting themselves from being subject to defamatory public posts from ill-willed and/or ill-informed EAs and Rationalists. It is already unfortunate that the damage to the reputation of the relevant orgs has made it difficult for individuals to decide when and how to associate themselves with their former projects.
Guilt by association is not a good faith argument here, and at a minimum, it seems reasonable to honor individual wishes for Forum users to refrain from using their full names in affiliation with prior projects when requested (and to be careful not to do so in a way that falsely implies that the person is (or should be) ashamed of their affiliation).
After reviewing the overall situation, we think it’s important for users as well as moderators to recognize that posts about former Leverage/Paradigm staff do not happen in a vacuum. We strongly condemn the sharing of information about an individual’s prior professional or social affiliation in a way that intentionally or negligently exposes them to undue negative consequences.
If people are proud of their work at an organization but feel the need to disassociate themselves from that org publicly, it seems like something has gone wrong.
Given the overall pattern of posts from this user’s accounts across the EA Forum as well as Less Wrong from 2018-2021, it seems plausible to our team that the actions of this user may have actually been a significant contributing factor in fomenting negative sentiment towards this group of people. In light of that, making the decision to list their full names in this comment in 2019 and then editing the comment to include them again in 2021, after Cathleen’s detailed post (which includes information relevant to the comment’s hypothesis as well as a request and argument for privacy), we find it harder to defend an interpretation where there was not an intent to cause harm to the named individuals.
Further, it is our understanding that only a fraction of those named worked for Leverage or Paradigm at the time of the original post, and only ~1 to 2 of those named worked for Leverage or Paradigm at the time of the subsequent deanonymizing edit; given that, and with the assumption that the argument for both relevancy of the post on the EA Forum as well as the argument for wrongdoing relies solely on the pattern of employment at these orgs, the weighing of potential benefit/value vs. cost/harm to prior project members seems particularly clear.
Intimidation and harassment can be executed in subtle ways, and while intent can be hard to ascertain, we encourage participants on the Forum to put in extra effort to ward against their posts landing in a gray area.
We don’t think that every case of bad behavior needs to fit neatly into our listed norms (and in evaluating cases like these, we also think it makes sense to revisit our listed norms to see if we should make changes for clarity or scope)[1], but it seems clear to us that the type of behavior exhibited by this user across their anonymous accounts is neither generous nor collaborative and it also seems likely to interfere with good discourse (not least of all by creating a hostile environment for some members of the community).
While we wish we would’ve done better, given our knowledge at the time, we don’t see this as a major failing, but we do recognize the harm that was caused and we want to emphasize that the use of anonymous accounts to harass individuals or groups is not something that we tolerate.
We have referred this case to the CEA Community Health team for further review. They will look at the totality of content from this user on this and related topics, examining patterns, severity, as well as the time period spanned by relevant posts and comments on the EA Forum as well as LW, as a way of assessing potential and actual negative impacts and intent. With the permission of relevant parties, they will also review registered complaints about the user’s behavior. With their input, we will deliberate further and decide whether there is mitigating action that the Forum moderators can and should take in this particular case.
If you have a world improvement related issue that you believe needs public attention but aren’t sure how to navigate it while minimizing unnecessary harm, we encourage you to reach out to the CEA Community Health team who can help organize your thoughts and perhaps mediate a discussion where more information can be exchanged before escalating to a public post. We recognize that in a situation where you suspect a conspiracy or are otherwise suspicious of others’ actions, it may be harder to prioritize the discussion norms of the Forum, but it is in those moments that the norms are most important to respect.
*(The Forum moderators are currently grappling with an issue that may be relevant to situations involving sensitive topics like these: it does not violate our norms to inadvertently publish false or misleading information – but in the case that a correction or material clarification is made and the OP doesn’t update their post or comment, an argument could be made that the user is either in violation of the norm of scout mindset/willingness to update their view, or (if they do update their understanding but don’t update their post) they could be in violation of knowingly/deliberately spreading misinformation. We generally have not wanted to act as the arbiters of truth, so it’s not yet clear how to best moderate a situation like this.)