Head of Video at 80,000 Hours
(Opinions here my own by default though will sometimes speak in a professional capacity).
Personal website: www.chanamessinger.com
ChanaMessinger
Karma: 4,369
(Speaking in a private capacity) Fwiw, I suspect that >90% of the worlds in which I found the masturbation comment uncomfortable, I would have found your suggested comment uncomfortable.
I don’t know what the vibe of the situation was here, but speaking to the more general case: in my experience, one thing about vulnerability is that if someone comes off as needy (which can be easy to do by accident), it can amplify other discomforts, because then I’m being put in a position of power or control over this person’s shame or other bad feelings, so then I feel like it’s on me to fix their bad feelings.
I think EA institutional processes need to change to make things like the FTX crisis less likely in future
[Taking out “significantly”, in case that’s significant for the karma, idea stolen from OllieBase below]
Have passed on to the team!
I’m very sympathetic to this but also really resonate with
The purpose of the effective altruism community is not to make effective altruists happy or to get them relationships, and by the same token the purpose of my personal life is not to improve the health or public relations of the effective altruism movement.
From this piece.
“don’t do X within Y time period” is also broadly how high school program rules in the EA space I’m familiar with work (though Y is significantly longer, but it’s especially relevant when you have junior counselors close to attendees in age)
Not all “EA” things are good
just saying what everyone knows out loud (copied over with some edits from a twitter thread)
Maybe it’s worth just saying the thing people probably know but isn’t always salient aloud, which is that orgs (and people) who describe themselves as “EA” vary a lot in effectiveness, competence, and values, and using the branding alone will probably lead you astray.
Especially for newer or less connected people, I think it’s important to make salient that there are a lot of takes (pos and neg) on the quality of thought and output of different people and orgs, which from afar might blur into “they have the EA stamp of approval”
Probably a lot of thoughtful people think whatever seems shiny in a “everyone supports this” kind of way is bad in a bunch of ways (though possibly net good!), and that granularity is valuable.I think feel very free to ask around to get these takes and see what you find—it’s been a learning experience for me, for sure. Lots of this is “common knowledge” to people who spend a lot of their time around professional EAs and so it doesn’t even occur to people to say + it’s sensitive to talk about publicly. But I think “some smart people in EA think this is totally wrongheaded” is a good prior for basically anything going on in EA.
Maybe at some point we should move to more explicit and legible conversations about each others’ strengths and weaknesses, but I haven’t thought through all the costs there, and there are many. Curious for thoughts on whether this would be good! (e.g. Oli Habryka talking about people with integrity here)
- It’s “The EA-Adjacent Forum” now by (Apr 1, 2023, 8:15 PM; 175 points)
- Problems with free services for EA projects by (Aug 3, 2023, 3:28 PM; 134 points)
- “Longtermist causes” is a tricky classification by (Aug 29, 2023, 5:41 PM; 63 points)
- Highlights from last week by (Mar 9, 2023, 8:27 PM; 21 points)
[Sorry for delay, there were a number of retreats / conferences recently]. Looking into this atm, hoping to know better what the timeline is going to be on getting this info (some people who know more than me have some out of office time) by the end of this week, will update then on timeline for getting a comment written, feel free to ping me if I haven’t.
Edit March 10: Still waiting to get records and info back. Will come back to this in a week if I haven’t updated by then.
Relevant comment now here.
Oh, sorry! TAPs are a CFAR / psychology technique. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wJutA2czyFg6HbYoW/what-are-trigger-action-plans-taps
Not a generally used phrase, just my attempting to point to “a TAP for asking Chesterton’s fence-style questions”
Maybe there should be a “top to read” in each tag? (This may already exist)
Got it—I have lots of thoughts here! Overall, the team has been wanting more contact people for a long time, and I’m definitely in favor of some versions of that (subject to considerations of tractability and prioritization). I still think there might be a few things you mean, but here are some thoughts.
You might mean something like “a different team doing the same work but with different funding and institutional affiliation”.
This might be good. It does bear coordination costs, and for instance it might mean we don’t see problematic patterns as easily. I’m not sure what us setting this up would look like; it takes a lot of trust to vouch for someone to handle tradeoffs and a variety of situations with sensitivity; in general if we found someone with the same skillset as people on our team who had free time, we’d want to hire them! (And this would allow syncing up on approach and process; with more separation, we might put ourselves in a position of vouching for someone where we couldn’t mentor or observe their process; that seems potentially problematic). This would take the kind of work and effort where likely we’d have to be quite sure it was the top priority for our team.
2. You might mean something like having people who aren’t connected to Community Health but pass on information to the Community Health team, perhaps to allow for:
Greater anonymity
Wider variety of people so that more of the community has someone they know and feel comfortable with
Non-CEA support, but still having important information about concerning behavior passed on.
Passing feedback to the Community Health team
Some considerations:
To some extent this exists in the form of contact people for city and university groups, and to some extent in the form of friends—if you have a friend who tells you a concerning story, and they’d rather you convey it to Community Health with some details anonymized, that is just fine by us (and happens pretty often)
We were already looking into programs to allow real-time textual anonymous communication before this incident; that might make some people feel more comfortable talking to us and seeing what thoughts, advice or ideas we have before or instead of deanonymizing themselves
Something I wish more people knew is that contact people are happy to just give advice about sticky situations; not every call has to be a “report”
If we pay people, they do have a connection to Community Health, so supporting this financially may undermine one of the goals. That said, it’s not a blocker; it could still be a good idea on net or we could try to get outside funding
It can be hard to convey stories with enough detail to make it clear why we should take certain actions without deanonymizing people
See the point above about trust required for vouching.
I’m not yet sure how many more people would get support via doing this, despite it seeming good—seems like we’ll learn from this situation
Hi Keller -
Regarding
> Right now, I have not been able to discern any plan from the Community Health team more extensive than “Julia screwed up and will try not to do that again.”
(Note that I’m speaking as interim head of the Community Health team)
I’m planning on spending significant time over the next several weeks on the plan I laid out in this comment (which is on a different top-level post, so you might have missed it if you are only reading this post’s discussion).
There will also be an internal reflection process. Julia and Nicole are going to do retrospectives on this situation, which will then get discussed with me, Ben West (as transition coordinator at CEA), and some senior management and/or trustees of the EV entities, possibly looping in others at CEA or EV as well.
Further steps are yet to be decided (and some will depend on the information we learn), but could include having other members of the team do assessments of the process and decision-making in this situation and getting opinions on this situation and our approach generally from other people who do similar or analogous work, in and out of EA.
Discussing retrospectives with senior management, plus whatever other steps are most appropriate, are all ways of feeding into decisions about what we should do going forward, for instance if we should have different processes or approaches to cases, or certain kinds of cases.
Thanks for your comment and kind words.
I’ll respond to the second set of questions here (we’ll respond to comments from the other post there).
I can’t speak to the external investigation since I’m not involved (it’s going through the board so as to be external to my team).
In terms of our internal investigation, since I don’t currently know the form it will take there’s not much I can precommit to, but I definitely think we should publicly say new processes or other changes we’re putting in place (or if none, that it’s none), so that people know how we’re planning to approach things in the future.
I think the categories you’ve laid out are good ones though I don’t yet know if those will end up being exactly the categories I end up using as Ben and I go through this—appreciate you writing them up and flagging them. My strong guess is that relevant categories will include (as I noted in things I wanted to keep in mind during reflection) conflicts of interest and powerful people in EA.I want to also address some elephant-in-the-room feeling (which may not be relevant to you, but feels important to say), which is that as I go into this only knowing what I learned recently, it feels important that before an investigation is finished to be able to “split and commit”. I want to hold onto multiple hypotheses, including
that we made serious mistakes and should change a lot
that our processes need serious change
that with the information they had at the time, people acted reasonably
that people didn’t act reasonably but that the processes are basically fine, since no process is going to yield no mistakes.
I don’t put equal weight on all those hypotheses, but I do want to be able to hold them, and at the end of the investigation, to say publicly what conclusions I’ve come to about those things.
Hey Joshua—can I ask you to clarify more what you mean about what kinds of people to support? I can imagine a few different things you might be pointing at being important.
Hi Peter—these posts (from Owen and from the UK boards) + comments from me and Julia on the latter have just gone up that might have the information and comments you’re looking for.
Hi Simon -
Two posts (from Owen and from the UK boards) + comments from me and Julia on the latter have just gone up that might have the updates you’re looking for.
Hi Marzhin -
Two posts (from Owen and from the UK boards) + comments from me and Julia on the latter have just gone up that might have the information and comments you’re looking for.
Meta: I’m writing on behalf of the Community Health and Special Projects team (here: Community Health team) at CEA to explain how we’re thinking about next steps. For context, our team consists of:
Me, Chana Messinger: Normally I specialize (from a community health lens) in EA projects that involve high schoolers or minors, and community epistemics; since November, I’ve been the interim head of the Community Health team
Nicole Ross, the usual team head, who has been focusing on EV US board work since the FTX crisis, and when she transitions back to community health work, she plans to prioritize thinking through what changes should happen in EA given everything that happened with FTX
Julia Wise, who usually serves as a community health contact person for the EA community, but has been working primarily on other projects for a few months
Catherine Low, who serves as a contact person for the EA community among other roles
Eve McCormick, project manager and senior assistant
An affiliate and various contractors
In this comment I’ll sometimes be referring to Effective Ventures (EV) UK and Effective Ventures (EV) US together as the “EV entities” or as Effective Ventures or EV.
Where things stand and next steps:
Someone came to Julia in 2021 with information about possible misconduct by Owen Cotton-Barratt, a few years after the events they were reporting. Julia took steps at the time in response, described here. In 2021, when Nicole became her manager, Julia told Nicole that there were concerns about Owen’s behavior, but as far as they remember Julia didn’t share many details at the time.
Earlier this month, after reading the TIME piece, Julia filled me and Nicole in on more details, and then later we informed the rest of the Community Health team about what had happened. We’re now looking back on whether Julia or Nicole made mistakes in handling this, and whether we should change things about our processes going forward.
As the post notes, an external firm is going to give us their independent assessment; I think this is important, and I’m grateful to the trustees of EV UK and EV US for helping to organize it. There will also be an internal reflection process. Julia and Nicole are going to do retrospectives on this situation, which will then get discussed with me, Ben West (as transition coordinator at CEA), and some senior management and/or trustees of the EV entities, possibly looping in others at CEA or EV as well.
Further steps are yet to be decided (and some will depend on the information we learn), but could include having other members of the team do assessments of the process and decision-making in this situation and getting opinions on this situation and our approach generally from other people who do similar or analogous work, in and out of EA.
Things we will be keeping in mind as we reflect:
potential conflicts of interest, the role of power in EA, and our own incentives as a team
that crucial details can differ between people or be misremembered over years
that the best response to a pattern of making people uncomfortable (for example) can be different from the best response to an isolated incident
that there are important selection effects on what we get to hear, and that we certainly don’t have all the information we would ideally want to have
We are also going to continue our normal work. We are available for calls concerning issues in the community, and you can reach out to us via relevant team members’ emails or our form (which can be anonymous). Feel free to also use the general form or forms for specific team members to give us feedback, questions or other thoughts and perspectives, on this situation or more generally.Forms
Chana’s form
Nicole’s Admonymous
Catherine’s Admonymous
Julia’s form
We are also considering many possibilities for proactive work to make the EA community safer and better at dealing with this kind of situation (some of which are already happening, and will continue).
If instead you’d like to share thoughts or feelings about this situation to someone not on the team, Habiba Islam, Luzia Bruckamp and Rockwell Schwartz have all kindly volunteered to be listening ears not working at CEA. (Habiba works for 80,000 Hours, which along with CEA is an Effective Ventures project, and Rockwell is paid via CEA Community Building Grant. Luzia is an EA community member who volunteered to help on Twitter.) If you have feedback for the Community Health team you’d like them to pass on, they’re happy to do that, at whatever level of anonymizing / aggregating you wish. They are all volunteering for this additional work, so may have limited time slots available, but will communicate that with you. (Note that these people were asked in an informal capacity and have not been formally assessed or trained by our team.)
There are also resources external to our team that may be useful, such as those compiled by RAINN.
I’m going to do my best in the comments to answer questions people have, with all the obvious caveats about ones I can’t answer or won’t be able to answer quickly.
My heart goes out to everyone who has suffered from sexual harassment or misconduct in this community. I’m sorry, and I care deeply about making sure our team is equipped to handle these issues well.
- EV UK board statement on Owen’s resignation by (Feb 20, 2023, 5:49 PM; 186 points)
- EV investigation into Owen and Community Health by (Jan 29, 2024, 9:23 PM; 90 points)
- 's comment on EV investigation into Owen and Community Health by (Jan 29, 2024, 9:47 PM; 81 points)
- Further possible projects on EA reform by (Nov 9, 2023, 7:06 PM; 43 points)
- 's comment on Update on project on reforms at EA organizations by (Jun 19, 2023, 11:29 PM; 23 points)
- 's comment on A statement and an apology by (Feb 22, 2023, 1:06 AM; 23 points)
- 's comment on Update on project on reforms at EA organizations by (Jun 22, 2023, 10:54 AM; 17 points)
- 's comment on Abuse in LessWrong and rationalist communities in Bloomberg News by (Mar 17, 2023, 7:45 PM; 9 points)
I’m doing AGI Safety Fundamentals right now and they use Miro, and I like it a lot; for the purpose of running a class, I’d use Miro over Excalidraw based on my current experience with both. For more general diagram-making, I’m not yet sure, but if you end up having thoughts we’d love to add them to the post.
For what it’s worth, my model is that anything with intense emotional openness and big potential emotional shifts (like circling, like some parts of EA) are both high potential reward (self-improvement, self-knowledge, cool and intense experiences) and higher risk (destabilization, being vulnerable to others’ narratives). I believe Anna Salamon talked about this as a mistake when she discussed CFAR doing a lot of circling without being attendant to the power dynamics between people in the circle.