Ebenezer Dukakis

Karma: 671

Ebenezer Dukakis 9 Sep 2023 2:23 UTC
48 points
15 ∶ 2
in reply to: freedomandutility’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear

Employers should not be asking employees to do things which are illegal

I don’t know if that is a great guideline. For example, should we feel obliged to condemn an EA animal welfare org if they ask their employees to violate ag-gag laws?

It seems to me that contextual information is more important than the mere fact of a law being violated. In the ag-gag example, that could be stuff like: Did the employee take the job knowing they would be asked to do this? Did their boss threaten serious retaliation if they didn’t do it?

In general the law is not necessarily well-aligned with doing the most good, or even common sense. See https://www.econlib.org/three-felonies-a-day/

[EDIT: To clarify, it seems quite plausible to me that as a community we should update away from law-breaking on the current margin. But, I think this could in principle be taken too far. I also agree power dynamics are important.]

Ebenezer Dukakis 9 Sep 2023 2:51 UTC
78 points
30 ∶ 14
on: An Incomplete List of Things I Think EAs Probably Shouldn’t Do
I’m concerned about EA falling into the standard “risk-averse bureaucracy” failure mode. Every time something visibly bad happens, the bureaucracy puts a bunch of safeguards in place. Over time the drag created by the safeguards does a lot of harm, but because the harm isn’t as visible, the bureaucracy doesn’t work as effectively to reduce it.

I would like to see Fermi estimates for some of these, including explicit estimates of less-visible downsides. For example, consider EA co-living, including for co-workers. If this was banned universally, my guess is that it would mean EAs paying many thousands of dollars extra in rent for housing and/or office space per month. It would probably lead to reduced motivation, increased loneliness, and wasted commute time among EAs. EA funding would become more scarce, likely triggering Goodharting for EAs who want to obtain funding, or people dying senselessly in the developing world.

A ban on co-living doesn’t seem very cost-effective to me. It seems to me that expanding initiatives like Basefund would achieve something similar, but be far more cost-effective.

Ebenezer Dukakis 9 Sep 2023 15:08 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: freedomandutility’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear

I agree with this, but I think deontological principles like “don’t ask people who you have power over to break the law” are good and should be followed, even when in specific situations, this might be misaligned with the act which generates the greatest utility in the short term.

It’s good to think carefully before violating this kind of deontological principle. But I have a hard time endorsing your statement in general.

It seems to me that in the case of e.g. an unjust law, the principle you endorse is fundamentally about reducing expected harm to your employee. If the expected harm to your employee is small relative to the harm averted for some other party, and your employee is willing to take on the risk, I don’t see a good case for sticking with the principle.

Thought experiment: Suppose you’re a wealthy abolitionist living in the northern US prior to the Civil War. You have an abolitionist friend in town who’s currently working as a clerk. They want to help fugitive slaves, and the punishment for doing so happens to be relatively light. Is it acceptable to hire them to help fugitive slaves?

With regard to Linch’s comment in this thread—let’s say that almost everyone in your state thinks helping fugitive slaves is wrong. According to them, it violates sacred property rights and the US Constitution.

An abolitionist movement which condemns you for hiring your friend strikes me as pathologically risk-averse, in a way that will cause slavery to end very slowly or not at all.

I tend to see deontological principles as opportunities to think carefully about what you are doing rather than hard rules, due to examples like the above. I am very interested to see someone make the opposing case. [Edit: An exception would be rule violations that seem suspiciously self-serving. Because it’s so hard to root out self-serving thoughts & behavior in oneself, I think a better approach here might be: Identify some rules that seem good for a 3rd party you don’t especially trust, then follow those rules yourself. My thinking is still developing on this.]

Ebenezer Dukakis 9 Sep 2023 15:30 UTC
18 points
5 ∶ 4
in reply to: freedomandutility’s comment on: An Incomplete List of Things I Think EAs Probably Shouldn’t Do
If it’s pointless to do a Fermi estimate, that sounds a lot like saying it’s pointless to try and figure out whether a ban is a good idea?

If that’s the case, I favor letting people decide for themselves—individuals understand their particular context, and can make a guess that’s customized for their particular situation.

Ebenezer Dukakis 9 Sep 2023 16:18 UTC
15 points
4 ∶ 4
in reply to: lilly’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear

not negotiating financial details with your employees, covering your employees’ rent and groceries

My impression is that it’s very normal for employees to expense food and living costs during business travel without any negotiation, and that there exist common jobs where free room and board are a part of the compensation (e.g. working at a resort or on an oil rig).

being in any way involved in your employees breaking the law

I think it’s fairly common for companies to ask their employees to break the law. (Often a bad thing, from society’s perspective. But common.) I was asked to do it multiple times a day at a previous job. (A good job, at a well-regarded company. I’m not sure they even knew they were breaking the law until I pointed it out. Eventually they changed their practices—possibly because it made very little difference to the bottom line.)

With regard to weirdness in general: The biggest mistakes I see the EA movement making—with harms I estimate as far larger than harms in the OP—are a result of insufficient weirdness, not excess weirdness. So I don’t like to discourage weirdness in a blanket sort of way.

It’s easy with the benefit of hindsight to point out a bunch of things which might have created a bad situation. What we really need is the ability to forecast the effects of individual norms in advance.

Ebenezer Dukakis 9 Sep 2023 18:14 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
Interesting framework! I agree social norms are important.

A possible problem with this kind of conformity principle is that it can preclude moral progress. Suppose you think a popular law is unjust, and the best way to demonstrate that is to break it publicly. It could be that all the groups you name take the view that an unjust law is good. If everyone followed conformity principles, I think we would have a lot more old unjust laws on the books. (You could try using the third clause about “laws other EAs think is OK to break” as an out here, but there’s a problem—EAs in this very thread are endorsing conformity and advocating against weirdness! Maybe the EA movement was once a bastion of principled independent moral reasoning, but I get the sense that aspect of the movement is weakening.)

In general I don’t think apparent consensus views regarding which laws are OK to break are the output of a high-quality decision process. In fact, I think most people are quite conformist, and what looks like “consensus” is mostly a result of behavioral drift. E.g. if we polled people on the ethics of online music piracy, my guess is that pre-internet, lots of people would say it’s wrong (virtue is cheap). The introduction of Limewire et al. would cause people to rationalize fun and decide it’s OK. The introduction of Spotify et al. would cause an increase in people saying “if I’m paying then so should you, it’s easy”. I would guess that people who do principled moral reasoning regarding the ethics of music piracy are a minority who aren’t driving changes in consensus opinion. [Edit: Nonetheless, individual moral reasoning isn’t necessarily more reliable than consensus, especially given that individuals may be subject to self-serving motives that are nearly impossible to be aware of and take into account.]

I also think people in this thread underrate the importance of a specific individual’s context. For example, suppose I am broke, homeless, and suffering from suicidal depression. I happen to hear a song I really like, and I use Shazam to identify it. I don’t have the money to buy the song, and I think downloading it could help with my suicidal depression. Is there a sense in which pirating the song is more OK for me than it is for Bill Gates? I would say yes. (Perhaps one could even use the “context” angle to argue that the introduction of Spotify does, in fact, change the ethics of music piracy!)

Ebenezer Dukakis 10 Sep 2023 2:57 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
I think the probability of your “year 2300” statement is very low.

One meta-point I’m trying to make here is I don’t think we should be too hasty to derive + enforce very general ethical rules after examining a single case study. Ben’s account of Nonlinear’s behavior is troubling, and I hope the leadership takes a hard look in the mirror, but it’s important for us as a movement to learn the right lessons.

Thanks for bringing up the public vs private use of reason thing. A lot of my thinking on these questions was shaped by reading a book about the US in the antebellum + Civil War period. As I remember, in signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln was acting as an ethical innovator. (Advisors suggested he wait until right after a major Union victory to sign the proclamation, in order to better sell the North on the concept.) It does seem to me that recommending “Abraham Lincoln shouldn’t have signed the Emancipation Proclamation” is a pretty serious hit for an ethical rule to take.

(Note that an abolitionist soldier who fought well for the Union in the Civil War would be violating the deontological principle “don’t kill people” in order to produce a tiny shift in the probability of a hypothetical future benefit. And sure enough, in that soldier’s far future, we look back on that soldier as a hero. Furthermore, an analogous “year 2023″ statement would appear to miss the point—many 2023 people think that killing is generally wrong, and also that the abolitionist soldier’s actions are justified in context.)

Another case where the “leaders shouldn’t be moral innovators” principle fails by my lights: is it ethical to persuade people in AI care about animals to a greater degree than people in the general population care about animals? I would say yes.

Another point re: leaders who innovate morally—as e.g. Holly discusses in this thread, EA has a long history of encouraging weirdness and experimentation. From my perspective, freedomandutility is attempting to innovate on this by making us all sticklers for following the law. And you, as an EA leader, appear to be endorsing this innovation. You might say that innovating by advocating inaction is different than innovating by advocating action, but (a) I’m a tad skeptical of act/omission distinctions and (b) endorsing an asymmetry like this could create a ratchet where EAs act less and less, because leaders are way more comfortable advocating inaction than action.

Re: crisis decisionmaking—my sense is that many EAs feel we are in a crisis, or on the verge of a crisis. So I do think this is a good time to discuss what’s ethically acceptable in a crisis, and what ethical rules would’ve performed well in past crises. (For example, one could argue that in a time of crisis, it is especially important to support rather than undermine your friends & allies, and Nonlinear’s leadership violated this principle.)

Thanks for engaging given your limited free time. I’m eager to read pushback from people who aren’t Linch as well.

Ebenezer Dukakis 10 Sep 2023 13:02 UTC
1 point
6 ∶ 2
in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: An Incomplete List of Things I Think EAs Probably Shouldn’t Do
There are millions of people around the world who live paycheck to paycheck, and run the risk of becoming homeless if they quit their jobs. We don’t have the resources to help all of those people, and I’m not immediately seeing how deontology helps us figure out how to allocate our limited resources between this and various other obligations we may have. [Edit: maybe this section was obtuse on my part—see Yonatan’s reply below.]

I think it is really valuable for people in EA to feel comfortable pushing back against their boss. (I see strong consequentialist arguments for this. Those arguments are why I will focus on people in EA, rather than non-EAs living paycheck to paycheck, for the rest of this comment.) I think there are ways to achieve this cost-effectively. For example:
- When possible, have employee housing arrangements made directly with a landlord or similar person, rather than routing through someone they have a working relationship with.
- Agree in advance that any employee who lives for free in employer-provided housing gets to continue living there for, say, 3 months if they quit/get fired.
- Build things like Basefund to the point where no EA thinks it is very hard to quit their job. (For example, a hypothetical Basefund+ could guarantee that EA employees who quit/get fired always receive a generous severance package. This idea might seem costly at first, but because the money is going to an EA instead of a landlord, it is much more likely to e.g. be donated to an effective charity.)
- Encourage EAs to live with non-EAs when all else is equal.

Ebenezer Dukakis 10 Sep 2023 21:26 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Cruxes on US lead for some domestic AI regulation
Even if it’s developed in the US, you should expect China to steal it.

[FBI director Christopher Wray] said China deployed cyber espionage to “cheat and steal on a massive scale”, with a hacking programme larger than that of every other major country combined.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-62064506

Ebenezer Dukakis 12 Sep 2023 4:14 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
Sorry, I didn’t mean to antagonize you that way.

I think I’m a somewhat high-scrupulosity person. When people say “EAs should abide by deontological rule X”, I hear: “EAs could get cancelled in the future if they violate rule X” and also: “the point of this deontological rule is that you abide by it in all cases, even in cases where it seems like a bad idea for other reasons”.

Some of the deontological rules people are suggesting in this thread are rules I can think of good reasons to violate—sometimes, what seem to me like very good reasons. So I push back on them because (a) I want people to critique my thinking, so I can update away from violating the proposed rule if necessary (related to your public vs private use of reason point?) and (b) I don’t care to get cancelled in the future for violating a bad rule that EAs came to accept uncritically.

I take the task of moral philosophy as identifying and debating edge cases, and I find this rather enjoyable even though it can trigger my scrupulosity. But your point that excess debate could result in no norms at all is an interesting one. Maybe we need a concept of “soft norms” which are a “yellow flag” to trigger debate if they’re getting violated.

Ebenezer Dukakis 12 Sep 2023 4:40 UTC
10 points
6 ∶ 3
on: Thoughts on EA, post-FTX
The “SBF was psychopathic” point is interesting. I wonder if it would be worthwhile to think about “hardening the community against psychopaths” from first principles, without much focus on the FTX situation in particular. Like, if psychopaths are people who try to work any system to their advantage, then a system focused on preventing FTX could still be a system that psychopaths can work to their advantage in some other way.

Ebenezer Dukakis 12 Sep 2023 5:21 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
I tend to be very concerned about hidden self-serving motives in myself and other people. This was my biggest takeaway from the FTX incident.

So regarding “extremely reasonable and obvious-to-everyone exigencies”, and “being cancelled … because people are total morons”—well, it seems potentially self-serving to say

I’m going to break this rule because it’s obvious to everyone that breaking it is OK in this case. In fact, anyone who thinks it is wrong for me to break this rule is a total moron, and I should do myself a favor by ignoring their ethically incompetent opinion.

I know you work in longtermist grantmaking—I can’t speak for you, but if I was a grantmaker and someone said that to me during a call, I wouldn’t exactly consider it a good sign. Seems to betray a lack of self-skepticism if nothing else.

Regarding the cluelessness stuff, it feels entangled with the deontological stuff to me, in the sense that one argument for deontological rules is that they help protect you from your own ignorance, and lack of imagination regarding how things could go wrong.

BTW, please don’t feel obligated to continue replying to me—I get the sense that I’m still aggravating you, and I don’t have a clear model for how to not do this.

Ebenezer Dukakis 15 Sep 2023 23:45 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation

[libel discussion] … CEA is in a bad position to take on legal risk.

...

My current impression is that many people in the EA ecosystem feel a false sense of safety from the existence of CEA Community Health, hoping that it will pursue justice for them, when (to a first approximation) it will not. While I respect many people on the team and consider some of them friends, my current sense is that the world would probably be better if the CEA Community Health team was disbanded and it was transparent that there is little-to-no institutional protection from bullies in the EA ecosystem, and more people do not get burned by assuming or hoping that it will play that role.

There was a recent post about how depending on the country you live, working in animal advocacy could be your comparative advantage as an EA. I wonder what country has creating a competitor to CEA Community Health as a comparative advantage?
What links here?
- Ebenezer Dukakis's comment on Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by TracingWoodgrains (21 Dec 2023 9:24 UTC; 43 points)

Ebenezer Dukakis 16 Sep 2023 2:28 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 2
in reply to: ChristianKleineidam’s comment on: Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation

It seems that a major problem of a competitor to CEA Community Health is that it’s harder for someone outside of the US to have the connection to get the necessary information.

My assumption was that Community Health work can be done remotely. Indeed, I suspect the current Community Health team works remotely?

Living in a convenient time zone (or having a weird sleep schedule) could be important.

Lack of connections could be a good thing if it helps objectivity. (Recalling the controversy over the connection between Owen C-B and Julia Wise)

I assume most people will volunteer information if someone contacts them and says “we are concerned about your behavior and we are thinking of writing a post about it, but we want to hear from you first”.

I imagine the best way to gain the community’s trust would be to produce detailed writeups like the one Ben produced. Once the new org has gained trust from producing good writeups, perhaps they can manage a list of people who they suggest to ban from conferences etc.

Maybe you can do all the money movement for the org in crypto and have no clear country to which the org belongs.

Also having minimal assets seems potentially good, so the incentive for a lawsuit is low.

(Side note: It seems fairly likely to me that the current Community Health team actually does a lot of great work and we just don’t hear about it.)

Ebenezer Dukakis 16 Sep 2023 2:43 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 2
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: Closing Notes on Nonlinear Investigation
Another thought regarding building trust for a new org. (This is a bit of a tangent.)

In a different subthread, Chris Leong said “there’s information I would have shared with Ben, but not community health.”

Community health work involves both making factual judgments about what occurred, and also value judgments about what constitutes a misdeed or what constitutes an appropriate punishment.

Insofar as people mistrust CEA Community Health, my guess would be that it’s because of disagreements re: the value judgments that CEA Community Health has made. That’s hard to avoid, because value judgments will often be controversial.

If I was to start an org competing with CEA Community Health, I think I would make it a priority to firewall factual judgments from value judgments. Focus first on gaining a reputation for making accurate factual judgments, then if you do make value judgments, keep them separate from the factual judgments. (E.g. “Our opinion is that...” or “Our random polling procedure suggests the median EA thinks that...” or even “If you have X values, you are likely to feel Y about this situation” for various different values of X.)

Ebenezer Dukakis 20 Sep 2023 3:06 UTC
24 points
4 ∶ 3
on: Protest against Meta’s irreversible proliferation (Sept 29, San Francisco)
Cool idea!

What’s your theory of change for this protest? For example, do we know for a fact that there are AI researchers working out of that office?

It seems to me like your theory of change should inform your actions a fair amount. For example, if your goal is to change the thinking of Meta employees, actions like the following could make sense:
- During the sign-making party, do some roleplays where someone pretends to be a Meta employee and asks the sort of questions a Meta employee might ask.
- People who seem good at answering Meta employee questions could write something like “Ask me questions!” on their sign. (Also, people with relevant credentials could write that on their sign, e.g. “I have an AI PhD”.)
- Try to look friendly and inviting during the protest. Since the protest is happening around the time employees get off work anyways, have a goal of getting at least one Meta employee embroiled in conversation to join you for drinks after the protest. Maybe by spacing protestors out a little—you could make it so even if they don’t talk to the first protestor they see, they think for a bit and then talk to the 2nd or 3rd.
It seems like most protests are fairly confrontational. I’m not sure if that’s just the nature of politics, or because confrontational protests work well according to some particular theory of change. I think I would favor a less-confrontational strategy just because you can always switch to being confrontational later. (Also: “In the qualitative responses about the readings, there were some recurring criticisms, including: a desire to hear from AI researchers, a dislike of philosophical approaches, a dislike of a focus on existential risks or an emphasis on fears, a desire to be “realistic” and not “speculative”, and a desire for empirical evidence.” Source. I wonder if Bing Chat would be a good case study to highlight?)

It seems like the sign-making strategy is fairly different if you want to do a confrontational protest. E.g. for a non-confrontational protest, I imagine that funny or inviting signs could be good (perhaps something like: “Only you can save us from irreversible AI proliferation!”) For a confrontational protest, I imagine it’s better to have accusatory signs, plus bring a bunch of extra signs and try to get passerby to join you.

BTW, a mental model that might describe what’s going on at Meta: It’s like an online echo chamber. Researchers at Meta self-select for being unconcerned about safety. Once they’re hired, they participate in internal discussions (probably in private Facebook groups) where the consensus is that AI risk fears are alarmist. Best-case outcome for a protest is inspiring a few people to speak up in favor of safety during internal discussions. (If you do manage to have a conversation with a Meta person, you could ask them if this mental model is accurate!)

PS—Another possible theory of change for protests is: use conversations to refine messaging that actually persuades AI risk skeptics, then broadcast that messaging later. Relevant post

Ebenezer Dukakis 29 Sep 2023 3:52 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 2
in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: From Passion to Depression and Pessimism: My Journey with Effective Altruism
There was a supportive response, to some degree, in the wake of FTX:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BesfLENShzSMeb7Xi/community-support-given-ftx-situation

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7PqmnrBhSX4yCyMCk/effective-peer-support-network-in-ftx-crisis-update

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gbjxQuEhjAYsgWz8T/a-job-matching-service-for-affected-ftxff-grantees

Maybe now is a good time to review that response and figure out what could’ve been done better. For example, maybe some person or organization could’ve made a point of reaching out individually to each and every FTX grantee.

For me, the OP resonates well beyond just the FTX stuff though. There’s an element of making personal sacrifices for the greater good that exists in EA, which doesn’t exist in the same way for an academic discipline. I myself found the lack of supportiveness in EA very alienating, and it’s a major reason why I’m not very involved these days.

One idea is something like a “Basefund for mental health”, to provide free or low-cost therapy for EAs—possibly group therapy. EAs have already made the argument that mental health could be an effective cause area. If that’s true, “mental health for EAs” could be a doubly effective cause area. Beyond the first-order benefit of improving someone’s mental health, you can improve someone’s mental health in a way that enables them to do good.

Ebenezer Dukakis 9 Oct 2023 9:42 UTC
17 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lucretia’s comment on: Silicon Valley’s Rabbit Hole Problem
Hi Lucretia,

I’m really sorry about your experiences, and I think it is noble of you to try and fix this problem.

It kind of seems like Buck is being placed into a double bind here. The OP denounces “acts of ostracization” and “opportunistic harm”:

Elaborate documents were circulated in group chats in our absence on the topic of our character and mental health.

Cherry-picked screenshots were circulated in group chats, along with elaborate discussion for character assassination.

...

Humiliating websites were put up about us with cherry-picked screenshots and non-consensual recordings.

Buck seems to be a in something of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. If he provides proof, he’s liable to be accused of ostracization, opportunistic harm, or slander. If he doesn’t, that could be a bit of a red flag, that proves how EA dismisses women.

Note Scott Alexander’s reasoning for not sharing proof publicly:

I’m extremely prepared to defend my actions here, but prefer not to do it in public in order to not further harm anyone else’s reputation (including Kathy’s).

Do you disagree with Scott’s reasoning? If so, why?

It seems like you’ve arrived at a similar place Scott has, with regard to your own case—you don’t mention your name, or the name of the person who hurt you, and you’re not sharing much proof.

If we’re going to avoid public discussion, is it OK to e.g. share evidence with Maya privately?

What do you think the “rules of engagement” should be here? I’d like to see a set of agreed-upon guidelines, such that a person who follows those guidelines can be confident that they won’t later be accused of ostracization, harm, slander, dismissiveness, or anything like that.

Again—I don’t feel knowledgeable about the details of what happened to you, but I’m sorry it happened, it’s clear to me that it hurt you a lot, and I think you deserve an apology, at the very very least, from the person who hurt you.

Sending compassion and support your way!

Ebenezer Dukakis 9 Oct 2023 9:59 UTC
12 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Silicon Valley’s Rabbit Hole Problem
Even if most examples are unrelated to EA, if it’s true that the Silicon Valley AI community has zero accountability for bad behavior, that seems like it should concern us?

EDIT: I discuss a [high uncertainty] alternative hypothesis in this comment.

Ebenezer Dukakis 9 Oct 2023 13:45 UTC
16 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers’s comment on: Silicon Valley’s Rabbit Hole Problem
Speaking of autism, this article mentions some characteristics of autistic women that seem potentially relevant:

Sensory sensitivity. People with autism experience the world in a different way than neurotypical people, and many women with autism experience intense sensory sensitivity. They may have a heightened sense of awareness when it comes to smells, light, sounds, and touch.

For someone with autism, it’s not just a matter of “not liking” certain things; it’s a sense of being unable to tolerate them.

...

Emotional regulation issues and meltdowns. Women with autism often have problems with emotional regulation. Research has shown that there is a poor connection between the frontal cortex and the amygdala in people with autism.4 Put simply, the amygdala can be thought of as an “emotion centre” in our brain, as it’s part of our limbic system and our mammalian brain. The frontal cortex can be thought of as our “thinking brain,” the more rational part of our brain which makes judgments.

Because of the poor connection between the two areas, women with autism may find it hard to rationalise situations and stay in control. Many describe having meltdowns: extreme emotional reactions to situations that might result in losing their temper, crying, or going into shutdown mode.

...

Anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression are not universal symptoms of autism. But because life is difficult for many women with autism, it is common for them to experience mental health issues like anxiety, depression, or problems with addiction. There is also a far higher than average rate of suicidality in women with autism, which appears to be related to the degree of camouflaging they engage in.5 Though their autism goes undiagnosed, it is more likely that they will receive a formal diagnosis for anxiety, depression or another mental health issue.

I think autistic men and women have a lot to contribute to the EA movement.

It seems to me that we should be especially protective towards autistic women, as they’re a potentially vulnerable population. In particular, I hypothesize that autistic women might experience e.g. sensory overload from unpleasant social interactions that neurotypical women would evade or brush off.

OP mentions that 90% of autistic women report being sexually assaulted. A quick Google suggests the number for neurotypical women is substantially lower. There is a lot of uncertainty in my mind regarding the cause of this disparity. It could be that autistic women are targeted by predators; it could be that autistic women experience a “sexual assault” level of trauma from a broader set of interactions; it could be some combination.

In any case, I like almost all the autistic women I’ve met, and it upsets me that they’re disproportionately suffering. I think it would be good if EAs took a protective attitude towards a vulnerable population which, IMO, has a lot to contribute.
What links here?
- Ebenezer Dukakis's comment on Silicon Valley’s Rabbit Hole Problem by Mandelbrot (9 Oct 2023 9:59 UTC; 12 points)