I’m the current Head of Business Operations at 80,000 Hours.
Before that I was the Interim Head of Operations at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), where I also was previously the lead organiser for EA Global. Before working at CEA I was an Operations Assistant at Open Philanthropy, and prior to that was involved in various community building projects at EA Oxford.
I appreciate you sharing your perspective, and I can see this has been difficult for you. However, I find your framing troubling for several reasons:
I don’t feel like your apology fully acknowledges wrongdoing. You say you’re sorry people were upset, but you frame your behaviour as part of an unavoidable “tradeoff” between different communication styles rather than as something you should work to change. This shifts from “I’m really sorry and will change” to “I’m sorry you’re sad, but I endorse my actions and may continue them.”
Most men navigate these situations without repeated issues. The fact that you’ve had multiple incidents over years, culminating in a ban, suggests this isn’t about inherent incompatibility between “clumsy men and sensitive women.” Many men—including those who are neurodivergent, from different cultural backgrounds, or naturally flirtatious—manage to participate in EA without repeatedly making others uncomfortable. Some aren’t flirty at all and still form meaningful relationships.
Cultural differences can be navigated. While I understand different cultures have different norms around touch, people regularly adapt their behaviour when they learn it’s making others uncomfortable. You mention being “as careful as you could be,” but if that still resulted in complaints, it might be worth exploring different strategies rather than framing it as an unsolvable incompatibility.
The social utilitarian framing feels concerning. You seem to weigh your enjoyment of physical touch and flirtation against others’ discomfort as if they’re comparable goods. Most people (even those within EA) might find this approach to interpersonal ethics troubling—it treats others’ boundaries as negotiable based on your personal cost-benefit analysis.
I understand you’ve experienced real loss here—friendships, community, and reputation. But I don’t think the “tradeoff” you describe is inevitable—it’s about finding ways to express yourself that don’t consistently cross others’ boundaries.
We’re very excited to announce the following speakers for EA Global: London 2024:
Rory Stewart (Former MP, Host of The Rest is Politics podcast and Senior Advisor to GiveDirectly) on obstacles and opportunities in making aid agencies more effective.
Mary Phuong (Research Scientist at DeepMind) on dangerous capability evaluations and responsible scaling.
Mahi Klosterhalfen (CEO of the Albert Schweitzer Foundation) on combining interventions for maximum impact in farmed animal welfare.
Applications close 19 May. Apply here and find more details on our website, you can also email the EA Global team at hello@eaglobal.org if you have any questions.
CEA is hiring for someone to lead the EA Global program. CEA’s three flagship EAG conferences facilitate tens of thousands of highly impactful connections each year that help people build professional relationships, apply for jobs, and make other critical career decisions.
This is a role that comes with a large amount of autonomy, and one that plays a key role in shaping a key piece of the effective altruism community’s landscape.
See more details and apply here!
CEA is hiring for someone to lead the EA Global program. CEA’s three flagship EAG conferences facilitate tens of thousands of highly impactful connections each year that help people build professional relationships, apply for jobs, and make other critical career decisions.
This is a role that comes with a large amount of autonomy, and one that plays a key role in shaping a key piece of the effective altruism community’s landscape.
See more details and apply here!
Having this non-relevant experience is unlikely to harm someone’s chances of getting a junior generalist ops role, but it might not help much either, and an application might be seen as weak overall if this is all they’re putting forward.
Relevant experience might include: organizing some kind of student group (EA or otherwise), volunteering at a conference, working part time as someone’s assistant, supporting or running a project where there would have been ops-type work (like running a cake delivery business), or doing any kind of service-related job like working in a coffee shop or restaurant.
As counterexamples, things that are not relevant experience might include: working on a challenging EA research project, academic credentials, building something technical where technical skills are not really part of the job.
For strong writing I’m thinking of things like: a near complete lack of typos, incorrect word choices, or writing-related formatting issues. I’m also thinking of whether the writing flows well, i.e., if I read it aloud (or in my head) does it make sense and sound good. In certain cases tone or register might matter too, for example whether the writing is too formal/informal for the required context. In many cases I expect applicants can actually write quite well but underperform, perhaps because they’re stressed, tired, or don’t realize how high the bar will be.
For strong work tests in general: this will depend on the work test, but I’m thinking of things like whether they wrote a sufficient amount of copy for the allotted time, whether they answered all parts of the question, and whether they provided sufficient reasoning if required. There’s also naturally a quality aspect, for example if a work test is asking them to investigate conference venues I might want to see that the applicant was thinking about the right sorts of trade-offs and whether they’d explained these trade-offs clearly.
In both these cases I expect it’d be easier if I could point to examples of strong vs weak work test responses, which I can’t easily do without making them up myself.
Applications are still open for upcoming EA Global conferences in 2024!
• EA Global: London (31 May–2 June) | Application deadline is in ~6 weeks
• EA Global: Boston (1–3 November)
Apply here and find more details on our website, you can also email the team at hello@eaglobal.org if you have any questions.
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is making a recruiter hire! We’re ideally looking for someone with professional experience in relevant domains, but we’re also open to hiring for a more junior version of this role—hence why the title of this role is variable.
The importance of recruiting is being heightened, as the team is entering a new era as we take on a new CEO and begin the process of spinning out from Effective Ventures to become an independent organisation. This means that in addition to our pre-existing recruiting needs, our spin out will create increased demand as we move various operations functions in-house (such as finance, payroll, and legal). We’re entering one of the largest hiring bursts in CEA’s history, and the person in this role will play a key role in ensuring we’re able to find and attract the top talent we need to be successful in our mission.
Apply here!
Applications for EA Global: Bay Area 2024 (Global Catastrophic Risks) are still open and close on January 21, at 11:59 pm PT (apply here)!
We’re excited to be hosting our first EA Global focussed on global catastrophic risks (GCRs). We’ll be welcoming up to 1000 attendees at the Oakland Marriott City Center and platforming high-quality content related to GCRs, including AI safety, biorisks, nuclear security, and more.
We have limited travel funding available. More information can be found on the event page and EA Global FAQ. If you have any questions, please email us at hello@eaglobal.org!
Thanks for the suggestion David — we’ve thought about this and might consider it for the future, but I worry it would be a fair amount of work for a low-quality product (that I expect wouldn’t get many views). However for our recent Boston event we did take audio recordings of most talks and are planning to have many of them written up as Forum posts soon.
Hi Joie — unfortunately there won’t be an option to attend this conference virtually, though we expect talks from the conference will be available on our YouTube channel after the event. It’s also very likely that there’ll be some sort of virtual EA conference in 2024 (an EAGxVirtual or an EAG Virtual or both).
Open to it for 2025, though looks like at least Oxford will still have exams then (exams often stretch until 1–2 weeks after the end of term). But early July might work and we can look into what dates we can get when we start booking.
It’s possible we should move the US event to May/June, though it’s not obvious to me that that’s the best move as finals still do have some weight there — I know it’s less than the UK but I don’t know that people’s behavior is going to shift that much if an exam season is worth 50% of their grade vs 100%.
The US also has more potential attendees in general than the UK, which I think counts for something here. There are also just other downsides to shifting our conference schedule around too much, and most of our attendees aren’t students anyway.
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I appreciate the thoughts from the comments below, but I don’t think I misunderstood the core issues. SpeedyOtter does say he continues being “touchy” and “flirty” outside EA—he’s just (mostly) stopped attending EA events. My concern is that he’s not saying “I’ve recognised this behaviour is harmful and stopped,” but rather “I’ve moved it to other communities.”
I did read the “Evidence of caring” section, and I can see he feels genuine sadness about the situation. However, planning to continue behaviours that repeatedly make others uncomfortable, even after seeing the harm they cause, seems concerning to me. And throughout I still felt there was a general framing of boundary issues as an inevitable trade-off between different social styles, e.g. with the comment “but also, sometimes things go really well”. This comment gave me the vibe of “yes I sometimes hurt people, but sometimes my behaviour goes well, and some amount of this trade-off is acceptable”, which in theory is correct, but many men have healthy relationships with women without sometimes hurting them as collateral damage.
I acknowledge that he says he tried to stop flirting/touching but complaints continued. This raises questions: either there’s a significant gap in understanding what constitutes appropriate behaviour, or there were other problematic behaviours not being addressed. And my guess is that part of what’s needed isn’t just behavioural tweaks, but a fundamental shift away from viewing others’ discomfort as acceptable collateral damage for personal expression.
(And to clarify, I did use LLMs to help draft this and its parent comment, but I don’t see that as problematic, and I have consistently used em-dashes for years, so I wouldn’t take that as a signal of anything.)