I’m experimenting with “norms-pledges” to help reduce forum anxiety. Maybe it could be a good social technology IDK. Click [Show More] to read them all:
🕊 Fresh Slate After Disagreement Pledge: I hereby pledge that if we disagree on the forum, I will not hold it against you. (1) I will try not to allow a disagreement to meaningfully impact how I treat you in further discourse, should we meet in another EA Forum thread, on another website or virtual space, or IRL. I know that if we disagree, it doesn’t necessarily mean we will disagree on other topics, nor does it necessarily imply we are on opposing teams. We are most likely on the same team in that we both wish to have the most good done possible and are working in service of finding out what that means. (2) Relatedly, I pledge to not claim to know what you believe in future, I can only confidently claim to know what you wrote or believed at a given time, and I can say what I think you believe given that. I know that people change their minds, and it may be you or me who does so, so I understand that the disagreement may not even still stand and is not necessarily set in stone.
👨👩👧👦 No Gatekeeping Pledge: I hereby pledge that if I am seeking a collaborator, providing an opportunity, or doing hiring or anything akin to hiring, and you would otherwise be a top candidate if not for the following, I will try not to gatekeep: (1) If an opinion you’ve shared or broken-norm you’ve done (on the EA forum or elsewhere) is relevant in a potentially negative way to our collaboration, that I will ask you about it to gain clarity. I will not assume that such an incident means you will not be suitable for a role. I will especially try hard not to make assumptions about your suitability based on old or isolated incidents, or if your digital footprint is too small to get a good picture of who you are and how you think about things. (2) I will not penalize based on someone being a social or professional newcomer or being otherwise unknown to me or my colleagues. If the person is a top candidate otherwise, I will do my due diligence to determine cultural fit separate from that.
🤔 Rationalist Discourse Pledge: (1) I hereby pledge to try to uphold rationalist discourse norms as presented here and here, and comedically summed up here.
🦸♀️Preferring My Primary Account Pledge: (1) I hereby pledge that this is my main EA Forum account. I will never use multiple accounts to manipulate the system, as by casting multiple votes or stating similar opinions with different accounts. (2) I also pledge that, although I can’t be sure what comes, I strongly intend to not use an anonymous or different account (alt or sockpuppet), or any account other than this, my primary account. I pledge that I am willing to take on some reputational risks on this, my primary account, in service of putting truth, transparency, integrity, and a complete narrative over my own anxiety, and to give ideas I think are worth advocating for the best chance at adoption. Therefore I pledge that I will not use an alternate account out of general anxiety around personal or professional retribution or losing clout. CAVEAT 1: I reserve the right to use an alt account in cases where *specific* retribution or other danger can be expected in my particular instance. As example: I reserve the right to use an alt account out of concern about riling up a suspected stalker, specific known bad-faith actor, specific known slanderer, etc. CAVEAT 2: I also reserve the right to use an alt account for the benefit of others. Example: in cases where revealing my own identity would reveal the identity or betray the privacy of some other party I am discussing.
🙇♂️Humility in Pledging Pledge: I hereby pledge that I take these pledges for my own self-improvement and for altruistic reasons. It’s okay to disagree that pledges are useful and important for you. (1) I don’t expect others should necessarily take a norms pledge. I believe the pledges only work if people take them after deep consideration, and I don’t expect I can know all the considerations for others’ situations. Therefore I understand there may be situations that it is actually right that a user avoid taking a pledge. Therefore I will not judge others for not having taken a pledge, including that I will not dismiss other’s character if I see other accounts without a pledge. (3) Additionally, I don’t presume that others not taking a pledge means they would even necessarily act differently than that pledge would imply. I don’t assume their intentions are even different from mine. Perhaps a person is new to the idea or just trying to protect their energy by not opening themselves to criticism. (3) I won’t automatically dismiss a user’s reasoning if I see the user violating norms pledges I’ve made. I still will give their claims a chance to stand on their own merits. (4) If you see me violating a pledge I’ve taken, I will always appreciate if you bring it up to me.
Ivy Mazzola
Thank you for sharing. In particular, I find your mention of shame vs edginess interesting.. But I expect that at least one person reading your story will think “Uh sounds like you need more shame, dude, not less” so I’d like to share a perspective for any such readers:
If I understand Owen anyway, I’ll say that I relate in that I also have had some brazen periods of life, prompted by a sort of cultural rebirth and sex-positive idealism. An outsider might have labelled these brazen periods as a swinging of the pendulum in response to my strict religious upbringing, but that isn’t quite right.. It’s hard to notice how it is related to shame but in my case:
For a very shame-prone or shame-trained person, it can be very difficult to parse out “What is the actual harm here? What are the actual bad acts and why, when I know that most of these things I’m programmed to feel shame about simply are not wrong or shame-worthy?” This can lead to a sort of idealistically-motivated throwing out of all feelings that look like shame. Anxiety, hesitance, guilt, and self-criticality are examples of possibly-adaptive-feelings that can be mistakenly thrown out here. This, I think, can lead to social permissiveness and lack of boundaries (you might call it “edginess”) to a problematic extent. Ironically, I can see this happening more for the people who have been most shame-prone because those are the people for whom shame has been such an omnipresent guide that “feeling something similar to shame” actually loses most of it’s compass potential without highly tuned emotional intelligence. Additionally, when such people throw shame out as a compass, they might find that other social-guiding inclinations (social skills which help you realize the unstated preferences of others) are underdeveloped. This is, I think, more likely the more you have used shame as a compass, especially if it was your primary compass during your whole developmental years.
It’s actually pretty hard to express in language, but I hope I have helped share one perspective on how, ironically, more shame can lead to worse behavior for a certain type of rational person, especially in their younger, not-at-all-wise-yet, years.
I found reading this document somewhat healing*, and I bet I am not the only EA woman who has**. With transparency and accountability, maybe we can move forward as a community. I’m hopeful to know that you are prioritising getting the help you need, and I hope other EA men follow suit. I hope that your therapist (or coach) helps you to develop other (non-shame) social compasses for sorting truly unhelpful acts from neutral or helpful acts. Long periods of focused tumult-free reflection are also important, so I’m glad you are putting polyamory and any extra obligations like board responsibilities on hold til you have things sorted. ***
[*Edit 1: “Somewhat healing” = I’ve been thinking about SA in EA for months now (ramping up since September but obviously peaking now). And my mind has come back to this (Owen’s) incident a lot. Why this incident? Well it is probably the most egregious incident in that Time piece that there has (til today) been no public clarity on. I have every day since the Time piece thought to myself “So, who is that man? This one seems the most likely to still, today, be strongly connected to EA. Do we need to be concerned about this actor?” It’s embarrassing to admit that it has consumed my mind this much recently, but I think other community builders are struggling similarly. So, this post somewhat heals 3 things for me: (1) this extra-worrying incident can be crossed off the list as handled without a doubt, eg that’s one less potential predator or reputational risk around. We don’t have to worry about that actor anymore. (2) The man himself is actually stepping up to take responsibility for it. That’s one less man’s scandal or misconduct that EA women have to clean up/monitor/apologize for. I feel healed in expectation that I and others might be able to get some of our energy back. I am acutely aware of how much energy men’s mistakes here cost women (women who are often supposed to be working on other altruistic questions!) (3) this post is also a model for how other men can clarify their pasts. I hope to see more of those Time incidents handled or somehow clarified, (although I still wish it could have happened in a different way). So this post might even signal further upcoming clarity, which will be what the community needs to move forward. And having hope that EA can move forward, improved, and back to impact, is healing too.]
[**Edit 2: I’ve gotten some fair pushback on the “I think I speak for a lot of EA women” phrasing I had originally. I modified the language to more what I really mean. I don’t presume to speak for all readers or any single reader. It would even be perfectly valid if this were your moment of peak fury or despair.. like maybe that’s right for you. Personally I am able to take healing from this post, and I bet I’m not the only one who is finding something positive to take out of it][***Edit 3: Some people feel this particular paragraph is too warm, and feel it’s an example of dialogue being gentler toward men than women. (1) It felt humanly natural for me to flow into my own thoughts once I’d crossed that shame writeup off my list. That was a mistake and in future I’ll just start a new comment. (2) I don’t regret being warm and leaving out affirmations of ill-fit, because sitting below my comment as I was composing mine was another comment saying how distraught they were at reading this post, and how disappointed in Owen. I did and still do think it was equally important (in expectation to the first part of my comment) for Owen and for this community that someone share a different perspective on reading the piece and also like, wish him well rather than pile the guilt on. Frankly I expected more negative sentiment toward him to come (which has), and some of these responses would make me straight up want to die if I were OP. I don’t want anyone to feel that way. The woman seems to have forgiven him herself so I presume no reason to withhold compassion myself.]
EAGxAustin Save the Date
Agree. I’d also add that this is a natural effect of the focus EA has put on outreach in universities and to young people. Not to say that the young people are the problem—they aren’t, and we are happy to have them. But in prioritizing that, we did deprioritize outreach to mid and late-stage professionals. CEA and grantmakers only had so much bandwidth, and we only had so many people suited to CB/recruiting/outreach-style roles.
We have had glaring gaps for a while in ability to manage people, scale programs, manage and direct projects and orgs, and perform due diligence checks on and advising for EA organisations. In other words, we lack expertise.
I’d say 80K has been somewhat aware of this gap and touched on it lightly, and the community itself has dialled in on the problem by discussing EA recruiters. Yet CEA, funders, and others working on movement-building seem to repeatedly conflate community building with getting more young people to change careers, revealing their priorities, IMO, by what they actually work on.Open Phil has done this as well. Looking at their Effective Altruism Community Growth focus area , 5 out of the 6 suggestions are focused on young people. The sixth is translating EA materials, so all options to directly work with promising people are focused on young people. Admittedly there is a form to submit other ideas, but given what looks like a ~5/5.5 base rate of thinking youth are worth mentioning where they could have mentioned something else, I’m not hopeful they care about non-youth interventions. When I look at that page, I cant help but think, “So, are we building a sustainable movement and network of professionals, or are we essentially running disjointed Thiel fellowships?”
Things I’d like to see to increase expertise and experience in EA (in addition to new roles, interventions, and EA orgs focused on improving governance in EA):
I hope it’s not moot to discuss funder priorities now: I’d like to see funders and grantmakers overtly acknowledge that we need expertise from professionals outside the EA movement. The expertise bottleneck is the other side of the coin to the operations bottleneck, and it never got addressed. I’d also like to see blunt transparency of their reasons to have not prioritized or called for people to work on building experienced professional leadership and leadership assistance in EA orgs. If reasoning is made overt, perhaps we can workshop it, eg, if they think EAs are bad at talking to late-stage professionals, we hire someone who is good, or we ask a couple promising comms EAs to go through some class on recruiting executives.
I’d also like to see EA individuals and orgs themselves take on this mantle of increasing expertise in EA. It feels like EA individuals have been saying this for a while but very few have been trying to solve the problem. Charity Entrepreneurship could even add charities with related missions to their incubation program. It can’t be that different from Animal Advocacy Careers which they incubated already.
I’d also like to see more nuanced terms than “community building” or “movement building” to better clarify what is being prioritized under the hood. Governance-building, professional network-building, and direct-worker building all have different focuses (and I could name so many more). I think the vagueness of the CB term could be responsible for a lot of our gaps, and also responsible for the lack of promising outcomes CB grantees might have seemed to yield, from the point of view of funders and grantmakers.- 17 Nov 2022 0:29 UTC; 67 points) 's comment on The FTX crisis highlights a deeper cultural problem within EA—we don’t sufficiently value good governance by (
Somehow they were doing this while having audited financials, passing due diligence from major investors, etc.? And Sam was supposedly a great fundraiser but was circulating a balance sheet with a $8B line item for “hidden poorly labeled account”? I would find it pretty helpful for someone to explain what actually happened here because this violates my models of how the world works.
Mine too, so I went digging. All in all, one can argue (and lawyers are) that there were a lot of enablers. Certainly, people trying to actively dodge being noticed as they violate standard models, is a predictable (but not necessarily pin-pointable at the time) way our models end up failing us.
For talk about audits specifically, there’s this and this. Essentially, “the firm’s auditors weren’t tapped to look into internal controls at FTX, and auditing the internal workings of a company isn’t a [legal] requisite for private corporations.” Of course plenty of people feel that doesn’t hold water, and a lawsuit by FTX customers is pending.
[Edit: A suit may be reasonable because audit firms know well they are commissioned to literally prove financial safety, and the audit was used in FTX’s self-promotion. That FTX was still very unsafe might prove there is negligence in the firm’s business model. If I try to make this fit my model of the world, I get a thought like “corporate greed incentivizes taking on clients that want useless/partial audits that end up being no better than shams, and you look the other way as you assist them in their likely sham”. I reflect more on this in the footnote which you don’t have to read but>>[1]]For talk about investors, there is this Feb 23rd piece on a major lawsuit against a few different VC banks who helped out FTX. That piece is frickin nuts just by virtue of the amount of info they fit into a mere 5 paragraphs. Here’s one quote to inspire a read:
The suit alleges that some of world’s largest venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, SoftBank Group, and Thoma Bravo, learned through due diligence that FTX was a fraudulent scheme, but nevertheless incited the Fraud with billions in necessary capital, provided guidance and other support critical to the Fraud, and publicly promoted Bankman-Fried and FTX to keep the Fraud concealed until FTX could go public or cash out in a private sale
And of course there was internal assistance. I’d bet there were both (1) employees who knew what they were doing and (2) employees just following direction without realizing they were committing crimes or aiding in them.
When it comes to improving models of how the world works, Zvi’s piece had some good discussion of this (and much more!). It’s long, but very worth reading even months later. Here’s a section on VC:
If you are a VC investor or taking VC money, the optimal amount of fraud, from your perspective, is not zero. You are more excited to invest if you suspect a fraud, those kinds of founders make good and make dreams real for you. So what if sometimes it all blows up? This is a game of hits for you, and you are much more worried about being asked why you didn’t invest in FTX than you should worry about people asking why you were. This goes double for crypto.
Notice this VC ready to invest in SBF again if he asked. Which, from a pure EV perspective, sure why not, same as they invested in Adam Neumann.
Therefore, I do not view ‘the VCs didn’t catch this’ as much of a justification. They are not supposed to catch it. It is not their job to catch it. I mean, they are supposed to do some things to catch this level of fraud, demanding voting shares and a company board in which they have a seat and doing proper audits, but they got none of that, because [SBF] needed to not allow it and the pitch was so good otherwise they went along (or, they took this to mean ‘this is a fraud’ and invested anyway thinking they were not the sucker, also plausible). [If] SBF said ‘you can’t check for fraud, invest or don’t’ then they are doing what they do, as much as we might hate that. Better to make that common knowledge. [emphasis mine]
The institutional traders are different. They face a different risk profile. If the exchange blows up in 10% of years that is a real drag on returns, whereas a VC expects 80% or more of their investments to go to zero, fraud or otherwise. Why did they trade?
Some of them Did Not Do the Research, no doubt. Others likely decided it was worth the risk. If FTX is an easy place to make money, because trading is very good against Alameda and generally they treat customers great, and they pay interest on USD and BTC, it is not difficult to imagine a decision that the blowup risk is worth taking, at least for some portion of one’s bankroll. Or one can say that if FTX goes down everything is terrible anyway, it’s already systemic risk, so assume it won’t fail.
Another play is to hedge the risk with a short position elsewhere, and put your leveraged longs at FTX since if FTX goes broke you would have gotten liquidated at Binance anyway.
[Note: There could also be a section about lack of regulation here. As commented on here. From a “how the world works” POV, it is the mother of all permissiveness that allowed the rest, especially the useless audits. Global heuristic = Pretty nuts how much can go wrong with a regulation gap. But FTX also maybe would have found away around/already did break regulations so idk]
Anyway, just thought that all might interest you. Thank you for sharing your insights. Really useful stuff.
- ^
Interestingly, now the company has stopped offering crypto audits due to “changing market conditions”. And I was going to say “good of them to notice that the bare legal minimum is not enough for one of the most volatile, least regulated assets the world has ever seen, eyeroll.” But actually that auditor firm is starting up crypto audits again under a different name, sigh. It appears that they only stopped offering crypto audits because some non-crypto clients of the audit firm put pressure on them to do so. Those non-crypto clients felt that the auditor being known to audit crypto, might reduce the trust their potential clients/users end up having in their own commissioned audits. So it appears that, to make sure they can catch the most non-crypto and crypto audit contracts without one segment compromising the other, the auditors are just splitting them under two companies. I didn’t see any mention of raising the crypto audit standards.
Additionally, through this process. I found mention a couple times that there are other auditing firms who do a much better job, “The big 4”, and it is sort-of business wisdom to downgrade trust in audits that aren’t from them. I was very surprised at this! There are auditors that business-people know to trust less? Then why do they exist? I guess because most consumers don’t know enough to downgrade trust? One has to wonder if the big 4 would have put their stamp of approval on FTX or even many of this audit firm’s non-FTX-clients. Probably not, right? And it makes you wonder why companies would go to these known-worse-auditors, especially if they can afford the best auditing like FTX should have been able to, if they don’t have something to hide. If the goal is consumer trust, and a company doesn’t have something to hide, that company should go to the best auditors, those that in-the-know-consumers trust the most, right? And surely a “worse” audit firm like this one would realize that is how the selection effect cookie crumbles. So lesser-known auditors should expect they will likely get a slew of clients who are nowhere near as reputable as those who hire the big 4 audit firms.
Sooo I think it’s easy to argue that the minor audit firm(s) are negligent or intentionally turning a blind eye somewhere in their business model. But it’s more a problem of incentives of corporate America and low federal standards for private corporations allowing those incentives to play out in auditing contracts, than it is a problem of a single actor. Even though the single actor/auditor might know damn well that they will end up giving a scammer cover eventually, maybe even frequently among their really wealthy clients like FTX who could have afforded better-known services. It appears to be part of the business model, chronic not acute. And as long as the private corporation and auditor are following the law in reviewing the bare minimum, oh well?
- ^
Thank you for writing this. I worry a lot about university groups being led by inexperienced people who have only heard of EA recently, especially given the huge focus on university groups (so, so much more focus than on regional groups or professional groups)! EA seems to be really banking on universities**, so much so that we are kinda screwed if it is done poorly, and turning people off. Some thoughts and theories:
1. Experience of organizers:I bet the mentorship and training in the new University Group Accelerator Program will help, but also I am not sure how much time a mentor will have, and that still assumes only 25 hours of engaging with EA content. From the website:
“The program is designed for groups that… have at least two interested organizers where… at least one has engaged with high-quality EA ideas for at least 25 hours (e.g. completed an intro fellowship or equivalent) and is comfortable facilitating group discussions or could be with training”
I realize a low amount of hours is a given for this role if you want it to happen at all, but still. That could be enough for someone who is a natural conversationalist to integrate a lot of key lessons and have a deep understanding and mental infrastructure, but for a lot of people it won’t be enough that they can field concerns well and not sound like cultists (repeating things rather rote rather than being conversational). And tbh, some people won’t know what high quality content is. Is 25 hours with no focus on animal welfare enough? What about that being the almost sole focus? Or what about if most of those hours are topical discussion with other inexperienced fellows?
I would love to see the training materials for the UGAP program made public on the forum or on request to dedicated EAs, for red-teaming. Red-teaming community building is a great idea!
2. Conversationality and critiquesI absolutely agree about interfacing with people who are naturally critical and them being some of the best prospective members. This also reduces the cult vibe.. organizers should ideally be people who have thought through the problems deeply and definitely didn’t just grab onto the first thing or go with authority. Frankly, I don’t think this personality trait/intellectual inclination is something organizers can or should fake, and it is possible that student organizers should be interviewed for this ability. My heuristic is something like “If they couldn’t hang at a rat or EA group house late-night discussion, they shouldn’t be publicly teaching EA”. (at risk of sounding strict, these are very friendly situations!)
I would love to see some training to uni organisers on how to field rebuttals. Eg, “hm, I actually can’t answer that with the confidence I think it deserves. But I recommend you message X about it!” (are there people who can just field questions? Ask a forum librarian?) or “Just because of time limitations, I really want to circle back to this later with you.. can we chat after the session or over [messenger app]?”
3. On CultsThe cult thing is really problematic. Here are some known aspects of cults we don’t technically fit, but could do to ensure all EAs, especially organizers, are leaning more outside of:
-Zealots: Don’t be one.
-Separation from friends and loved ones: Happens accidentally due to value changes. Mentioning other people and commitments in your life other than EA might go a long way.
-The cult’s philosophy is the one great truth: Stress moral uncertainty and the different approaches to doing good within the movement. Discuss how EA has changed and how the philosophy doesn’t have any prescriptions written in stone except that the community welcomes people who try to do their best for the good of others using evidence and reason.
-One magical leader: No idolizing and err toward being open if you disagree with an expert. Emphasize the decentralized origin of ideas in EA. Also, if you bring up one expert, it is good to bring up others, eg why just peter singer, toby ord, will macaskill, or rob wiblin? Surely you can find a second person to support their claim? Or just say “some well-respected figures think X because Y” and don’t namedrop anybody unless requested.
-Tithes and pushing self-denial or frugality to increase the ability to tithe more: Why is this even promoted among broke college students when the community has funds for a good few years? I’d approach it as something EA ideals have pointed to in the past, and something some people still do. Let them hear about GWWC if they ask. Move on quickly to talking about direct work. EA initially had bad publicity because of talks about money, and we can thank our lucky stars that it isn’t a moral imperative to “fundraise” anymore! It’s great that people have been and are still donating, and thanks to them, organizers are free to use so many other framings in outreach and pitch other things that will be less unpopular and more impactful. So please do!
-Promising a great afterlife or great eventual reward: Immortality via simulation, cryonics, and utopian simulation are probably things to steer a beginner-friendly discussion away from if it happens to go there.Additionally, I’d love to see some training on how young EAs can talk to their families.. I recently met a wannabe student organizer who told me how tenaciously he was talking to his (Mormon) parents about EA, and cult bells were ringing even in my head. I gave him some advice, but the odds are there are more prospective-organizers out there doing that. As an ex-young-vegan, I get it. But EA really doesn’t need parents lobbying their child’s university that the EA student group is a cult and should be shut down. Nor do we need well-meaning parents posting on social media or sending emails warning their parent friends or religious leaders about EA student groups corrupting their kids.
4. CRM
CRM seems good, but it should be used transparently. Just ask people what opportunities they would like information about and what their favorite cause areas are, and anything else about them they’d like you to know. Say you will keep this information for now, but it can be deleted any time on request. It is so you can send them things like job and fellowship opportunities they will really like, or interesting events and intellectual pieces they will really like. Be clear that you are not affiliated with any opportunities, but just doing it as a helpful service to your members.
5. Maybe we can all can helpA good volunteer opportunity for EAs might be to reach out to your university organizers and try to mentor them a bit. Send them good pieces or teach them how to proactively use the forum and subscribe to the community-building topic tag. Invite them to the slack and facebook groups and share newsletters with them they might not know about. You could even show up to the first or last day of their fellowships if the student organizers think it would help. I am doing a bit of mentoring for University of Texas organizers slightly , but this post makes me want to do moreso.
**Side note, I really don’t get the focus on student outreach in general. At least 4 of the 6 bottlenecks named seem better sourced from professionals and regional connections (management, ability to really figure out what matters most and set the right priorities, skills related to entrepreneurship / founding new organizations, and one-on-one social skills and emotional intelligence) than from universities. Plus young people are probably better at spreading cultural memes, so we might have a bigger reputational risk with them.- Red Teaming CEA’s Community Building Work by 1 Sep 2022 14:42 UTC; 296 points) (
- 12 May 2022 21:40 UTC; 16 points) 's comment on A hypothesis for why some people mistake EA for a cult by (
Kathy Forth was NOT right. How can you say that when she falsely accused someone of sexual assault, and tried to smear their character in her own way when proven wrong? She was demonstrably wrong. Please just let the dead rest. No one will like it, including Kathy’s family and friends, if this gets brought up again. Honestly it is not appropriate that you posted her suicide letter which has falsehoods within, and we know how drama hungry the EA community is. I personally witnessed the pain and chaos her delusions prompted her to cause and it does not need to be repeated. Many people witnessed that pain but mostly we don’t talk about it out of respect for the dead, because it is so evident she was unwell not malicious. It’s very sad. If you don’t see her claims constantly being refuted out in the open that’s why. Most correction about Kathy happens over DM so as to not publicly embarrass her memory. But it’s been 5 years and people on the EA Forum need to stop giving her falsehoods platform in your comments. So now I am writing this public response.
BTW you start off saying “EA/rationalism does have a sexual assault problem”. Actually, this still remains to be proven that EA has issues with sexual misconduct (let alone assault) worse than other, say, millenial-coded, social communities. Yes there was a big blowup with Brent Dill and Vassar 5 years ago. Appalling stuff. But I fail to see how this necessarily translates to the average EA’s experiences. As someone who has spent time in many social scenes (rave, burning man, nerd, gamer, poly, startup, animal liberation, spiritual/woo, and university social scenes to name a few) blowups happen everywhere thanks to the worst men. Women also have bad experiences everywhere. Unfortunately it is part of being a woman in a coed space. EA’s social scene is very respectful/boundary-respecting toward women in my experience, and their reporting processes are good (even Kathy praised the reporting systems of EA/CEA). Is there room for improvement? Almost definitely, like anywhere else. I hope to see more improvement. But in my opinion EA does not have a noteworthy sexual misconduct problem in 2023. Let alone an assault problem.
Just my opinion based on my own experience. But it is just as valid a data point as anyone else’s. If you are going to share stories, you could share the stories of women who have not experienced harassment too. Pushing back on this salacious narrative does not mean dismissing women’s reports btw. We EAs should take reports extremely seriously. And I expect most reports will be true or mostly true. But we should also refrain from labelling the whole diverse community as being plagued with a “sexual assault problem” because some women have had problems. Men do troubling things in every community. Reports are extremely important so we can attend to those specific people and situations, but they tell us almost nothing about frequency/endemicness of harassment within the broader community. Hopefully we get broader data soon.
I don’t think stories like this are lost on devoted EAs. But I think that many of us have heard of them many times before and you are going to see less and less handwringing the more the same stories get posted as proof of worse and worse systemic problems. For example I personally was outspoken about the Brent Dill case mentioned above back in 2018, at the time, even though I was new in the community. You could say I was incensed. I even had a meeting with the leader of CFAR at the time (which actually was good of them tbh). Anyway, witnessing that whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth and I definitely kept caring enough that I steered clear of the rationality community (not EA community, they are different!) for years. But as shocked as I was when that came out (as many were), that doesn’t mean I think that it is right to bring that incident up for the rest of time, (if 5 years later is fine, why not 8? Why not 10 years later?), as proof that EA or even the rationality community has a certain problem today.
Like yes, for sure, there was a problem there. For sure there are problems in little bubbles elsewhere, well I’d bet so anyway, because that’s just life right now until society becomes a bit “better” about women. But like, the EA community is huge and diverse and many of us who care about this are frankly tired and are starting to not even be sure that we want to feed a narrative that seems to run away with itself into false, generalized directions? Even if we would like to talk about it...? A lot of us who care are starting to learn that it seems like there isn’t a way to talk about this that doesn’t lead to people hijacking the conversation to shame all EAs, including those of us who care..? And like, it’s totally reasonable if those us who care don’t want to play into generalization of ourselves or the movement we care about, a movement which contains our friends whom we also know don’t deserve to be generalized in this way?
In general I think most EAs are totally cool with people making reports etc, I’d certainly encourage it. 100%. I’ve done so myself multiple times over the 5 years I’ve been in EA, whenever there was something that happened at an actual EA or rat space. I think it is important that things be brought to attention and logged and tracked somehow, and retributive action be taken if necessary. I just wish in these articles and discussions that there were timestamps and more details attached and such so we knew what we actually had to be worried about? Once you look at the timestamps and other details in relation to the hugeness of the EA community you can’t help but notice how much it looks like either cherrypicking OR beating a dead horse and frankly a little sideeyeing of and flatout ignoring journalists (not the women’s primary reports themselves though!) is starting to look very, very fair. For EAs who care enough to want details and stuff, there just isn’t a lot to say especially if you have heard the vague story before?
There are plenty of EAs who want any problems handled, but who also aren’t going to voluntarily put on a badge of shame. But like, some people, possibly you are one of them, seem to want the whole community to put on a badge of shame? It’s like… if people don’t see enough handwringing they think EAs as a group don’t care about women? But EA is 1⁄3 women? Anyway, (constant) shows of handwringing (like again and again in response to stories you have already heard) are not actually what you should care about? You should care about hard numbers and detailed incident reports and what is being done? People making their care evident to you and other lurkers is simply not going to be the priority? Like sorry you can’t see that many of us in EA give a damn, but I think you must not be looking and it isn’t our priority to shove our care in your face at every single turn (sometimes, sure, but not all the time forever) as the most evident thing we do. It is not the lurking self-appointed judges who matter. It is the actual experiences of women etc. You wouldn’t expect to see constant updates from any company that is trying really hard to handle gender-related issues, it has other goals too. So like, maybe don’t expect constant updates from EA either, and chill out on trying to drag EAs?
I hope you can take this comment in full stride. On reflection you can likely realize how it appears you’d want to put EAs in a box. It’s not fair given how diverse the EA community is and how many of us were already thinking about these problems and were way before the Time piece? For all the pushing you and other users like you have done these past few months I think you earned a little push*back*- 8 Mar 2023 3:56 UTC; 180 points) 's comment on Abuse in LessWrong and rationalist communities in Bloomberg News by (
- 11 Mar 2023 0:48 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Abuse in LessWrong and rationalist communities in Bloomberg News by (
“Most can only bring significant public attention to our concerns through the media or other intermediaries.”
This is a very disempowering and false narrative. Anyone can write their accounts up in perfect detail on the forum, to the community health team, on Twitter (and tag relevant parties), over DM to organizers of the event where they experienced the problem, over DM to mutual friends or employers of the problematic person, over a message to broad community organizers, on any of dozens of EA FB groups or Slacks, and/or in a police report.
To me, your comment reads as though normal people would have little option but to go to the press and shrug when their stories are inevitably misrepresented or shared only in piecemeal in service of the narrative the journalist cares about rather than the single narrative aim of the victim. But that isn’t true. People can go to the press if they want I suppose, I wouldn’t suppress anyone, but I want to push back against your disempowered narrative for doing so.
Also a separate point: If I’m honest, your comment about OP just rubs me the wrong way. You say “The original poster, being ‘mini-famous’, has a relatively effective platform to present whatever information she would like to present.” Relatively effective at what, I wonder?
To rehash the lessons from within her post: Despite her massive platform, she has not been meaningfully able to handle false rumors about her. Her fame is a bug when it comes to truthseeking about her and her experiences, not a feature. Additionally, she deals with death threats and stalkers and surely must speak carefully. I think it is kind of gross to imply her situation has the upper hand compared to other women when she is also a huge victim of mistreatment by men and doubtless has to be aware of risks every day. Her platform is also not “relatively-effective” at keeping her safe.
Like your sentence reads like “well that’s easy for you to say Aella” but it isn’t easy for her to say. That’s the thing.
I think my sentiments are not only my own though? Just as I’m sure your sentiments are not only your own and it is important that you say them. I never said I speak for all. I also never said I was fully healed nor that anyone should be fully healed by reading this piece.
I do have empathy toward that person too. I think that went without saying. In future I really hope that others will not try to map any particular women like me and other women who do feel healed and/or hopeful about moving forward to any particular side of any fence.
Okay but, before I say, I’d like to clarify that I don’t think I’d be perfect at this, which is one reason I’m not leading weird things. But I think if you are gonna make requests like that of employees you live or travel with, you basically have to be. (because it gets so much harder then, and this type of communication that makes weirdness safe is the leader’s responsibility not the employee’s).
Okay, at risk of sounding cringe, it’s things like:Hi Chloe, some of us were talking about going to St. Barths for the day, would you like to come? As a separate question, would you be willing to help get things ready so we can make it happen before the ferry leaves at X, and possibly be available for some ops tasks throughout the day trip too? Before you answer: I realize it is your day off today, so I wonder if there is a good solution for that? My thought was maybe you can take your day off tomorrow and I pay you overtime to make up for the surprise? I don’t know, does this appeal to you or what do you think?
Hey Chloe, the group of us would really appreciate an Ops lead for today’s trip. But before I ask, I want to clarify that there’s no pressure at all. It’s completely up to you as I bet I can wrangle people to turntake as things come up instead. If you want to take it on though, we can discuss how to make up for your day off or what overtime pay makes sense. Feeling keen or no?
Hi Chloe, asking as a friend, not your boss.. We were thinking of going to St. Barths and we wonder what might be your happy price for helping today? Or do you not even want to be engaged with in this way and want your days off to be sacrosanct? I understand that navigating the social stuff while also being employed by me is probably awkward and I’d like to give you the chance to take the lead and clarify on what feels beneficial, not just passably appropriate, for me to ask you about bonus tasks like this. [hopefully this conversation happened early on but it could happen then if not]
[After any reflective but nonconclusive response] Okay, that makes sense. Hm. I am noticing that I want you to have time to think about it, but then feel conflicted that I am on a deadline to make this St. Barth’s trip happen. So let’s get some quick takes, and if you still aren’t sure, hang back and just enjoy your day to yourself as you planned and as I’ve noticed you like to do :) Sound good? [Okay] Ok, what’s your gut take on what minimizes your expected regret? … And, gut take, what maximizes your expected joy and wellbeing?
[As a friend, relies on a jovial environ Chloe is already included in] Okay everyone, let’s put our heads together to make this St. Barths trip work! Raise your hand if you’re coming and I’ll delegate something to you, you can trade your tasks if you want. Chloe could you chime in if you think I’m missing anything? [Everyone, before they head out: Thanks Chloe, enjoy your day :) ]
[If Chloe helps, with or without bonus pay, give lots of check-ins and thanks throughout the day]
I mean, it would depend on how everybody is/the feel of the group, and how much Chloe was needed Sunday, and how much this is considered personal (make offer out of my pocket/crowdfund out of group’s personal pockets, eg “guys before I ask Chloe to work on her day off is anyone willing to put some money forward for her overtime pay? Let’s get some revealed preferences out in the open as to how much we really want this trip and need help with it) vs professional (okay it can be considered a teambuilding exercise but it forces you the leader to think how important it is compared to next week’s work because she will need more time off).
But I feel pretty confident that people can patchwork something together to make this type of thing feel happy and good. Rationalists get weird looks for speaking in this way and coming up with frank, novel solutions, but honestly it can make all the difference. Of course, you have to sort people out in interviews to make sure there is a cultural fit for this level of flexibility and frankness.
I’m curious what others would think of being approached in such a way. Especially Alice or Chloe but I can understand them not responding
(Edited to try to escape the cringe but probably failed)
[Edit: I’ll redact this comment once someone who knows more actually clarifies it. My intent was to help provide a way to connect the concern to OP’s piece as-written. If you don’t want that and want perfect clarity instead, just skip this thread]
(I’ll throw my hat in the ring that this doesn’t surprise me, now seeing that he was pretty sure that he had a friendship with this woman. Personally If I arranged for a friend to have an interview at an effective nonprofit in my city, I would definitely ask them if they wanted to stay in my spare bedroom. I’d always offer because (1) I personally greatly prefer to stay in a place with a kitchen and some opportunity for social interaction over a hotel room, and (2) hotel costs are counterfactual donations and trades of this flavor have been going on in EA for a decade now.
It’s bad if he didn’t clarify first and give her the option of hotel or not. And possibly, due to perceived power dynamics, it would even be bad anyway to offer his space… like maybe it’s important that he had been totally hands-off with her entire work-related visit since their friendship was not actually so cemented. But this whole housing dynamic seems qualitatively similar to the type of mistakes and misunderstandings of power dynamics that he made elsewhere, and is now working on improving and addressing proactively in future. So I personally do not continue to be worried about the housing aspect although it was not named in this apology piece.)
Just wondering if you can acknowledge that EA is not for everyone? I guess I feel a lot “safer” about these types of critiques to change the culture and overt focus when people acknowledge that. There are ways I would tweak EA culture in some places to lead to a bigger and broader community. There also ways I would not, and there are people who I think would never be happy with EA’s values unless it already described what they are already interested in and already believe, which is very far from and conflicts with EA. And those people will never like EA until we forsake the effectiveness focus at all.
For example, this person:
In an introductory discussion group we ran (in our university group), one of the participants perceived some of EA’s ideas as “cold-hearted” and was very critical of the abstract, sometimes detached way of trying to calculate how to do good most effectively.
(Not saying you didn’t do this but) If it were me leading that group I might poke at that a little and help them think differently. Because I think often people like that have picked up a slight mistaken impression along the way. And based on where that misunderstanding was, it would be great to be able to replace or augment parts of the curriculum, even if it is just with your own disclaimer. You could ask them what would prove them wrong about that conception? You could ask them if they think there is ever a way to compare interventions and how they would do so?
But I also might just say something like, “okay well this group and movement might not be for you then and that’s okay. You would meet plenty of warmhearted people in EA, and I think by definition it might be wrong to call altruistic tactics coldhearted. But if you have such a strong reaction, you probably won’t ever be happy with the goals and tactics of the movement. And that’s fine. Good luck in your altruistic endeavors”
I wonder if you think that person would ever really be a good fit for EA?
It is frustrating to see people bounce off the movement saying it is too cold. And it might be a reason to tweak the intro curriculum or work on the culture in your group. There is something going on there, and it does happen often, and I don’t like it either. But I don’t think it warrants coming to EAs and saying anything approaching “you guys actually are cold and need to work on compassion”. I actually don’t think they* are? EAs are the warmest most compassionate people I know. (*I had said “we” originally but removing myself from this as I’m one of the colder ones in writing style. But even I have cried many a tear for animals, minorities, people in poverty, etc)
[Edit: I accidentally flowed into a bunch of suggestions, but originally I wanted it to have a questioning tone and just wanted to know what you think]
It’s definitely important! It’s also important to note that this person has likely already been banned from CEA events for 5 years and some other EA spaces: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=jKJ4kLq8e6RZtTe2P
I honestly can’t comment on how rationalists feel about it and what they have to learn. But I don’t think non-rat EAs necessarily have to do “so much more soul searching”[edit: than we are already doing] about this. After all this entire piece is basically about the rationality community.
[This comment has been heavily edited since it got a response]
[So, I’m responding to a comment asking for the utility case about casual sex and poly. But I realized I focused exclusively on consensual casual sex within the community because that is the only piece I view as possibly worth engaging with, and it is what the post is about. I don’t have notable-feelings about in-company relations or COI relations so I wouldn’t go out of my way to defend them, and I do NOT think anti-poly-feelings hold water so I’m not wasting my time on that. There is no reason to feel the need to defend polyamory on ethical grounds. It’s as ethical as monogamy, period. That said, I will push back on the lumping together of poly and casual sex in the first place. In my mind, the people who have the most casual sex historically have been like… college kids and people between relationships. These are both groups who will probably end up in monogamous relationships for life. I really don’t get why people conflate casual sex and poly. Casual sex and open relationships? Sure, that’s kind of their thing. Casual sex and single people (both mono and poly)? Sure, that’s how a lot of modern dating gets started and how people blow steam off when they aren’t ready for a relationship. Casual sex and in-relationship poly people? I’m not sold because each relationship has its own rules and for the most part people do go on dates and think carefully of where to spend their time, time which is limited greatly by already having a partner.]
Why do you think casual sex is bad for utility of the movement? It actually doesn’t go without proving. I admit that was my intuition too, when I started thinking about it. But tbh after considering the other hypothesis equally (my gf facetiously was like “lmao EA is really gonna lose what it has going for it without sexual freedom” and I went “wait what” and thought about it), I have changed my mind.
So anyway I’ll make the “sexual freedom within community is good for utility” argument:
[At first glance and often in practice,] EA is either (pick your poison): (1) a doomery apocalypse cult or (2) a morally strict self-flagellating mass of tithers and minimalists. On the other hand, we do poly and flexible sexual connections and those of us who are engaged in those things will even try and help you figure out if it’s for you. Poly is fun[1]. Sex is fun. Play and curiosity are fun. These are some of the major fun things our community does have going for it when comes to hedonism [and utopian way of life, over the rest of society.]
[I want to clarify the term “fun”. I’m afraid that people will think that “fun”, cuz it’s a one-syllable word used by children, is a trivial experience. It isn’t. It’s a complex experience pairing joy with surprise and with acute presence and focus in the world and with lightness of being. Fun is the ultimate “being in the present moment joyfully” experience. It’s basically the hedonic holy grail.]
I’m also, in thinking it aids impact, not talking about using sex as a lure to get people out to events or something. I’m talking about making the lifestyle sustainable and nice and liberating for the people in it. Increasing connection. Increasing joy and laughs. Sex is something special and it leads to special things, not just moans and groans. Even if you do it casually it leads to special things. It’s a shortcut to connection. [More than sexual connection—I mean real human-to-human connection that comes after you’ve engaged intimately. Then a new type of interpersonal comfort emerges. This is very similar to the point made in the top comment of this post, but I’m trying to explain the mechanism and ground it so people who have not experienced it can see it as real and these types of casual explorations as inherently valuable. You know it yourself if you have ever had a new friend who you have stayed up all night with after hooking up, or who, the new hookup opened space in your friendship for increased texting/memesharing/asking each other big questions about the world/etc. I even know one couple in the animal welfare sector who I think are now engaged whose relationship started out with casual sex: they went on a date but it was really lame according to them and they had “no chemistry”. But they (consensually and both knowing what it meant to go back to someone’s place after a date) decided to go back to his and have a one-night stand anyway. Yano for kicks, in a may-as-well-get-some-pleasure kind of way. But then something shifted after they hooked up and they pulled an all nighter talking together. At least, this is what they told me (and some others around). As I say, IIRC they are now engaged, but either way they have been in an enriching relationship for 3+ years now which they surely treasure deeply and which has surely helped with their animal welfare impact.]
Now the apocalypse thing: Many EAs especially want this interpersonal connection shortcut and freedom when a lot of us are afraid we don’t even have that many years left on this earth even. I’m sorry but I’m already hearing friends talk about reducing their interest in AI safety work because they want to cross things off their bucket list before we all die. People are literally spending down their retirement accounts and we’ve just begun to see real worrying AI progress. You make EA and longtermist spaces sex-negative,and I’m just not sure people are gonna keep giving it their all til the end. We may see darker nights ahead than we are now and yet those nights might still have hope and we wouldn’t want people to leave EA the way normies will be flocking away from corporate jobs and stifling culture. Who keeps their 9-to-5 when the world ends ~next month? Nobody. They go and hang out with their loved ones. This will sound dramatic at first glance. But I’m not saying people will leave EA as soon as it becomes more sex negative, I’m saying that the more sex-negative EA becomes, the lower the critical mass of dread is required to abandon your post.*
Now the tithing, self-flagellation thing: Let’s be real, getting involved in this community has been known to prompt onset of a lot of burnout at best and serious mental health struggles at worst. [And this might unfortunately be a bug of the philosophy. It might be stifling by nature, at least in early stages. Read the section “Bad” EAs Caught In a Misery Trap” here: https://michaelnotebook.com/eanotes/ So, firstly, I don’t want EA to become more stifling than it already can feel, or not more stifling in a way that actually feels stifling (there are other norms we could adopt). This seems bad for the weirdos in it (and yup we are basically all weirdos for now). Second, the more deep connections people make with eachother in the beginning (and I argue connections are shortcutted via consensual sex, these are adults after all), the more help people can get moving from [early EA full of shame] to [experienced EA happy to make tradeoffs and prioritize their own wellbeing]. This was actually my experience. I came into EA a hardcore minimalist who was using my altruism obsession to suppress myself, so much so I was really ineffective. Then after hooking up with a certain EA which led to to-this-day friendship and an ongoing romantic relationship at-that-time with that EA, I ended up witnessing how to do EA more sustainably from that person and their friends. It was a big relief, at first I could hardly trust that it was morally okay to say, order random things on amazon or go out for fancy dinner or hire a house cleaner, I had so shamed myself about altruism and money. I think I’d have learned anyway how to make my altruism more sustainable and efficient (I’d have had to), but getting consensually involved with one person who knew the rhythm of it all probably helped me skip a lot of guilt and just move forward faster.]
That we are all high in the “openness to new experience” personality trait, and nonjudgmental about alternative lifestyles including dating styles, actually matters too. I think few people are gonna want to sign up to EA if it’s also a constant HR meeting with the same “you can only bring one partner to the Christmas party” vibe. The people who stick hardest to EA are the weirdos and the people with a healthy distrust in authority and prescribed standards. Despite the ivy league outreach, I think that remains the case. For people like that, social scripts just raise question marks and side-eyes, and seem unhealthy. We want to attract early adopter types. We can’t do that by trying to pattern-match everyone else. I think EA might fall into a trap of trying to “please all of the people all of the time” and that isn’t going to work. We can’t be everything. And if we can’t be everything, it will be a lot more efficient to be ourselves rather than pretend to be something we are not. Give the new members caveats to reduce feelings of discomfort, and kick out the grifters trying to just get laid, but our existing members (the actual EAs tryna work on stuff, not the EAdjacents/grifters) still are served by being who they are. I don’t think you can remove one of the weirdest aspects of EA and expect the other weird and good ways of thinking to flourish in the same way tbh. I really value what EA has going for it and I don’t even want to risk making big cultural changes like that without really good proven reason. Forum reflections are not enough reason for changes so big as a swathe of people forcing themselves to change their preferences and increase their disgust reactions or whatever, anything to get themselves to uphold arbitrary norms about sexual connection within community. At least, I don’t want to risk it yet. I might change my mind next week, but right now it feels rash. The norms of allowing casual sex within community (it’s not even a huge thing tbh but my point is that it’s allowed and many people don’t look twice at you for giving it a go) evolved with effective altruism, in the past say half-dozen years especially. If you think EA kind of discovered a lot in that time, we should be very wary to push back on the norms we have. Maybe our growth and what has been figured out is a little bit due to sexual connection which created a little innovator soup that gave us a lot of great ideas and curated high-trust ingroup spaces to discuss them in. Just maybe an effect like that is enough to tip the scale toward “these norms are actively net positive.” I don’t know that yet, but I at least won’t say confidently that they are net negative so I’ll stay out of people’s business.
Also finally, this is maybe the best reason to destigmatize casual sex within the EA community. I want EA to be the future. I want the philosophy to spread such that almost every person is, by some degree, an EA. I know that we don’t need 100% of humanity working on the world’s most important problems. But I do want future humans to value doing good efficiently. I do want EA to become way way bigger than it is now. We shouldn’t think EA is going to remain tiny and there will always be other people to fool around with if that’s a fundamental life experience you want to have. We should take on a mantle of trying to not only impact the future, but be the future, because we can’t even protect the future if our values don’t spread into it and broaden to more universal ways of life. We should figure out how to live our lives coherently, when we want, within EA just fine, rather than fractioning EA into a smaller box of one’s life. If people want to separate EA from their broader life, that’s fine! But don’t force people who don’t want to, to do it. Those are the people who I think are doing the work of figuring out how to integrate EA with a vision of social utopia. We will doubtless fumble a few balls on the way to the goal, but that doesn’t mean we should advocate for people to get off the field and stop trying. Sex-positivity will be an aspect of a utopia. I believe that anyway. So sex-positivity should be a part of EA. And anyway, if EA grows so big, this rule about not hooking up with community members won’t even be sustainable, it would cut out too many people from the population and we’d have people twiddling their thumbs for want of people to test the waters and explore sexuality with. That would, I think, be net negative. Well, I argue it’s a difference in scale, not of kind, to stigmatize casual sex today, from a moral POV.
I don’t even want to see terminology like “sleeping around” on the forum tbh, which to me is inherently stigmatizing at worst, and at best trivializes the niceness and essential humanness of the experience people are trying to have. Even if they are mistaken in how they are using the tool, how can we surely say yet that the tool has little use? Sure, maybe some people are trying to have causal sex stupidly and riskfully (although I have seen nothing of the sort myself), and perhaps some people don’t want casual sex and need a piece like the above post to help them consider what they really want. But maybe we can help people do what they want less stupidly and find what they really want, without stigmatizing casual sex.
You might not buy these arguments but people who have casual sex might. Let them decide. If you don’t feel too awkward, you can ask people about it. Same as I might ask an EA “Why do you eat meat?” If they say “I think it’s better for my impact” I will drop the question. But If they say “yeah I’d really like to go veg actually” I will help them with that, or if they say “it’s too hard to go veg” I will ask them if they would like to know how easy it can be to go lactovegetarian. Similarly you can ask someone something about their casual connections (or poly) and if they say “I think it’s better for me and does no harm, we both had fun, and it’s none of anyone’s business also” you can drop it. If they say “yeah tbh I’m actually trying to find a relationship”, “yeah I’m worried about my career and this helps me feel more sure in mentoring and the like”, or (big oof) “IDK she’s hot right?” then you can totally offer to talk with them about those things and suggest ways of being which are kinder to themselves and others.
So let people pick what makes them happy where they can get it, I think there are better solutions if we keep looking than cultural mandates about consensual bedroom practices.
But I have other norms I think would work way better than [blanket increased finger wagging at people sleeping around] plus [increased guilt and self-suppression for those interested in sleeping around who are most vulnerable to guilt]. Those two are what I think this suggestion will amount to. I can write those alternative other norms up if people are interested.
Oh yeah, fyi I also have no horse in this race personally. Not these days for sure. I’m ambiamorous and I don’t really feel a deep burning need to love and create fun sexy times with anyone but my partner, and I haven’t dated (at least) anyone else basically our whole relationship. So if it were negative utility to not have casual sex in the community obviously I’d abide. But I do have an ethical compass that all people be treated well, including people with minority sexual inclinations, and people who want to dip their toe into things casually to learn about each other and learn how things work. My ethical compass demands that these people should be allowed to craft their own futures without stigmatization. Even if all that is precisely forseeable about that future at the moment of diving in is just one night of fun (again, fun being one of the most precious things ever), if there aren’t blatant costs in that particular interest (again like COI or in-company relationships), let people figure it out themselves. Curiosity and freedom are both intrinsic values of mine.
*I get that if people are bouncing off right now, that’s a problem that trades against this. But to me that isn’t conclusively proven. We need surveys. Soon hopefully. I do not want people to use their energy or their cultural attention budget on crafting a norm that we don’t even know will do any good. Not sleeping around doesn’t seem to meaningfully address most of the concerns I’ve even gleaned.
- ^
Poly is fun if you are well-suited to it. Monogamy can be just as fun if you are suited to that! I know because I’m an ambi-amorous person who is really liking living mono for right now
- ^
I have read all that before. I really have to wonder if you actually read the Facebook threads, because that isn’t damning at all. Especially not against Yudkowsky.. it’s actually overtly vindicating of him. And it is intellectually dishonest that you even link the archived miricult website when even the medium piece and the Facebook posts malign it as essentially a highly inaccurate hit-piece. So, your second link contradicts the first. (The first is so nutty it’s not believable anyway it’s very pizzagate-ish).
And tbh, the facebook threads themselves discredit much of the second link where they are ironically posted within as proof of the claims it tries to make.
Also it is funny that if you read those Facebook threads, Michael Vassar is named as a primary source for some of those claims they discuss whether or not they could they be true. And Vassar is actually one of the few people that is agreed to be a sexual harasser/assaulter and serious agent of chaos. He is one of the men RuffleJax names in your 3rd and 4th links. So, your third and fourth links which implicate Vassar as a bad actor, in so doing also discredit the 1st and 2nd about MIRI involvement in statutory rape/blackmail/etc.
As for the RuffleJax tweet allegations, yes serious stuff. I can’t comment on the Rettek stuff because I am not in the rationality community to the extent to know, but Vassar has been discussed on here before and has been banned from EA and SlateStarCodex events for quite a while. Please read that link. Plus RuffleJax admits that the only reason she included EA in her tweets, not only rationality, was out of respect for Kathy naming EA. RuffleJax only had issues in rationality, but it is proven that Kathy was wrong about EAs so there was never any reason for RuffleJax to mention EA and doing so was a mistake on her part tbh. Relatedly, I wish you too would not speak of EA and rationality as though they are interchangeable.
That same Vassar discussion also is a good enough rebuttal to the Time piece, though there is a lot more to be concerned about with the veracity and relevance if you dig for anything that doesn’t already confirm your ideas that EA has an abnormally high rate of sexual assaulters:Questions like, were any women with recent experiences who spoke to journalists actually interacting with EAs, or were they interacting with startup and coliving people in the bay and assigning the responsibility to EAs? As 2023 has progressed, people have become a lot more aware that EA does not necessarily include E/acc and other random bay area armchair-philosophizer, polyamorous, and AI-obsessed types. But tbh most people could be forgiven for being mistaken about this when the TIME journalist was doing interviews. More questions you might care about could be: Had the EA community health team handled those complaints already to the victim’s satisfaction? Are perpetrators cast out and what are the banning procedures? Should it matter for EA’s reputation that the EA community had not been given the chance to handle some of those complaints? (Some women spoke to TIME without ever having told anyone of the behavior they experienced and I think this matters, because men do sexual misconduct everywhere behind closed doors. So I think it is more how a community handles misconduct when reported that should matter for that community’s reputation. How else would other EAs not experiencing harassment know about it? Reports are so essential). And is this quantity of complaints one can dig up unusually large for a community of this size and diversity, especially if you allow yourself to go back 5 or more years in collecting reports? (In my experience no this is not an unusual quantity of complaints going back 5 years)
It feels like you are just throwing everything you can think of to prove your preconceptions, but the intellectually honest thing would be to pick the things you think are valid only. Your links either contradict each other (as with the first 4) or are redundant and outdated (as Vassar is implicated strongly in both RuffleJax’s tweets and the Time piece and has been dealt with) and actually paint a picture of a hit-piece not a serious critique or expose at all.
I don’t want to comment much on what did or didn’t happen. What I will comment on myself is this: Those instances where we can actually identify the alleged bad actors were a long time ago:The miricult stuff was alleged to have happened 10 years ago (and I’m not sure this relates to EA anyway tbh). Personally I don’t find them believable allegations anyway. But I’ll leave it at 10 years.
The RuffleJax/Vassar/Rettek stuff was alleged 5 years ago and has been dealt with, and has nothing to do with EA by her own admission.
The one thing in the Time piece that was definitely attached to EA and not Vassar or startup/AI culture (the OCB stuff) was also 5 years ago and has been dealt with. In fact the woman had told CEA that she was satisfied with CEA’s handling prior to the TIME piece being written. The dynamics were also quite a lot more socially complicated than it was made out to be in the Time piece.
If your claim is still that EA and/or rationality has a sexual harassment or assault problem today, I’m sorry but your data just does not prove that in the slightest. If you disagree with this still then I really don’t know what to say. Maybe, “encourage women to make more reports that include date and names?” Because right now it is impossible to say what has been going on in recent years. It’s always going to be harder to prove a negative (that sexual misconduct doesn’t happen much in EA or rationality), but at least if reporting were the norm, lacking recent reports would be a good signal. Right now it’s hard to say if it means that misconduct instances or low, or just that women were avoiding reporting and wanted to exit the community asap.
It’s funny because back in 2018 I was extremely hard on the rats about the Brent Dill stuff. Now 5 years later I’m the one who is reminding everyone that time has passed and it’s possible things changed. I witnessed the rat community wake up to abuses and people really started paying a lot more attention to twisted dynamics. I am actually really hopeful that not only have things gotten better, but that EA (and maybe even rationality!!) is a more respectful place for women than other counterfactual communities. Again, it looks like we will have better data soon. But your links are not good data at all that there is a current issue. I don’t understand the rush to condemn an entire diverse community, almost every one of whom cares deeply about sexual misconduct as much as anyone else who, say, read that TIME piece. You should withhold judgement just a bit longer.
I think it’s better than tech at large or basically anywhere else I’ve found. [Edit: Nobody just writes a Time piece about a community that needs the same level of improvement as other places. Come on.. the world knows this and let’s not pretend otherwise. The world therefore should not be happy and shrug its shoulders and allow its attention to be collectively wasted in such a way? Readers should be able to trust that if something is published in Time that it is important and actually noteworthy. To publish something non-noteworthy in there is inherently espistemic dishonesty. So no, that “improvement is needed” is not the only thing that matters when it comes to the question of whether the journalist was dishonest, mal-intentioned, etc]
And I think an investigative journalist absolutely could have found more claims to the actual contrary, yeah, and actually should have before blasting a narrative on a nation-wide scale. I see them as basically paying lip service to neutrality by quoting Julia there (if they were truly neutral, they could have just said that themselves, as I see similar qualifying sentiments in Kelsey Piper’s journalism). And paying lip service to neutrality allows them to avoid accusations that they didn’t show both sides (like severely overweighting one side is so much better?). It also allows them to dodge any claims from normies and colleagues that they aren’t following journalistic integrity. But the bare-minimum journalistic integrity doesn’t hold a candle to unqualified, every-man integrity, and I think that’s closer to what the journalist’s presentation lacked.
Wow. Sincere apologies you went through that. Even if Kat and Emerson thought they were being reasonable (no comment), and/or even if bad instances were few and far between (no comment), such instances would affect me and most people I know very deeply. Probably including the multi-month hangover and residual pain today. And that matters, and is something we need managers/bosses/colleagues to consider. Even if it was only painful at the time, that would matter. Really sorry.
P.S. I previously put a “changed my mind” react to this comment, but I really meant “brought new things to mind”. Put them in other comments
Seconding that it’s a bit condescending to imply that people who are not digging into Owen might just “like Owen” or “face cognitive dissonance”
I also find the concept in the last sentence that commentors might look like they are “backing” powerful community members, to be gross. It’s not a zero-sum situation. This might not be exactly what Hattie meant by “backing” but I think others night feel vindicated that that’s a good way to look at it. But Owen and the woman herself collaborated on the piece so I’d be surprised to find that anyone involved thinks of this situation as like...winner v loser going forward.
Hm you say “EA didn’t listen to anyone who warned them about obvious scams”, but the article says:
None of the early Alameda employees who witnessed Bankman-Fried’s behavior years earlier say they anticipated this level of alleged criminal fraud. There was no “smoking gun,” as one put it, that revealed specific examples of lawbreaking. Even if they knew Bankman-Fried was dishonest and unethical, they say, none of them could have foreseen a fraud of this scope.
And
No one has alleged criminal behavior on the part of top EA figures. None of the people who raised concerns about Bankman-Fried to EA leaders in 2018 and 2019 say they warned about specific criminal activity, nor did they foresee the size and scope of the alleged fraud at the heart of the FTX collapse. In charging documents, federal prosecutors identify the start of Bankman-Fried’s alleged fraud as 2019.
So I’m not sure you can say there were warnings of “obvious scams”.
AlsoSometime [in 2019], the Centre for Effective Altruism did an internal investigation relating to CEA and Alameda, according to one person who was contacted during the investigation, and who said it was was conducted in part by MacAskill. Bankman-Fried left the board of the organization in 2019. The Centre for Effective Altruism did not respond to repeated requests from TIME to discuss the circumstances leading to his departure; MacAskill and others declined multiple opportunities to answer questions about those events.
So I’m not sure it is accurate to say that “EA didn’t listen to” the warnings which were given. I’m certainly curious about the quality of the internal investigation by CEA. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were gaps/it was of low quality. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was of expected/good quality given the nature of the complaints made. And I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Sam would have fooled a non-EA, commissioned investigation too, enough that non-EA nonprofits would have felt comfortable taking his money. I mean, I assume Sam would have refused to give internal financial documents to independent investigators, and such a refusal to engage thoroughly from Alameda (“Um, no you can’t see our internal documents? Who do you think you are..?”) would be so normal for an investment firm that it can’t even be seen as a red flag.
I’m not surprised that CEA is refusing to comment til after the commissioned independent investigation is complete, whether or not their 2019 internal investigation was of high, decent, or low quality. I’m not sure which it was yet. I guess I’ll wait to see.
[Edit: In general I’m against pushing to make others responsible for the sins of others without a lot of proof. Especially when the “sinners” had dark triad traits who could have been trying to manipulate the others. I know the general population and journalists don’t think that way or have as much patience in that regard, but I’d like it if EAs did. Judge leadership for competence, and replace them if needed, sure, but comeuppance here is still likely to be punishment for trying and failing. And I think punishment should be reserved for the actual sinners themselves. I’m not at all sure anyone who didn’t work directly with SBF at Alameda “sinned” here. And if they didn’t, EA itself and EA leaders don’t “deserve” comeuppance, IMO.
I find comeuppance as journalistic motivation plausible, but I also admit that comeuppance might not be the journalist’s intention with this article, even subconsciously. But it sounds like you are also arguing that comeuppance would be warranted for other reasons here, and I just don’t think so. Comeuppance is moral punishment. I’ll reiterate that it would be fine to push that leadership should be changed (after the investigation). But let the actual sinners, and the sinners alone, be punished for their sins. [[I don’t want to suppress discussion, so sure, place your bets, but please don’t assume moral fault yet.]]
Finally, I agree with you that many journalists are activists themselves. But I’ll also note that when journalists and others say that “EA isn’t doing enough”, they are still potentially using another way to shame moral actors who otherwise appear to be doing more than them. It is a frame that EA has more agency and privilege than them (perhaps unjustly given), but still has less actual goodness and merit than them. So I still find it very plausible that the recent journalists are (consciously or unconsciously) doling out extra blame and shame to put aspiring altruists in their place. And if it is not the journalists themselves doing this, perhaps, as a business, they are catering to the many, many readers who click for and revel in “comeuppance”.]- 25 Mar 2023 15:54 UTC; 10 points) 's comment on Ivy Mazzola’s Quick takes by (
I appreciate you writing this. To me, this clarifies something. (I’m sorry there’s a rant incoming and if this comunity needs its hand held through these particular revelations, I’m not the one):
It seems like many EAs still (despite SBF) didn’t put significant probability on the person from that particular Time incident being a very well-known and trusted man in EA, such as Owen. This despite the SBF scandal and despite (to me) this incident being the most troubling incident in the Time piece by far which definitely sounded to be attached to a “real” EA more than any of the others (I say as someone who still has significant problems with the Time piece). Some of us had already put decent odds on the probability that this was an important figure doing something that was at least thoughtless and ended up damaging the EA movement… I mean the woman who reported him literally tried to convey that he was very well-connected and important.
It seems like the community still has a lot to learn from the surprise of SBF about problematic incidents and leaders in general: No one expects their friends or leaders are gonna be the ones who do problematic things. That includes us. Update now.
Some EAs think that a public reckoning in the comments is what is needed but honestly, if I was a victim looking in, such a show of shock and pearl-clutching just looks naive and frankly some of the responses would frustrate me a bit. Like “do you guys think you are a community of angels [or robots] or something?” I hypothesize that many of the people who are reacting kindly to Owen already got our surprise and despair out of our systems before now. Like I already mourned this, both that leaders can do dumb stuff that puts their own movement at risk and that the men I know and respect can do sexually problematic and power-naive things. And I’ve mourned it many times before now too, inside and outside of EA, when finding out that friends of mine or even partners have sexually problematic or manipulative pasts, or even been the one on the receiving end of sexual misconduct or worse from the people I love and trust the most. [I’ve also mourned my own professional stupidity plenty so I know deep in my bones that people who usually try pretty hard to do good can make major fuckups.]
I don’t want this message to be taken as dramatically proclaiming something like “men suck” or “reject all gods” or something.… I don’t think either of those are useful scripts. But honestly.… this community needs to come to terms that sexual harrassment or professional misconduct can be done by anyone. Sexual-assault-awareness advocates have been trumpeting that for decades now. Frankly the surprise this community is displaying is more concerning to me than Owen’s behavior itself. Like.… this is almost exactly what we should expect this to look like? Men have been disrespecting women or just not noticing the perspectives of women for most of human history, only improving sharply on a sociological level a few years ago, which is after most of the men in this community reached adulthood. The decent men with past fuckups are trying to atone for their past sins or mistakes, and I guarantee we all are connected to at least some of those men. You don’t realize who they are, but you should factor in that you are already close to a couple of them. So just like you shouldn’t be surprised when a woman tells you she has sexual abuse in her past or is uncomfortable, don’t be so surprised when a man tells you he has done something intentionally or accidentally problematic. Like, start integrating these social justice and human lessons, please. I feel this should be a relatively quick update to make, you should have downloaded almost the entire package already -_-
Again thank you for writing, it really did help me clarify a lot about this community’s reaction vs. my own, I think.
[Edit: I want to add that from a personal development perspective, I know mistakes happen, including moral mistakes and professional or social mistakes. I’ve done them and so has every person I’ve ever become close enough with to discuss such things with. That is one reason I want to treat both the women and Owen kindly. It could be you or your loved one or your child next time, trying to present a truthful situation that everyone views as outlandish but which you’d have found troubling in their shoes. Likewise, it could be you, or your loved one or your child next time being caught up after doing something everyone else thinks (and which you now humiliatingly agree) is egregious. From behind the veil of ignorance, how would you want the world to treat your or your child’s incident report or apology letter?]