Keerthana Gopalakrishnan

Karma: 248

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 22 Mar 2023 18:01 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 6
in reply to: RobBensinger’s comment on: Where I’m at with AI risk: convinced of danger but not (yet) of doom
An AI killing everyone wouldn’t earn a massive penalty in training, because there won’t be humans alive in that scenario to assign the penalty.
Humans need not be around to give a penalty at inference time, just like how GPT4 is not penalized by individual humans, but that the reward is learned / programmed. Even if all humans are sleeping / dead today, GPT can run inference according to the reward we preprogrammed. They are not doing pure online learning.
This is where a huge amount of lethality comes from on anything remotely resembling the present paradigm. Unaligned operation at a dangerous level of intelligence*capability will kill you; so, if you’re starting with an unaligned system and labeling outputs in order to get it to learn alignment, the training regime or building regime must be operating at some lower level of intelligence*capability that is passively safe, where its currently-unaligned operation does not pose any threat.
It is a logical fallacy to account for future increase in capabilities but not future advances in safety research. You’re claiming AGI will be an x-risk based on scaling current capabilities only, but you’re failing to scale safety. Generalization to unsafe scenarios is a situation we want to write tests for before deploying in situations where they may occur. Phase deployment should help test whether we can generalize to increasingly harder situations.
I’d expect the first AGI systems to be built by labs that are pushing full steam ahead on making crazy impressive things happen ASAP, which means you’re actively optimizing against minds that are trying to limit their impact, intelligence, or power
The recent push for productization is making everyone realize that alignment is a capability. A gaslighting chatbot is a bad chatbot compared to a harmless helpful one. As you can see currently, the world is phasing out AI deployment, fixing the bugs, then iterating.
You gave an argument that human goals overlap some with the goals of evolution, but you didn’t give an argument that humans are non-catastrophic from the (pseudo-)perspective of evolution. That would depend on whether humans will produce lots of copies of human DNA in the future.
Humans are unaligned in various ways, it looks like a lot of AIs will be deployed in the future, many aligned to different objectives. I’m skeptical of MIRI’s modeling of risk because y’all only talk about one super-powerful AGI that is godlike, but y’all haven’t modeled multiple companies, multiple AGIs, multiple deployments. Unlike the former, this is going to be the most likely scenario that is frequently unmentioned in forecasting. Future compute is going to be distributed among these AGIs too, so in many ways we end up at something akin to a modern society of humans.
Yep! The orthogonality doesn’t just show that unfriendly goals are possible; it shows that friendly goals are possible too.
Then why the overemphasis/obsession on doom scenario? It makes for a great robot-uprising scifi story but is unscientific. If you approximate the likelihood of future scenarios as a gaussian distribution, wiping out all humans is so extreme and long tailed that it is less likely than almost any other scenario in the set, and the least likely scenario in that set has a probability whose limit approaches to zero given the infinite set of possibilities summing up to 1.0. Given that the number of possibilities are infinite, the likelihood of any one possibility is far too small, close to zero. The likelihood of unaligned AGIs jerking each other off in a massive orgy for eternity is as likely as wiping out humans (more likely accounting for resistance to latter scenario).

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 15 Mar 2023 20:03 UTC
12 points
4 ∶ 5
on: How bad a future do ML researchers expect?
There are a few obvious flaws in interpreting the survey as is:
1. sample size and sampling bias: 13% respondents amount to 700 ish people surveyed. That is fairly small. Secondly, with MIRI and AI impacts’s respective logos on the front page of the survey document, it introduces a bias into who is taking the survey, very likely it is just the people familiar with lesswrong etc who has heard of these organizations. Here’s why a lot of serious AI researchers don’t engage with MIRI et al:
  1. MIRI hasn’t shipped a SoTA in AI alignment or AI research in the last 5-6 years
  2. A quick look at the publications on their website shows they don’t publish at top ML conferences ( ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, etc). Less wrong “research” is not research, it is usually philosophy and not backed by performing experiments ( “thought experiments” don’t count).
2. appeal to authority fallacy: a lot of people saying something doesn’t make it true, so I’d advise people to not confuse between “AI research is bad” and “a proportion of surveyed people think AI research could be bad”. Some moral outrage in the comment section takes some people feeling this way as evidence for defacto truths, while the reality is that they are contested claims.
3. modeling the future: Human beings are notoriously bad at modeling the future. Imagine if we ran a survey in Oct among EAs about FTX health. Not just that modeling the future is hard, but modeling the far future is exponentially harder and existential risk analyses are often incomplete because:
  1. New improvements in AI safety research is not accounted in these projections
  2. Multiagent dynamics of a world with multiple AIs is not modeled in catastrophic scenario projections
  3. Multiagent dynamics with governments/stakeholders is not modeled
  4. Phased deployment: accelerate, then align to use case, then accelerate again, as we are doing today is also not modeled. AI deployment is currently also accelerating alignment research because alignment is needed to build a useful product- a gaslighting chatbot is a bad product compared to a harmless, helpful one.
  5. New research produces new knowledge previously not known.
Anthropic’s write up, afaik, is a nuanced take and may be a reasonable starting point for an informed and calibrated take towards AI research.
I usually don’t engage with AI takes here because it is a huge echo chamber in here but these are my two cents!

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 9 Mar 2023 10:04 UTC
2 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Cornelis Dirk Haupt’s comment on: Consider not sleeping around within the community
And perhaps an illustrative example here is that yes, some in the death metal community do put more status on tattoos while some do not—which, like polyamory to EA, is wholly separate from what the core of the community is actually focused on, namely death metal music. I accept and respect that to some people within the metal community I’m lower status due to not having tattoos. They aren’t being mean to me by assigning me lower status.
Nice of you, but I do not accept or respect having lower status in EA due to being monogamous. They are being mean to me and thousands of monogamous women they’re recruiting / want to recruit / who are dedicated EAs by assigning us lower status. I am not willing to participate in a community where I have lower status due to factors I didn’t choose (race/gender/sexuality), and I’d think many self respecting others will also not put up with what you’re calling “relative lower status”. No fuck that. We want equality, equal respect, equal opportunity.
So I’ll start by saying it is absolutely awful you feel like the EA community is assigning you lower status for being a monogamous woman. I have to ask though, isn’t this something where you can look at the individuals who were this insensitive towards you and call them assholes without calling the EA community as a whole asshole-ish?
I am not calling the whole EA community asshole-ish, but it is big problem here because there are many such individuals. There’s no push back against these people that I’m seeing widely either. I’m also confused you think individuals who assign me lower status are assholes after saying above yourself that may be I should be ok with being assigned lower status like you’re ok being lower status elsewhere.
I’m sorry but the death metal-tattoo analogy got lost on me. You can get a tattoo if you chose to, many people can’t change their sexual preference, so it’s a false comparison. It’s like you’re saying white people have higher status and you should be ok with that, but I can’t paint my face white and become a white person if I wanted to. Secondly tattoos are nothing like sex. Sex involves two people ( often) and conveys a relationship where you can benefit a higher status individual. Your getting a tattoo is not pleasurable to high status men. I do not want to get into the frame of arguing based on this analogy because the analogy doesn’t model many complications.
- I really doubt I need to make a case that concerns of women are being taken seriously. If they weren’t the number of women in EA wouldn’t be growing.
If you recruit more women than you hurt and if you drive out and silence the ones who speak up, number of women will grow but that doesn’t mean concerns of women are taken seriously. I’m not saying this is happening but your logic is flawed in many ways. Your implied casuality, ie, evidence that women’s numbers are growing means concerns of women are taken seriously, is false.
Likewise, polyamory is quite stigmatised and we don’t really have many role-models or representation.
Bay area EA has around 60% poly, so I’d say monogamists are the minority here.
guess the question then is, if you possibly don’t feel it wrong to assign a women more social status for being a good role-model for women as a woman, why do you feel uncomfortable when poly people are assigned more status for being a good role-model for poly people as a poly person themselves?
Your original statement said “if you’re poly you’re interesting and would be invited to speak on podcasts” so matter-of-factly. That is very different from “if you’re a good role-model for poly people as a poly person...”. Good role models should get status, I agree, but that’s not what you said. The equivalent of what you initially said would be ” if you’re a man you’re interesting and would be invited to speak on clearer thinking podcast etc”.
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc
a woman feeling bad and left out when they compare themselves to other women who have gained social status in part for sharing their experiences as women.
Inverted casual reasoning. But if we look carefully at your first quote the order of events is being poly gets status that converts into the opportunity to speak on podcasts. But in your justification, sharing experiences gets status. Sharing experiences should get more status, but just being poly/mono shouldn’t. Being a good role model for monogamous people and sharing that experience should also get higher status, but tell me dear friend, are they getting invited to podcasts? I am amazing at monogamy, the absolute best, do get me an invite. Or are these opportunities gate-kept?
I like big-tent EA so people with near any preference might also like doing EA stuff. They might even be EA leaders. But we shouldn’t let their preferences automatically lead us to conclude that is the preference of the community as a whole.
Have you heard of the netflix quote “The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.” Almost all top rationalists are poly, many top EAs are as well. >50% of bay area EA is poly while base population rate is 15% or less. Tell me this is not a preference of the community once again :) Tell me what monogamous people need to do to rise the ranks.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 8 Mar 2023 1:33 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Cornelis Dirk Haupt’s comment on: What happened to the “Women and Effective Altruism” post?
Ah, I just found this comment after it was referenced elsewhere. My definition of “heavily downvoted” = “lot of downvotes”. My post had around 75 or so downvotes which may be a third of total votes(speaking from memory).
but it is still a fair accusation to say they are being dishonest.
I’m making a credible accusation of harassment at the cost of my reputation, time and mental energy and you’re strawman attacking me for two words in the whole excerpt based on a subjective definition of “heavily downvoted” to call me overall dishonest? Dude.
If some seedy politician got up and said the project was clearly and obviously “heavily downvoted” and nowhere highlighted that actually most people voted in favour of it, you would be fucking pissed and right to accuse him of being dishonest.
My intention was not to point out that most people in EA voted against it which would be a false characterization. The intention of my statement was to convey that there was heavy backlash against my post, which I believe is accurate. The evidence for the claim that there was “heavy backlash” is “lots of downvotes / a large fraction of downvotes”. I wanted to get the information out that I faced a lot of attack for saying what I did( even right now, I am defending my exact choice of words and defending against being characterized as a liar for a small difference in opinion) because that’s useful information to survivors, and because it is an out of domain / unexpected response toward people coming out.
Ultimately my words are my words and not your words. Feel free to disagree with my exact framing but be more careful before accusing someone of intentional fabrication/lying and puncturing the overall credibility of people who are already taking much personal and reputational risk to talk about their truths. Dishonesty implies intention. One day, when it’s your turn to tell your story, others may dismiss you as well based on small disagreements in adjective use.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 4 Mar 2023 11:12 UTC
17 points
7 ∶ 2
in reply to: Cornelis Dirk Haupt’s comment on: Consider not sleeping around within the community
But if what you’re saying is that absent any professional setting, absent any coworker or mentee/mentor relationship, people who identify as “EAs” should still not grant anyone any social status for being interesting when the topic of sexuality is brought up… what you’re effectively demanding is for thousands of people around the world to change their personality and become less sexually liberal and less open-minded.
You’re using the word sexually liberal / open-minded /interesting interchangeably. Catholic nuns can be interesting, monogamous people can be open minded. Private sexual preferences have nothing to do with interestingness or open minded ness.
What I think you’re talking about is a problem where power dynamics is involved including mentor/mentee relationships and coworkers etc etc. This is a separate topic from the social status increase and feeling-dejected by it that Ivy and I are talking about.
I am not just talking about professional relationships. I’m also talking about what the community should value. Treating women differently as higher/lower status based on their sexuality is simply wrong. A lot of people are intentionally monogamous ( like me). Assigning them default lower status due to their private relationship preference is an awful practice that shouldn’t be adopted community wide.
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc
May be you’re struggling to understand my point, so let me try to demonstrate why this sort of language is troubling. If you substitute the word “poly” with “white” ( ethnicity)/”male” (gender)/ “homosexual”(orientation) or other equivalents, this sentence sounds so wrong. I don’t think that my choice / programming of sexuality is something that needs work, I love being monogamous, just like how I don’t feel lesser because of my gender or ethnicity. All other things being equal, I want to be given equal status as someone else with a different sexuality, just like how I want the same status as a man / white person / a person of different nationality. That’s all.
Likewise it is my problem for feeling like I “need to be better at being poly to be EA.” This is something I genuinely feel.
I am sorry you feel this way.
This is not really entirely different from how when EAs talk about AI Alignment and get status for it that I also feel uncomfortable and left out for not being smart enough. Let their social status increase. It’s my problem for feeling insecure, not theirs.
This is actually status working the right way. Status can be used as an incentive to promote behaviors we want from people because humans are great incentive maximizers. We want alignment researchers to gain status by producing high quality alignment work, because EA thinks this work is of high impact. Conversely, we want more people to aspire to become alignment researchers because this work is highly regarded / high status in EA. Unlike promoting certain type of technical AI work over others in EA, the community should not promote a certain type of sexuality over others. Let EA be about doing good alone, and decoupled from sexuality / race / ethnicity / orientation.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 1 Mar 2023 22:30 UTC
2 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Cornelis Dirk Haupt’s comment on: Consider not sleeping around within the community
Again begs the question, why status in a community oriented around “doing good” has anything to do with sexuality and is not uniformly distributed across all sexualities. Status in EA should be a function of doing good and should be sexuality-neutral, period.

I think you’re reframing on a technicality. Status and success are fairly related in many ways in the real world, because status opens doors and signals greater opportunity.

EA might want to hire competent women but competent women might not want to stick around if they’re lower status due to factors outside of their control such as sexuality/race/etc.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 28 Feb 2023 23:18 UTC
1 point
4 ∶ 4
in reply to: Cornelis Dirk Haupt’s comment on: Consider not sleeping around within the community
These discussions are quite enlightening. I had a gut feeling this is how things are but seeing it clearly verbalized confirms my intuition.
It’s more like (to me) some boats are sped up by the sex positive-current and other boats miss the wave and just reach their destination the same time they counterfactually would have.
and
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc. You gain status just due to your private relationship preference in EA, or such is my perception. Nobody cares if you’re mono.
To retain competent people you need to sustain a competitive atmosphere. If success is not just a function of impact / work but also a function of sexual liaisons / sexuality, it calls for a toxic culture because one feels compelled to sleep around to get ahead. Even if you’re not doing it, your peers are.
Do you realize how many competent women will be driven out of EA if they are not open to have sexual liaisons? They’re not offered a seat on the fast boats, not because they’re not smart/hard working but because they’re rejecting sex/ have different relationship preference.
How is that equality of opportunity? How is that inclusive?

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 18 Feb 2023 22:48 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Catherine Low🔸’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
+1 :)

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 18 Feb 2023 20:17 UTC
29 points
6 ∶ 5
in reply to: Catherine Low🔸’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
Hi Catherine, thank you for clarifying what measures were taken regarding each instance reported in the TIME article and for directly addressing each point.
Regarding my previous post, here’s more context from a previous discussion on why I haven’t yet involved CEA’s Health team: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sD4kdobiRaBpxcL8M/what-happened-to-the-women-and-effective-altruism-post?commentId=MxJqDoNTqLxkPthzy I’ll probably share more thoughts, especially regarding why I spoke to TIME, women-friendly culture updates a movement can take and more perspectives when time permits me to think more clearly about this topic and write them down. Obviously, SA is a high stress discussion; a lot of context is lost in translation and in medium of communication; people can misrepresent/misinterpret; people also have jobs and other commitments; but I’m hoping we will have more clarity over time/ update to a better state overall as a society given enough time.
Meanwhile, I’d like more clarification on one matter. I’m one of those people who connected Charlotte, the author of the TIME article with the curious case of the Aurora Quinn Elmore, an unofficial SA mediator who interviews people via facebook and recommends actions for accused and accuser in EA-adjacent/rationalist communities in the bay. This person was introduced to the EA-adjacent group house situation by an active EA (out of good intentions/ lack of awareness I think, it was a high stress situation and all sides were acting sub-optimally) and it was told to me that this EA got the idea of involving the mediator from her work of mediating SA cases at CFAR or Center For Applied Rationality. I was told that this person has mediated at least 5+ SA cases as far as this EA knows, and probably more. Can you verify this information? How many cases has she mediated in totality? Why is CFAR with millions in funding using an unofficial individual (who is a PM in her day job) with no formal training in / affiliation to women’s organizations to arbitrate SA cases? Some women who have had their situations arbitrated by this mediator have told me that they faced retaliation for speaking up, that they were informed of a “no-gossip policy”, ie, if the mediator has arbitrated the case and ruled in favor of an accused and if the accuser then speaks about the case to her friends or others, she will face consequences up to and including career consequences and being removed from communities. Can someone from CFAR share more context/data? Thank you.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 6 Feb 2023 8:27 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ivy Mazzola’s comment on: What happened to the “Women and Effective Altruism” post?
I see, makes sense.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 6 Feb 2023 6:18 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ivy Mazzola’s comment on: What happened to the “Women and Effective Altruism” post?
How did you know that Catherine Low, Julia Wise and Rocky offered to speak with me?

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 6 Feb 2023 5:34 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ivy Mazzola’s comment on: What happened to the “Women and Effective Altruism” post?
Also I’m curious how did you know exactly who DM’ed me? Where did you get that information?

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 6 Feb 2023 5:16 UTC
4 points
6 ∶ 6
in reply to: Ivy Mazzola’s comment on: What happened to the “Women and Effective Altruism” post?
Hey Ivy,
There are multiple reasons I didn’t take EA’s help.
1. California law is more liberal than EA community health code. Community health is a euphemistic and blunt term for “sexual harassment”, minimizing its seriousness with a vaguely worded umbrella term. Usually every org has a sexual harassment code, non retaliation policy, etc. Phrases like “second/third chances”, “measuring impact of abuser and abused”, “unfairly harm reputation” etc doesn’t reflect victims will be taken seriously. It is also worded in a way that impact to community as against individual would be prioritized should claims be found true. I was better off going to the cops in CA.
2. The people I had bad experiences with were deeper/more popular/influential in EA than I was and given how everyone’s friends/lovers and stuff, I didn’t think there would be impartiality. I am easier to be othered than them.
3. Given the multiplicity of the problem, I didn’t want to go after individuals because they are too small fish to be worth my time frying. It was the culture that was broken that needed fixing because these people believe they are good individuals while doing things everyone else at EA was also doing.
4. Julia Wise’s office has way too much opacity and no accountability frameworks but courts/cops in CA are held accountable. DA’s lose elections and governments fall for mishandling criminal justice, what happens to Julia Wise for mishandling?
5. I didn’t know Julia Wise so didn’t have reason to think she was different than the distribution of EA people commenting on my post. It’s a lot to ask that you trust some private individual blindly you haven’t met. Julia also only reached out to me yesterday to clarify about Kathy Forth, but not in Nov/Dec/Jan.
6. One of the other people who reached out was an ex primary partner of a person who attempted to sleep with me, so I didn’t feel safe talking to her ( see, conflict of interest). I scheduled a meeting with the other and we didn’t end up meeting due to scheduling. The meeting was also a month later because when I posted my original post they were overworked from FTX scandal. A month later I had already checked out of EA.
7. After EA’s response to my post, really you expect me to trust that EA will help me? I did not.
On deleting post:
1. It was only removed from EA forum but a google search with my name would’ve taken you to my blog/twitter where it went viral. So I did not subtract information that could be useful for decision making from the collective conscious, I just removed it from the EA forum.
2. Like I said, I don’t need to offer ANY REASON to delete post because EA is not entitled to it. I was surprised the response was not overwhelmingly compassionate or empathetic but kinda cruel and debating. It was my life, my pain, my personal experiences being analysed, overanalysed, doubted, questioned by RANDOM internet strangers who I had no obligation to. Kindness should be an obligation but there was no kindness to be found. Any amount of attack can be reason enough for me to take it down because I want to tolerate ZERO disrespect.
3. It was also a Monday when the comments came rolling in, I was in between meetings at work, super annoyed and had no time to respond either(or desire to respond to the nasty ones). There weren’t many people defending me so it was me against like 10 others it was exhausting. I had saved everything though for later use because I wasn’t the type to shut up and disappear when the issue at hand is important: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KgnpB8hOeOYPeMc2Hk48St5w7mPE4kzr/edit
4. You can check the upvote / downvote count and use that as an indicator of aggregate response of the group. From memory the post got close to 100 downvotes, which was A LOT.
5. I had also shared it on twitter where the response was widely, widely different and kind, so I knew that the response on EA was atypical and tbh, extremely weird (my first response to a person claiming assault would be empathy, but may be EA selects for low empathy people?) https://twitter.com/keerthanpg/status/1591515890109255680?lang=en
6. Women who were hurt by EA are not chilling on the forum, they have left already. This space is an echo chamber that self selects for a certain type of person. You can find these women scattered on Twitter and the internet.
7. Ripples are not enough for me Ivy, I am high agency and impatient. A day or two later my friend Richard Ngo posted a brainstorming post as well, he had more buy-in with the community so I thought they’d act collaboratively if its coming from him. No action was taken as a consequence of that post either. The community had a second opportunity, and this time it was not over indexed on my personal experiences / emotionally worded, but the community did not take that either.
On AI capabilities: EA’s x-risk modeling is dumb and you’ll see it eventually. My views closely resemble that of Sam Altman. All of this crisis just makes me wanna throw my heart into work and build that AI. :)
Edit 1:
Bad comments don’t mean one should pack up, and then tell other people who weren’t there that their “energy was not appreciated” or their post was “heavily down-voted”. I hate to be the one to say it to you, but I think it needs to be said eventually… based on what I saw and know, I don’t think that wording and any similar wording you’ve used elsewhere is honest.
I just read your whole comment carefully(sorry it was long). Appreciation is subjective and hard to quantify but votes are, you can look at the drive link I posted to do the math of vote counts ( ~75 downvotes count for me as “heavily downvoted”, my comments were also appropriately downvoted as you can see in the comment graph relative to parent/child nodes in the comment trees, so from my perspective it is a reasonably correct characterization). Given that you’re (delicately but still) accusing me of being deliberately dishonest, do you want to correct that characterization?
Edit 2:
Well, there may be a way to verify the correctness of “energy was not appreciated” as a claim. Compare the distribution of responses on my twitter post and the frozen EA forum post + responses.
What links here?
- Keerthana Gopalakrishnan's comment on EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse by whistleblower9 (18 Feb 2023 20:17 UTC; 29 points)

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 5 Feb 2023 21:01 UTC
10 points
8 ∶ 3
in reply to: Ivy Mazzola’s comment on: What happened to the “Women and Effective Altruism” post?
Let me explain my thought process.
I didn’t know I could delete individual comments but even if I could, I wouldn’t feel good censoring individual comments. Am I mad she called me bigoted? Of course. Should she be allowed to make her speech about me being bigoted? Yes. As someone who is strongly criticizing EA so publicly, I for one want free and unrestricted speech. From a system perspective, multiple players playing most optimally helps us get at the best solutions. Optimality though doesn’t mean playing nasty/below the belt, and I’d definitely opine that calling me bigoted was a nasty move on her part.
About deleting the post: EA is not entitled to my words, my thoughts or my time. I am not getting paid to do this, it is all free and voluntary and comes at the cost of alternative uses of my time. There were multiple people who expressed similar sentiments as Monica though her characterization was the most extremely worded. If EA as a group speak abusively to me, or otherwise indicate my opinions are unvalued, I’m just gonna take my post and exit the door. I think that’s fair to decide to not invest your energy where it is not appreciated.
Thirdly and most importantly, EA is very fond of talking but not fond of acting. The post I made led to no action. Even today, the TIME article despite being a public expose is likely going to lead to no action because everybody makes their little speeches and votes in the comment section, feel they’ve done enough and move on to business as usual. Talk is shit; discourse is not doing. At the time of deleting the post, I knew how EA felt as a group about my concerns, I knew no action will be taken, and I don’t care for more talk.
Nit: I am an AI capabilities researcher.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 5 Feb 2023 5:19 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 9
in reply to: Cornelis Dirk Haupt’s comment on: What happened to the “Women and Effective Altruism” post?
Because I refuse to be spoken disrespectfully to :)

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 14 Jan 2023 1:48 UTC
2 points
2 ∶ 7
in reply to: Two riders were approaching’s comment on: What happened to the “Women and Effective Altruism” post?
I felt it was higher EV to spend my time developing AI than developing responses in comment sections.
If EA didn’t like my post, that’s fine. I said my piece. There are other places on the internet and elsewhere where my discussion was welcome and where I felt heard. :)
It’s faster to be on a boat where you’re rowing in the direction of the current than against it.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 13 Jan 2023 23:23 UTC
8 points
2 ∶ 4
on: What happened to the “Women and Effective Altruism” post?
I took it down due to the responses from the forum. The original intention of the post was to catalyze action from the within the community, but after it was around for a day or two, I realized this will not happen. The original goal of posting here will not be served.
In addition, the post being live here brought me a lot of headache. I felt like the responses from the forum were mob-like and fell into three categories 1. normalizing ( this is just a statistic, every community has a few) 2. dismissive (not a big deal) 3. attacking. I also have a full time job so didn’t have the time to respond and felt increasingly unsafe given that I wasn’t posting as an anon.
There will be some follow up work on this topic in upcoming days.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 16 Nov 2022 0:48 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: pseudonym’s comment on: Brainstorming ways to make EA safer and more inclusive
Correct. I had mentioned in my post it was not a criticism of polyamory that is practiced consensually and without conflicts of interest.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 15 Nov 2022 23:11 UTC
0 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Amber Dawn’s comment on: Brainstorming ways to make EA safer and more inclusive
Do you think that the EA community would be safer if fewer people in it were polyamorous? - I am not going to give a moral lecture on what people should do with their sexual choices, it’s up to them.
The men who abused me were poly, the dynamics of poly are important for amplifying their harmful reach. They’re using polyamory to legitimize reaching a wider number of victims, and they’re piggybacking on EA’s compelling call for impact to meet and discover new victims.
If a poly man asks me out respectfully because they did not know I was mono, I say no and they accept my decision. No harm, no foul. This is not what happened.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan 15 Nov 2022 23:01 UTC
−6 points
1 ∶ 3
in reply to: ozymandias’s comment on: Brainstorming ways to make EA safer and more inclusive
Your expectation of push back is wrong. If you say ” i was harassed by monogamous men”, I’m never going to be like “not all monogamous men are like that”, “oh but it is just a statistic”. I am female, Indian, bisexual. I am a minority on many axes. I don’t defend female abusers, Indian abusers or LGBTQ abusers. I am going to stand with the victim, not with the class of victim/abuser. A wrong is a wrong, plain and simple.
@ozymandias: now that you have clarification, can you help me get action on the pointers and suggestions on my post? My post is here : https://keerthanapg.com/random/ea-women/ All action items are agnostic to poly/mono status of victim/abuser. I didn’t barely post it in EA forum to talk about it and then move on, I want things to change.