For sure. Your experience does not need to negate that of mine and my friends. :)
Keerthana Gopalakrishnan
Availability bias informed by personal experience affects our perception of rate of incidence a lot. So I added this stat.
“Edit: I have personally experienced this more than three times in less than one year of attending EA events and that is far too many times.”
I have two other female friends I talk to who are not ready to speak up yet who were involved longer and report higher numbers.
Also, the post is not optimized for analytical/argumentative quality. My only goal is to speak my mind, my authentic experience and bring awareness that this happened to me and others I know. I would like to see these issues fixed but I am not overly invested in it yet, because there are also lots of interesting things to do in the world.
:)
Hi keller_scholl, I am not making this claim
“obviously the only reason Caroline could have become CEO was because she was sleeping with SBF”.
or this
I think it’s bad to confidently assert, without real evidence, that a woman slept her way to the top of a company. Do you think it’s fine?
Hope that helps resolve your confusion. I have no special information beyond what CoinDesk / Business Insider is reporting.
Baileys are overstated imo. If I may:
conflicts of interest in grant allocation, work place appointments should be avoided
men should be made more conscientious about hitting on women at EA events, also vice versa. this means honoring ’no’s, avoiding coercion, respecting a person’s choice of poly/mono, etc
any EA event organizer using that venue to hit on women should be removed from organizing EA events again, without question
retaliation for sexual rejection, both social and professional, needs to be addressed.
more women should be encouraged to seek the cops, instead of keeping arbitrating it within the community where bias and power differentials can creep in
Apologise for the confusion. There’s no policy at present, so the ethos represented by Title IX are a start, especially when victims are reluctant to go to cops or if behavior is harassment but not strictly a crime. That said, cops should be involved wherever possible because EA has no expertise in arbitrating SA.
Updated the post to clarify
Kirsten, how many incidents of harassment would need to be reported to warrant your worry? How many is too many that it is no longer worth risking your safety?
women reading this post shouldn’t feel worried to attend an EA event; lots of women in EA haven’t had these same experiences
You’re defeating the point of my post. Women need to be on the look out when engaging with EA if they don’t want to be exploited, at least in SF and NYC. Among them:
Not be drinking or using psychedelics without a trusted girlfriend to look after you and make sure you get home ok
Avoiding putting yourself in a position of dependence on a bad male actor
Cutting off friendships with bad male actors, and letting your girlfriends in EA know what’s up
For a community that is so alarmist for 5 or 1 or 0.1 percentage of X-risk from AI, giving a wide berth for sexual harassment is utterly hypocritical. Kathleen Forth’s suicide is not enough. The anonymous reports I linked is not enough. My own narration is not enough. You can make an evaluation of your own safety and risk tolerance ( assuming your gender here based on your post but feel free to correct me), but please let other women decide for themselves how much risk is acceptable and what dynamic is worth engaging with.
Hi Lizka,
I wish to take down this post from EA forum based on the comments received. The version exists on my website and on Twitter. I am not seeing an option for it from my control panel. Could you do it for me?
I am not willing to be attacked like this. I heard the word ‘bigot’ thrown around. Trying to change the minds of EA is a lost cause. Sexual harassment does not discriminate but the comments make it seem that only well articulate, debate sophisticated victims deserve to be heard here. So I’ll let the community carry on and remove myself, I am not here to debate and win because my time is valuable.
We might be talking to journalists. There are other women too who have left AI safety, EA due to problems I mentioned above and they’re not on the forum because they left the community. I definitely would love to hear from you even if you do not want to speak publicly about this. I am @keerthanpg on twitter :)
Thank you, that works. But I also want to download all the comments/discussion because I may need it in the future. Would you know how I can do that before deleting? I only see an “archive” button, I wish to have a copy of it on my local separate from the server where the site is hosted.
Just had to click through all comments to expand them but it worked perfectly, thank you.
This is the comment that made me feel very unsafe and take down the post.
What I said:
1. you can find many unhappy women in poly relationships
2. many poly men are sexual predators
You reframed my sentences to your convenience to claim that I said :
proceeds to suggest that women in poly relationships are unhappy and that poly men are uniquely likely to be sexual predators
the rest of your post bases on that assumption. Many != all, that is an important distinction. I am qualifying my sentences with “some of these men”, “many men” in various places but you’ve ignored that. I am not anonymous, so your calling me bigoted seems retaliatory, personal and unwarranted. The reason I didn’t take specific names but used many was because I don’t want to get into more issues, but usually the definition of many is more than one. I have not stopped a poly person from being poly so what do you mean by “not respecting others mono/poly choices”? Who did I coerce?
@lizka, @julia_wise, take note, I cannot presume your forum permits retaliation, name calling and personal attacks.
I wrote that post. I just want to clarify that I did not say “all poly men”, but “many poly men”. The difference is important. As someone who has no theoretical issue with poly practiced consensually, I’m not getting it why Amber Dawn and others feel attacked.
Me: “I was harassed by many poly men. ”
Amber: “Stop attacking poly men. Not all poly men.”
+1 agree with Richard.
While polyamory definitely leads to different dynamics of women’s safety issues(like the ones throwaway5 pointed out), making every discussion of women’s safety as a discussion about poly is unproductive.
Amber, I also shared this on twitter and this is the response I got: https://twitter.com/keerthanpg/status/1591515890109255680?s=20&t=WobT4rLWtpPRSOryCTlDxw
None of them walked away with your conclusions. The response from within EA forum, the people who can take action from within, was a completely different distribution. You’re interpreting my post, not as it is written, but as it is implied to you. But I am only responsible for what I say, not what you think I said.
Ultimately, no action was taken on my post and EA remains unsafe, partly because of you.
Your feeling attacked is slightly unwarranted, because everywhere I mention poly men in the article, I say “these poly men”, “many poly men”, I never say “all poly men”. It’s hard for me to write a post anticipating what you could imply from it, right?
In fact poly women have the most incentive to stop bad poly male actors because they’re more dangerous to you than they are to me. I will never enter into a relationship with them because they’re a disjoint dating pool for me, but they’re lurking in your pool, making you unsafe more than me. And not just that they harm one poly woman, each bad poly male actor will harm multiple by definition, so that multiple poly women are traumatized and driven away from EA due to one poly bad male actor.
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.
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.
Correct. I had mentioned in my post it was not a criticism of polyamory that is practiced consensually and without conflicts of interest.
Hi Rocky, if you’re looking to improve on the situation (I read you’re an EA director), I’m down to help and have some ideas. EA has a lot of good core ideas, and can be a better force with processes and structures supporting inclusion.