I agree with this—it is also why I disagree-voted, and no, I don’t have notifications set up for Geoffrey (as mentioned in another comment by them).
The comment felt to me like it was undermining a lot of the recent criticism regarding people in powerful positions, AT THE VERY LEAST, showing very bad judgement. The comment makes me very sad and angry.
Yeah, I agree with that, and I’m really glad how much Owen expresses he’s keen to work on himself.
I’m not sure my anger is appropriate here, but I’ve been in similar situations as this woman. If one of these people asked me for a conversation about their behaviour, I imagine being impressed/glad by them wanting to change but also feeling a bit like, ‘You already made me feel shitty, and now it’s my job to make sure you don’t do this again?’.
I think this is especially because the quoted sentence does not acknowledge the person much—even an addition of something like
’If there’s anyone else whom I’ve ever made feel uncomfortable or pressured <<I’m deeply sorry and regretful this happened. I would like to make sure I never put anyone in that position again.>>”
would have made me feel less bad about the phrasing.
If there’s anyone else whom I’ve ever made feel uncomfortable or pressured, I’d love to hear about it — I think I might benefit most from a conversation, but I’d also welcome anonymous feedback.”
Sorry if this is uncharitable, but this sentence rubs me the wrong way. It reads to me like “hey people who I might have harassed, it would be good for me if you talked to me”.
I think the priority here should not be what YOU benefit from.
On the feeling good about yourself: One way that helped me is to separate the donation money out while saving up for my runway—so I ‘donated’ 10% to a budget in my personal finance spreadsheet, whilst saving about the same percentage in my savings budget—basically committing the money to donations whilst keeping it as a backup for rainy days on my bank account. Once both budgets add up to a 6 month runway (or however long someone thinks they need), you can start donating from the donation budget (+the extra 10% each month). Personally this helped me a lot with the psychological “but I said I would donate 10%” and stopped me from spending the money on other things—whilst being able to take the donation money for runway if I would have needed to do so. The percentages might be too high for some people, but overall I’ve found this way of framing my savings quite useful psychologically.
We’ve set up the Parfit and Atkinson Scholarship programmes for graduate students in economics and philosophy to come to Oxford and work on global priorities research topics through the DPhil programme. We’re also offering prizes for students already studying a DPhil at Oxford (in either economics or philosophy) to do the same.
For those PhD students who might not be eligible for the scholarships/prizes because they are not at Oxford University, note that the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research has just opened applications for the Global Priorities Fellowship for both—economics and philosophy students.
As an extra data point—I had a couple of extremely uncomfortable conversations with someone at an EAG a few years back and didn’t report it, because I tend to think it’s my fault/ I might be misinterpreting things/ I don’t want to escalate things. I was relieved to later find out the person had been banned from EAG for making various women feel uncomfortable. I wished I had erred on the side of reporting (maybe with no steps taken if it was just my report), and was very glad CH exists!