AI Threat Countermeasures checks bad actors in AI where companies and institutions are not incentivized to.
Lucretia
Karma: 671
This is a great answer, thank you.
The context-dependence of some sexual abuse is also why it can take some survivors awhile to process and articulate their experiences. The process can feel like picking jagged glass out of an organ.
I don’t have great answers yet, but appreciate the frameworks you’re developing.
I’m not inherently against this. But one problem is that it’s not clear who is qualified/trained and who is not. There’s currently no Yelp or Trustpilot for sexual harassment/abuse mediators. In contrast, I know a lawyer has my best interests in mind legally because I hired them and am paying them.
Psychedelics are normalized in some parts of Bay Area culture, compared to in other parts of the world. Some Bay Area subcultures use psychedelics recreationally at a similar frequency as people in NYC may drink alcohol. In some circles, it is common to take psychedelics (LSD, ketamine, MDMA, shrooms, 2C-B etc) recreationally with a group of people in a hacker house setting. While taking psychedelics is not inherently irresponsible, psychedelics can be used irresponsibly.
When someone is on psychedelics, their sense of reality can be distorted. They are in a vulnerable state, highly suggestible and psychically exposed, and so they cannot make informed decisions. Some bad actors know this and will deliberately give a woman LSD/MDMA with the purpose of getting her in a vulnerable/altered state so that he can have sex with her, without making any of these motives explicit upfront.
Here is an article about sexual abuse at ayahuasca retreats, which may make the danger of sexual assault/coercion on psychedelics more visceral: https://www.thecut.com/2021/11/sexual-assault-ayahuasca-tourism.html. Aya retreats are a different subculture from the Silicon Valley psychedelic date rape scene, but some dynamics of predatory shamans transfer.
An example from this article is a guest who is unable to consent with a predatory shaman while on ayahuasca at a retreat (content warning for sexual assault/coercion):
The world quickly went sideways. Ross tried to stumble out of the hut. As she did, the shaman saw her and led her over to the bed to lie down. He started telling Ross that he’d had visions of her before her arrival, that he’d known what clothes she’d be wearing, that they had a higher purpose together. He had so much to teach her, he said. Then he climbed on the bed and wrapped his arms around her; she could feel his sweat against her skin as he began professing his love. Ross felt unable to move. “My grip on reality — I was watching it kind of slip away,” she said. The shaman began writhing against her. She eventually mustered the strength to turn away from him, and he left. The next morning, he returned: “He motioned me to the bed and told me to take my clothes off. That was the point at which it was like I had no will,” she said. They had sex. “He could have told me to do anything and, like an automaton, I would have just done it. I would watch my body perform these things, and it was like I wasn’t there to control it.”
More aya examples and information:
Date rape drugs:
This makes sense, and I’m generally agnostic. But the trade-off with a centralized authority is that the people running the system take on a lot of liability. The good samaritans who do this work currently are very careful, paranoid people. If one has incriminating information about powerful people, there is often a target on one’s back.
It’s an interesting thesis! Maybe a subject for a separate post, because I imagine this view is controversial, and I don’t want this comments section too off-topic.
My parents had an Indian arranged marriage and came from a very conservative culture, so I’ve thought a bit about this. Transitioning to San Francisco liberalism was indeed a culture shock. Here are two controversial speculations so please take them with some salt, for I don’t necessarily agree with them: a) It’s possible that if every sexual encounter has an n% probability of being in bad faith, and you have more sexual encounters, the probability of getting assaulted just increases. The opportunities in sexually liberal cultures are simply higher. b) Now for a very controversial statement, with low epistemic status: It’s also possible that women have different types of leverage in more sexually conservative cultures.
I did feel that rape was taken much more seriously in my family subnetworks in India, and I felt more protected there than in America, despite media stereotypes about gang rape. But this also has to do with complex cultural norms, including the protection of the nuclear family, worship of female goddesses like Kali and Parvati, India being anthropomorphized as a women (instead of Uncle Sam), India having had a female Prime Minister (compared to the US, which has never had a female president), having sex with someone’s fiance is considered “rape,” accused men are guilty before proven innocent, men can get jailed for staring at a woman for too long, India has never had an Epstein/Weinstein-level crime ring (at least that was surfaced), etc. Obviously, India is a huge and diverse place with a large spectrum of norms, but these were the norms of my subnetwork.
I’d expect the answer to look something like “sexually liberal cultures have a larger possibility space of going poorly or well,” but are not sexually toxic by default. There are sexually liberal consent cultures out there.
Yes, there are some efforts to build infra like this! I’m not sure any have launched yet.
Some people have been looking into blockchain as a decentralized way to store and add information. There are also some great FB groups, but they frequently get shut down by some people who report them to moderators.
I do think the Bay Area startup world should have its equivalent to CEA, but it would require time, dedication, smart incentive design, and funding. Right now, Silicon Valley seems too libertarian/internally competitive for this to happen by default.
Ah, thank you for saying that. I’ve been so numb to some Silicon Valley tech/rat bro subcultures for so long that my simulation of actually asking him to never return is to be met with dismissal/anger and comments I was being too conservative, so I toned repercussions down to “polite conversation.” Female community leaders can have a tough time in those environments. But yes, I agree with you.
Older and more experienced figures in Silicon Valley need to be protecting and guiding the young populations who come here with big dreams, not creeping on them. Unfortunately, Sergey Brin showing up at hacker house parties with undergrad women sets the tone, lol.
:’)
Thank you for the question!
There are both important differences and similarities between sexual abuse and other types of abuse. I’d be curious about other women’s opinions.
All abuse is shaping an attack, and some people are more vulnerable to different types of attacks than others. The power and control wheel may be helpful here in laying out some modalities: https://www.thehotline.org/identify-abuse/power-and-control/
Some possible differences
Sexual abuse is using systemic power and vulnerabilities to exploit someone in a very intimate way. It’s different because it’s a different modality of abuse.
Sexual abuse (at least heteronormative sexual abuse) is also gendered violence, entwining with gender dynamics and sexism in a way that other types of abuse may not as obviously. You can see this in my case study, where my quest to break into a male-dominated field got entwined with the red pill ideology of the bad actors in it. Personally, I liked how the movie Do Revenge showed how gendered violence can play out differently from other forms of abuse, both due to its intimate nature and its relationship to broader gender/power dynamics.
Sexual abuse also less understood than other forms of violence. Our society has pretty agreed-upon norms that hitting someone is bad. But due to women only relatively recently entering the legal system, media, economy, and other positions of discourse and power, the epistemics around sexual violence are currently less agreed upon and clear (the hermeneutical injustice stuff applies here). As a result, survivors of sexual abuse face a myriad of painful second order effects, such as society-wide gaslighting, minimization, and dismissal, or being unable to have the language to communicate their experiences.
Lastly, I find sexual abuse to be distinctly disturbing in that it’s a perversion of something that’s supposed to be enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life.
Some possible similarities
There are a lot of similarities in prevention. When the female co-leader and I were dealing with the hacker house’s retaliation, we read a lot of anti-bullying curriculums for high schoolers and noticed similar patterns.
For example, the anti-bullying curriculums would convert bystanders into “upstanders,” or people who would call out and stop bullying behavior before it escalated. We noticed that many people of that community were not great at identifying sexual harassment in the first place, and would also not say anything if certain behaviors were escalating.
For instance, if at a hacker house party, a wealthy late-thirties startup founder seems to be running red pill scripts on a 17 year old Asian-American high schooler, who is new to the Bay Area and intimidated (i.e. he is touching her upper thigh and continuing to physically escalate, making digs at her boyfriend, and you can see panic flash in her eyes), the default bystander in this community would be very unlikely to intervene. But in upstander culture, the upstander would enter the situation and make sure that the 17-yr-old is comfortable, and that the man’s intentions were in good faith. If the man’s intentions were not in good faith, the upstander would find a way to diffuse the situation, like telling the 17-yr-old she is needed elsewhere, and then having a polite conversation with the man. So in that sense, preventing sexual harassment has a lot to learn from preventing abuse of other modalities.
There are, as you mention, other similarities between sexual abuse and general abuse. All abuse is a fundamental disrespect for another conscious being’s dignity and agency. Sometimes they get entwined—I think the movie Bombshell, which is about the sexual harassment climate at Fox News, does a great job of depicting how the general abuse you mention (“a boss that aggressively lowers the self-esteem of an employee, using status/rank to force people to do things they don’t agree with for fear of retaliation, or a repeated attack on a person’s personality due to professional disagreement”) entwines with sexual abuse.
I’d love to see better frameworks that contextualize sexual abuse with general abuse while preserving its distinctness.
There’s a lot more to say here, so I may follow-up again later!
Thank you for your kind words.