AI Threat Countermeasures checks bad actors in AI where companies and institutions are not incentivized to.
Lucretia
Why I Spoke to TIME Magazine, and My Experience as a Female AI Researcher in Silicon Valley
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.
Anecdotally, I have heard ~3 stories of premeditated psychedelic assault (the guy sometimes even explicitly says his intent to others, sometimes realizing this is bad, sometimes not realizing this is bad). I have heard ~2 stories of psychedelic date rape assault that were probably not premeditated, and ~2 stories that were ambiguous. I don’t know how well this reflects base rates. The ~3 stories of premeditated assault may be passed on through word of mouth more frequently, because they’re more obviously frightening.
But more importantly, I should have been more clear in my original post. Psychedelic assault is bad, whether or not it’s premeditated. I wrote more in this response about premediated vs not-premeditated assault.
Update:
I’m going to take a stab at a framework. This is the first time I’ve written this down, so consider this possibly prone to errors and in draft status.
Instead of lumping all types of sexual harassment/abuse together, we could view sexual abuse/harassment as structurally similar to first, second, and third degree homicide, with varying degrees of intent.
Type 1 sexual abuse/harassment may involve calculation and intent. Epstein, Weinstein, and Ratrick’s actions above in studying red pill scripts would fall under Type I. You can see that this behavior was premeditated.
Type 2 sexual abuse/harassment may be analogous to “crimes of passion,” such as a hypothetical guy becoming overtaken with desire and not checking in on the woman. But it is not a premeditated offense.
To be clear, both types are bad. I don’t think parts of Silicon Valley take either type seriously enough. Type 1 and Type 2 is also a spectrum, and repeat offenders may have a mix of both. However, perhaps the offenses should be treated differently.
I think people get squeamish when you try to lump adolescent boy who’s learning boundaries and who is clumsy with consent, but open to correction (Type 2), with someone like Epstein, who is a calculated offender (Type 1). This may also be one reason why the #MeToo movement got cancelled; there may have been a lumping of Type 2 with Type 1 offenders in a way that made some people think parts of the movement were “unreasonable.”
I think restorative justice fails when it is assumed that the offender is a Type 2 offender who is open to correction. But oftentimes, the offender is actually a Type 1 offender who is manipulating his community into thinking he is a Type 2 offender. Or, even if the crimes are not premeditated, they are serial, and the offender is not open to correction but pretends to be, which would make him Type 1.
So perhaps severity of consequences of sexual harassment/abuse should be modulated by: a) “How premeditated was the act?” and b) “Is this a repeated offense?,” which together could classify the offense into a Type 1 or Type 2 offense.
- 14 Jun 2023 16:51 UTC; 22 points) 's comment on Why I Spoke to TIME Magazine, and My Experience as a Female AI Researcher in Silicon Valley by (
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 a lot for this comment. I am honestly surprised and saddened by the number of downvotes on Mandelbrot’s post and think it’s ironically reflective of the issue she is drawing attention to.
Thanks for this, this is interesting.
I am sure there are cleaner cases, like your “Bob works for BigAI” example, where taking legal action, and amplifying in media, could produce a Streisand effect that gives cultural awareness to the more ambiguous cases. Some comments:
Silicon Valley is one “big, borderless workplace”
Silicon Valley is unique in that it’s one “big, borderless workplace” (quoting Nussbaum). As she puts it:
Even if you are not currently employed by Harvey Weinstein or seeking employment within his production company, in a very real sense you always are seeking employment and you don’t know when you will need the good favor of a person of such wealth, power, and ubiquitous influence. (Source.)
Therefore, policing along clean company lines becomes complicated really fast. Even if Bob isn’t directly recruiting for BigAI (but works for BigAI), being in Bob’s favor could improve your chances of working at to SmallAI, which Bob has invested in.
The “borderless workplace” nature of Silicon Valley, where company lines are somewhat illusory, and high-trust social networks are what really matter, is Silicon Valley’s magic and function. But when it comes to policing bad behavior, it is Silicon Valley’s downfall.
An example that’s close to scenarios that I’ve seen
Alice is an engineer at SmallAI who lives at a SF hacker house with her roommates Bob, Chad, and Dave, who all work for BigAI. The hacker house is, at first, awesome because Bob, Chad, and Dave frequently bring in their brilliant industry friends. Alice gets to talk about AI everyday and build a strong industry network. However, there are some problems.
Chad is very into Alice and comes into her room often. Alice has tried to set a firm boundary, but Chad not picking up on it, whether intentionally or not. Alice starts getting paranoid and is very careful to lock her room at night.
Alice does not want to alienate Chad, who has a lot of relationships in the industry. She feels like she’s already been quite firm. She feels like she cannot tell Bob or Dave, who are like Chad’s brothers. She’s afraid that Bob or Dave may think she’s making a big deal over nothing.
Alice’s friend Bertha, who is an engineer at MidAI, has stopped coming to the hacker house because, as she tells Alice, she finds their parties to be creepy. At the last party, the hacker house hosted a wealthy venture capitalist from AI MegaInvestments who appeared to be making moves on a nineteen-year-old female intern at LittleAI. When Bertha tried to say something, Bob and Chad seemed to get really annoyed. Who does Bertha think she is, this random MidAI employee? The venture capitalist might invest in their spin-off from BigAI one day! Bertha stops coming to the hacker house, and her network slightly weakens.
Alice also debates distancing herself from her house. She secretly agrees with Bertha, and she’s finding Chad increasingly creepy. However, she’s forged such an incredible network of AI researchers at their parties—it all must be worth it, right? Maybe one day she’ll also transition into BigAI, because she now knows a ton of people there.
One day, Alice’s other ML engineer friend, Charlotte, visits their hacker house. She’s talking a lot to Bob, and it looks like they’re having a good time. Alice does not hear from Charlotte for awhile, and she doesn’t think much of it.
Six months later, Charlotte contacts Alice to say that Bob brought her to his bedroom and assaulted her. Charlotte has left Silicon Valley because of traumatic associations. Alice is shocked and does not know what to do. She doesn’t want to confront or alienate Bob. Bob had made some comments that Charlotte had been acting kind of “hysterical.” And what if Charlotte is lying? She and Charlotte aren’t that close anyway.
Nevertheless, Alice starts to feel increasingly uncomfortable at her hacker house and eventually also leaves.
As you can see, Alice’s hacker house is now a clusterf*ck. Alice, Bertha, and Charlotte have effectively been driven from the industry due to cultural problems, while Bob, Chad, and Dave’s networks continue to strengthen. This scenario happens all the time.
Proposal
I propose that the high-status companies and VC firms in Silicon Valley (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Sequoia, etc) could make more explicit that they are aware of Silicon Valley’s “big, borderless workplace” nature. Sexual harassment at industry-related hacker houses, co-working spaces, and events, even when not on direct company grounds, reflects the company to some extent, and it is not acceptable.
While I don’t believe these statements will deter the most severe offenders, pressure from institutions/companies could weaken the prevalent bystander culture, which currently allows these perpetrators to continue harassing/assaulting.
Thank you for this absolutely brilliant expose. I know too many people who have stories like these ones.
I worry about the broader effects on AI alignment, given that Silicon Valley AI is somewhat selecting for bad actors.
I have a lot more to stay but will take some time to process everything here first.
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.
Call for Pythia-style foundation model suite for alignment research
I don’t see anything on the linked post in this comment that L’s report was false from legitimate sources.
Thank you for your comment. I understand promoting narratives that autistic men may be more likely to be sexual predators is deeply unfair and encourages neurotype discrimination (and tracks alongside some racism narratives).
That said, I don’t think this post is saying that, nor is that the point of the post. I think it’s pointing that this has historically correlated with risk factors for all genders. I have also seen (usually wealthy, high status) men use autism as an excuse for boundary violating behavior (they may not even be autistic in the first place, lol).
I would love to find a way to talk about this that does not unfairly condemn non-predatory autistic men.
Yeah, I see your point, SFBA as the first approximation makes sense to me!
Thank you for your kind words, and for the work you are doing! I haven’t been in Boston since ~2017, but I messaged you with what I know.
Thank you for your kind words.
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:
I do think “EA is plagued with sexism, racism, and abuse” is a very very granular first approximation for what’s actually going on.
A better, second approximation may look like this description of “the confluence”:
“The broad community I speak of here are insular, interconnected subgroups that are involved most of these categories: tech, EA (Effective Altruists), rationalists, Burning Man camps, secret parties, and coliving houses. I’ve heard it referred to as a “clusterf**k” and “confluence”, I usually call it a community. The community is centered in the San Francisco bay area but branch out into Berlin, London/Oxford, Seattle, and New York. The group is purpose-driven, with strong allegiance to non-mainstream morals and ideas about shaping the future of society and humanity” (Source)
There is probably an even better third approximation out there.
I do think that these toxic dynamics largely got tied to EA because EA is the most coherent subculture that overlaps with “the confluence.” Plus, EA was in the news cycle, which made journalists incentivized to write articles about it, especially when “SBF” and “FTX” get picked up by search engines and recommender systems. EA is a convenient tag word for a different (but overlapping) community that is far more sinister.
As I wrote in my response above, I’m mainly sad that my experience of EA was through the this distorted lens. It also seems clear to me that there are large swathes (perhaps the majority?) of EA that are healthy and well-meaning, and I am happy this has been your experience!
One of my motives for writing this post was giving people a better “second approximation” than EA itself being the problem. I do believe people put too much blame on EA, and one could perhaps make the argument that more responsibility could be put on surrounding AI companies, such as OpenAI/Anthropic, some of whose employees may be involved in these dynamics through the hacker house scene.
- 19 Jun 2023 15:04 UTC; 6 points) 's comment on Why I Spoke to TIME Magazine, and My Experience as a Female AI Researcher in Silicon Valley by (
It is pretty notable how frequently bad actors / bystanders out themselves on this forum if you watch for red flags.
Yeah, this is interesting. I would invoke some of the content from Citadels of Pride here, where we can draw an analogy between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
I would argue that hacker houses are being used as professional grounds. There is such an extent of AI-related networking, job-searching, brainstorming, ideating, startup founding, angel investing, and hackathoning that one could make an argument that hacker houses are an extension of an office. Sometimes, hacker houses literally are the offices of early stage startups. This also relates to Silicon Valley startup culture’s lack of distinction between work and life.
This puts a vulnerable person trying to break into AI in a precarious position. Being in these environments becomes somewhat necessary to break in; however, one has none of the legal protections of “official” networking environments, including HR departments for sexual harassment. The upside for an aspirant could be a research position at her dream AI company through a connection she makes here. The downside could be getting drugged and raped if her new “acquaintance” decides to put LSD in her water.
Hacker houses would then give the AI company’s employees informal networking grounds to conduct AI-related practices while the companies derisk themselves from liability. Which makes this a very different situation from criminal activity at the local grocery score.
Yeah, I am mainly really sad that my experience in EA/EA-adjacent communities was through the distorted lense of these redpilled AI and AI safety researchers. But I hope to engage with the more productive part (and seemingly majority!) of the EA community going forward!