I’m a third-year PhD student in economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I’ve previously worked as a predoctoral research fellow in economics at the Global Priorities Institute in Oxford. My main research interests are fertility choices and the continuing decline in birth rates.
Luzia
Karma: 125
I was just going to fill this out but got a bit confused: I thought this was about insect welfare but the guide you linked basically only talks about environmental impacts and risks to humans. Is this just a strategic choice because you expect the government to not take responses talking about potential insect welfare seriously?
Kat, I appreciate you responding in detail to Ben’s post. I haven’t had time yet to look at all the evidence but will hopefully do that in more detail later. One thing that stood out to me from the appendix:
False, questionable, or misleading claim: “The staff they hire … live in the house with them.”
The other side: False. We no longer do this, and haven’t since Alice/Chloe left ~1.5 years ago. Despite having lived with many employees in the past and it being a good experience, we’ve decided that in the current climate of EA (high amounts of assuming ill-intent), it seems too risky.
This sounds a bit like you haven’t really reflected on whether the setup of living with your employees is a good idea in general, regardless of the climate in EA. In your comment below, you say:
I think it’s valuable to have social experiments. However, I do think the social experiment of living and working with your employees while traveling has now been experimented with and the results are “it’s very risky”. I’ve been doing it with Emerson and Drew for years now and it’s been fine, but I think we have a really good dynamic and it’s hard to replicate.
I liked Holly’s comment on Ben’s original post saying that if we encourage lots of experimentation as a community, it is unfair to blame people if the experimentation goes wrong. However, I think this is conditional on the people in question acknowledging that something went wrong and being willing to learn from it.
I wish there was more reflection and apologising in your post. Just blaming the EA community for assuming ill-intent too often and spending all your energy on debunking as many claims as possible gives the impression that you’re not really taking responsibility for the situation. It seems pretty clear to me that working and living together (especially when going to lots of new places where you don’t have an existing support system) does create a lot of dependence and makes it more likely for your employees to feel stripped of their agency. I think a lot of the things that I find icky from Ben’s post and that still feel icky to me have to do with this dynamic of completely blurred professional and personal boundaries. In the same vein, I agree with Frances’s comment, that including all these photos seems to be missing the point. Yes, you traveled to really cool places together and everyone looks really happy in these pictures, but it is a highly unusual situation to have this kind of relationship with your employers and I don’t find it that surprising that people left feeling really bad about some of the dynamics that played out.
I know it must have been tough to respond to the original post and I understand why you focused on debunking as many claims as possible. However, to rebuild trust in the community I think it would be really helpful to hear more about what your reflections are and how you’re planning to prevent anything like this from happening again.
I have definitely spent a lot of time thinking about the situation since the 7th October and have felt the urge to do something. The one thing I actually ended up doing is email a German MP from the Green Party who is the main person responsible for foreign affairs to ask what the German government is doing to improve the situation for civilians in Gaza.
I generally think that not everything I do has to be effective and that there are lots of things I care about besides EA motivations. I also think political action can be effective and I’ve been to some climate protests before.
One reason I’m not doing more about what is happening in Gaza right now is that I am genuinely unsure about what the right thing to do is. I have been reading opinion pieces by various people almost every day since the terror attack and it seems to me that even though the suffering in Gaza is incredibly heartbreaking, it is unclear what a ceasefire now would actually accomplish in terms of making the situation better in the long-run.
I think another big reason is that I find the pro-Palestine movement quite alienating and I, for example, wouldn’t feel good about going to a protest demanding a ceasefire that is largely organised by people from the movement. I find it unacceptable that a lot of people in the movement seem to think that the terror attacks were justified and are just some legitimate uprising against colonial oppression (besides the fact that I don’t think framing Israel/Palestine as an issue of colonisation is particularly helpful and true). As a German, I have obviously grown up with a specific stance that is relatively pro-Israel and a strong sensitivity about antisemitism. I think it’s possible that I am too biased here but actually condoning the terror attacks seems like an extremely clear red line to me.
I wish there was more protest that makes the clear distinction between supporting the civilians in Gaza/supporting Hamas/being against the existence of Israel/criticising actions of the Israeli government. When I was thinking about wanting to go to a protest, I researched whether there was a demonstration that felt sufficiently aligned with my views in my area but I couldn’t find anything so decided not to go.
Great, I’ll just write something myself then :) Thanks for the quick clarification!