First, CEA definitely have access to legal counsel.
Second, I don’t think these issues are that relevant, after reading Ben’s posts.
Regardless of legal risk, the reasons for not making claims public are clear -
(A) It took Ben hundreds of hours to feel confident and clear enough to make a useful public statement while also balancing the potential harms to Alice and Chloe. This is not uncommon in such situations and I think people should not expect CH to be able to do this in most cases.
(B) CEA is not in charge of Nonlinear or most other EA orgs. Just like Ben tried to be responsible for behavior in his offices and ended up down a rabbit hole, CEA tries to be responsible for behavior at their events, and has to choose which rabbit holes to go down. As Ben has said, they are not the EA police.
I agree it would be good to be clear about what jobs they are not doing, but think it would absolutely be worse to have no people in EA paid to work on similar issues rather than 2-3 people who still cannot do all of the work people might ask of them.
Re: “But I read this paragraph and it seems alien to me. What % of women+nb folks have this experience in EA?
‘I could tell you how tears streamed down my face as I read through accounts of women who have been harmed by people within the Effective Altruism community.’”
In the interest of reducing alienation, here’s some anecdata and context. Maya’s reaction wasn’t alien to me at all.
Among my female friends, having this type of reaction at some point was basically a developmental milestone. It wasn’t unique to EA. I expect such a survey would be more useful if you did some sort of national poll of women and compared it to women in EA.
Most (85%?) compassionate women I know reached a point in our teens or 20s where we got properly distressed and angry over gender-based* injustices that we and others had experienced. Most of us had experienced something bad or knew someone who did by then and it sucked.
If we happened to be involved in a specific “Good Community” that claimed some moral high ground (eg a church, an EA group, an “honorable family” etc), we hoped bad treatment happened less there and that we were safer there. Finding out, inevitably, that even in such a community, some of our peers and moral heroes also demean, harass, or rape each other is really awful. Our level of emotionality varied by personality type, but it sucked for all of us.
For Maya, this happened at its height about EA. For me, it happened about church. I’m no longer involved in religion. By the time I got to EA though, I expected some bad behavior even from “good people,” so I was just impressed the EA community health team existed to deal with it and didn’t have Maya’s intense reaction. I still do have a visceral reaction to others’ stories of harm though.
I don’t know if there base rate of problems is higher or lower in EA groups compared to other communities. I think the resources dedicated to good responses is higher than in other communities, which I feel good about.
I think we should try to track our base rates if we can, and plan to always dedicate resources to things like the Community Health team’s prevention and response efforts, because that is the price of admission for running healthy human groups.
I don’t mean to be callous or cynical, but I unfortunately now regard gender-based* violence as a gross and terrible part of being human that is present everywhere.
So, all communities and conscientious community members will need to contend with this unfortunate aspect of reality at some point and learn to talk about it in a healthy way, despite the pain. We’ll all need to have conversations like this sometimes, again and again, to address the pain involved, and it will bring up varying degrees of emotion and discomfort with that emotion, that are all pretty “normal”. It’s the price of admission for being alive and part of a social species.
Maybe, hopefully, the base rate of problems stays low within our microcultures and gets lower across the centuries as we keep learning how to human.
I hope saying this doesn’t belittle Maya’s concerns at all. They’re real and I’m glad she raised them so people could respond.
Fwiw, some of the discourse about these issues does seem more pointed, more naïve, more fearful, and less obviously compassionate in EA than eg in my church (maybe because of the gender and rationality skew in EA), so talking about it on the Forum felt worse than talking about it at church overall and has sometimes made me emotional. However, most EAs are less shame-laden than discourse in church, and more nuanced than discourse on eg. Twitter, so sometimes the Forum is preferable. I am more invested invested in EA communities so I’m willing to put more effort into these conversations than I would elsewhere.
To avoid intense frustrations though, I usually choose to talk about this stuff only with EA women or 1:1 with EA men rather then dealing with a Forum furor.
(*tbc, I see the same experiences happen for other characteristics that people realize they may unfairly targeted for, like race, sexuality, neurodivergence, etc).