Rochelle Shen

Karma: 292

Rochelle Shen 16 Feb 2023 4:24 UTC
8 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
Apologies, I should have checked in with her

Rochelle Shen 8 Feb 2023 18:08 UTC
−12 points
3 ∶ 7
in reply to: gated’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
I seriously doubt that you were someone who lived in the house.
Would love for you to hear any more rumors you might have “heard” about me.

EDIT:
I find it interesting that the mods chose to lock this thread after deleting J_J’s reply addressing and invalidating most of the above accusations, but kept the accusations themselves up. It introduces doubt in the readers about my credibility, but silenced the response reinforcing my credibility.

These points that u/gated brought up just further prove the Time article’s point about reputational retaliation. First, none of those accusations about my likeability as a female leader have anything to do with the initial issue of dealing with a potential serial predator in the house. Secondly, they’re also just wrong, and hint at the much deeper issue of victim intimidation tactics that these particular EAs’ were so eager to pursue against me. Third, don’t randomly name drop community leaders as siding with the accused—that person is supportive of healthy community sexual assault policies and I can’t imagine they’d be happy to be associated with your response.

This all merits a deeper discussion about EA culture. I’m currently thinking about how best to open this conversation.

Rochelle Shen 7 Feb 2023 2:35 UTC
17 points
7 ∶ 2
in reply to: Holly_Elmore’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
You are absolutely right that it was not an EA house. Only 30-50% of the house was EA-affiliated at any point, and it is noted as so in Time. It was primarily the EA members who were involved with the harassment I experienced. Moreover, EA’s who I didn’t even know, including the moderator, who did not live in the house became involved as the situation escalated. I am happy to share more details offline to prove that this absolutely was an EA related situation, but I am avoiding disclosing the whole story out of courtesy to individuals and in hopes that we can have a productive conversation about how to improve the toxic culture that produced these negative experiences.

Rochelle Shen 7 Feb 2023 1:38 UTC
3 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: timunderwood’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
Speaking on behalf of my own personal interactions with the reporter, the described events in the article are far much milder than what I really experienced. I did not want to tell the full severity of the story because I genuinely care about the Effective Altruism movement, and though numerous individual actors behaved in a coordinated and awful way, I still see the promise in having a positive conversation about how the movement can change.

That being said, if people try the same intimidation tactics on myself and my peers again, I will probably share more of the evidence I’ve gathered over the past year to give a clearer picture on what actually happened.

Rochelle Shen 6 Feb 2023 4:27 UTC
3 points
12 ∶ 14
in reply to: Holly_Elmore’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
“And yes, this included reports of people, but like I’ve met the first person interviewed in the article and she is hella scary and not someone I would trust to report accurately on this.”
Adorable attempt at character assassination. See rhetorical technique here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
Not that it matters but the person you are describing as “hella scary” and unreliable is a very decorated robotics researcher whose career has made incredible intellectual contributions in her field. I would like to counter and ask what makes you so keen to exclude her narrative?
EDIT: To anyone who is good faith skeptical of the above claim of deflection, let me point out how absurd it would be to counter any other claim (ie, “The sky is blue” or “Capitalism is the best form of economic organization ever”) with “well I can’t engage with the argument because this person is hella scary”

Rochelle Shen 5 Feb 2023 14:43 UTC
19 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aptdell’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
In my personal experience talking to victims since, I’ve noticed that this is one of the most scary heuristics of all. Every woman I’ve spoken to in this community who comes forth about SA once feels like they are now more than twice as vulnerable for being targeted by predators.
Very personally, several of my house co-founder’s friends had an intentionally loud conversation outside my door about unfortunate things that might happen to “girls who cry wolf” since nobody will believe them on subsequent claims.

Rochelle Shen 4 Feb 2023 13:08 UTC
47 points
21 ∶ 7
in reply to: Rochelle Shen’s comment on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
MY RECOMMENDATIONS
Given my experiences, I have a few insights that may help guide good future practices.
My recommendation here is to create systems of checks and balances that do not allow for conflicts of interest to enable biased decisions. I think that expecting a person in a position of power to make the correct judicial decision regarding a conflict with people they are close with is an incredibly difficult ask, and I am not surprised that cases are often handled poorly or to the dissatisfaction of the community.
- Create some kind of educational content around how to be a good ally to victims and how to identify bad situations so people can intervene. As a bystander, if you see a peer piling drinks onto the youngest girl at the party with the intent to take her upstairs, it would be nice to intervene rather than ignore the intended consequences. If a victim comes to you following a traumatic event, it would be nice if you’ll be compassionate and understand that they often intentionally won’t tell you what happened out of pain or shame, and it would be fantastic if you patiently wait to hear their story rather than gather evidence out of the omissions to build a case to convince yourself nothing ever happened.
- Identify when situations involve biased actors and correct by introducing unbiased actors. If the person mediating the situation is in a close personal or professional relationship with ANY of the parties, OR if the person is incentivized as a leader of a system to guard its influential members, it is expected that their personal biases will cloud their ability to make sound decisions. I am neither surprised nor upset to see that the EA response from Julia Wise is basically a beautifully articulated shrug. It’s a hard position to be in, and I can say this from personal experience as well, I feel a deep pain holding my long time colleague to be accountable to his past behaviors.
- Hire an external arbiter. Companies have HR departments. Countries have legal systems. EA is big enough that it should probably have an unbiased arbiter help out with the situation. Companies hire consulting firms to fix fundamental operating flaws that they otherwise would not see. EA likewise can use an external party as a lens to discover its own safety issues and improve them. In the case of Aurora, people should be allowed to recuse themselves if they have personal biases introduced from outside relationships. If the recommendations are not up to scratch, you can fire them and try again.
- More pointedly, please work with [J_J] (who is in the comments) who has been doing grassroots justice in the Bay Area for some time now. She’s a lawyer and has been working for some time now to set up systems of justice and recourse for organizations. She’s helped with dozens if not more cases in the SF community, and offers mediation services. While she’s not an EA, I’m sure many of you will see the meaning in her sacrifice of thousands of hours of her life towards trying to create justice. I’d talk to her, she was very helpful in understanding how to deal with these difficult situations

Rochelle Shen 4 Feb 2023 13:07 UTC
215 points
67 ∶ 8
on: EA, Sexual Harassment, and Abuse
I am one of the people mentioned in the article. I’m genuinely happy with the level of compassion and concern voiced in most of the comments on this article. Yes, while a lot of the comments are clearly concerned that this is a hard and difficult issue to tackle, I’m appreciative of the genuine desire of many people to do the right thing here. It seems that at least some of the EA community has a drive towards addressing the issue and improving from it rather than burying the issue as I had feared.
A couple of points, my spontaneous takeaways upon reading the article and the comments:
- This article covers bad actors in the EA space, and how hard it is to protect the community from them. This doesn’t mean that all of EA is toxic, but rather the article is bringing to light the fact that bad actors have been tolerated and even defended in the community to the detriment of their victims. I’m sensing from the comments that non-Bay Area EA may have experienced less of this phenomenon. If you read this article and are absolutely shocked and disgusted, then I think you experienced a different selection of EA than I have. I know many of my peers will read this article and feel uncomfortable about the familiarity towards these examples, and reflect on their own behavior in protecting or ignoring abuse. They are the ones who need to change their behavior.
- There’s a common pattern I’ve noticed (often in men) where they will conflate extremely severe abuse (one of the men in the article had over 5 allegations of criminal sexual assault) with less severe abuse. This can lead to nonpredatory people enabling predators, because they’re blind to the difference. In practice this looks like a person who is afraid of false accusations from miscommunications with a romantic partner protecting someone who actually actively targets intoxicated, disabled, young or otherwise vulnerable people with the intent to violate. Predators capitalize on that spectrum and try to find allies in men by insisting that they aren’t so different.
- There’s also some conflation between predation and polyamory/kink. I think it’s bad faith to equate the two, and I’ve encountered numerous counterarguments relying on cultural relativism in different sexual cultures to add ambiguity to what is actually in fact a cut-and-dry rape case. That being said, polyamory/kink is very often used as a tool of social pressure by predators to force women into a bad choice of either a situation they would not have otherwise agreed to or being called “close minded” and potentially withheld social/career opportunities. Polyamory/kink cultures should self-police to get rid of these bad actors. YOUR loving and consensual poly/kink relationship is not a valid argument against a discussion of abuse.
Julia Wise’s question:
Q: “How do you figure out what is a community problem versus what is a Bay Area problem or sex problem or something else?”
A: I can answer this very concretely. The problem is with people who enjoy taking advantage of skewed power dynamics for their own personal gain. There is a subculture of people sharing tips and tricks on how to get away with more predatory behavior, how to gaslight women, how to get them drunker/higher faster, how to make them feel so small afterwards that they’re afraid to even admit the abuse to their friends. THIS is the problem. If you are not a part of that subculture, please relax. If you are, please stop deluding yourself about being an effective altruist. You are in fact a selfish person who sees EA as an easy rhetorical hack to generate narratives around yourself. You are a rationalizer, not a Rationalist.

Q: “don’t unfairly harm someone’s reputation,” “don’t make men feel that a slip-up or distorted accusation will ruin their life, ” and “give people a second or third chance.”
A: In my case against my house cofounder, there were (during the initial case, more now) no less than FIVE allegations of abuse ranging from inappropriate touching at conferences to statutory rape, from women who did not previously know each other. An EA in the house wrote up a document calculating a joint conditional probability on whether or not he might have done anything wrong and concluded that the percentage was far enough from 100% that he couldn’t possibly justify any serious consequences. I don’t know you so I can’t tell whether your point is meant in good or bad faith, but I can say that you do need to draw the line SOMEWHERE, otherwise how on earth do you make any moral calculations at all? My recommendation is to make a code of conduct for the community, and refer to it when dealing with allegations to avoid people moving goalposts around second/third/fourth/fifth/sixth chances.