I appreciate where the sentiment is coming from (and I’d personally be in favour of stronger COI norms than a lot of EA funders seem to have) but the impact cost of this seems too high as stated.
There’s value is being squeaky clean, but there’s also value in funding impactful projects, and I think having COI policies apply across the whole large org (“If anyone from our org is dating anyone from your org, we can’t fund you”) will end up costing way more value than it gains.
I hemmed and hawed about this but ultimately ended up strong-downvoting this post. The main reason is several instances of behaviour I consider strong and culpable norm-violations, including sharing private documents and emails without permission, outing people, and making various personal allegations that haven’t been properly researched or verified prior to publication.
There’s a broader theme where this post pitches itself as “just asking questions” but is pretty clearly written as an attempted exposé; I think if you do want to do an exposé, you should put some effort into finding out whether your accusations are actually true before making them publicly. (As one example, with the coffee table, you could quite easily have found out the background of this by asking someone, then published the actually correct story with an addendum like “I think this is bad because X reason”, and this would have saved everyone a lot of time.)
Additionally the document notes that it shouldn’t be shared publicly. I think you ask some important and good questions in this post, but I think this combined with you unnecessarily outing an employee, not engaging with most comments that provide answers to your questions, and your spreading of unconfirmed rumors are all harmful norms to promote on a public forum. I think posts like this raise similar questions while not being harmful and fostering beneficial discussion, and I wish this post was written similarly.
To be fair, the request not to share the document publicly is not very prominent: it’s a non-bolded sentence halfway down the second page. It would be easy to miss if you hadn’t read the document carefully. (When I’ve written private documents in the past, I generally have it in red in the header or something similarly unmissable.)
I do think the moderators should probably remove the link. If we have decent evidence that the OP knew the document was private, I think that speaks very poorly of them and I’d support more draconian repercussions.
Historical note: If EA had emerged in the 1970s era of the gay rights movement rather than the 2010s, I can imagine an alternative history in which some EAs were utterly outraged and offended that gay or lesbian EAs had dared to invite them to a gay or lesbian event.
I think the comparison here is somewhat inapt. The actual case listed in the OP is “casually invit[ing] coworkers to go to sex parties with them to experiment with BDSM toys”. If someone now invited a coworker to a gay sex party I think it would be quite reasonable to consider that unacceptable behaviour, even in the complete absence of homophobia.
It’s very common in other forums I’m a part of for literally everyone except me to be various levels of pseudonymous and I find it pretty rare that people use their real name, especially for giving spicy takes that people disagree with. I’m actually pretty pleasantly surprised by the number of people in EA who give spicy takes with their real name attached.
I think there might be an important difference between pseudonymous and burner accounts here. I basically have no problem with consistent pseudonymous identities, whereas I share the feeling that having a bunch of throwaway accounts posting anonymous complaints is kind of bad.
Wouldn’t option 2 above mostly resolve these concerns? Community stuff would still be fully visible on the frontpage, just boxed into its own section rather than intermixed.
I also prefer option 2.
I’m really happy that the Shrimp Welfare Project exists. Listening to their 80K podcast gave me the most “classic EA” warm fuzzy feelings I’ve had in a while. I think it speaks really highly of CE that they incubated a project like that, and of other EA funders that they’ve helped support it.
Also this comment was just pure <3 for me:
I agree—it was a real priority for us to not have a curled shrimp in our logo (which was tricky!) for this reason. And you’re right, most shrimps that are farmed are whiteish or brownish (though there are over 2,000 species of shrimps, and some are very colourful!).
(NB: I actually agree that Bay Area poly culture is probably a contributing factor to a lot of the recent allegations and broader cultural issues, and that people in that culture need to take that possibility really seriously and think carefully about possibilities for change. I don’t think that legitimizes general anti-poly discrimination or derogatory language.)
Keep in mind that these analogies risk trivializing the oppression that the LGBTQ+ community has faced. Gay and queer individuals have faced and continue to face massive discrimination, and being gay is never a choice.
As a gay person I really strongly object to this. I think it’s quite clear that in most of the modern US, being poly is significantly weirder and puts you more at risk of discrimination (e.g. of issues at work or with your family, or of having your partners recognised by the law) than being gay.
This is classic “oppression olympics” of a style that I think is nearly always counterproductive.
Regarding “Mentioning ‘UV’ vs. not mentioning ‘UV’”, what terminology was used in the “not mentioning UV” condition?
Fair enough—appreciate the nuanced take as always!
I’m honestly baffled by all the downvotes & disagreevotes this is getting. I’m really struggling to see anything objectionable in Sanjay’s comment; indeed, it seems like a clearly positive and valuable contribution. Our community would be a better place if more people made (& meant) clear statements in this vein.
Object level take: IANAL, but I’d be surprised if the first one of these is illegal. It doesn’t even seem ethically questionable to me; I expect very many charities carry out similar activities without issue.
Regarding the second, if this level of “data collection” is illegal, then virtually every group or organization that exists is breaking that law. (It might still be illegal, though—the GDPR is a very badly written law.)
As has been noted many times recently, it’s much easier to make anonymous allegations that stick than it is to protect oneself from reputational damage from such allegations. Given this, failing to do basic due diligence to check whether your allegations are founded before making accusatory public posts seems frankly irresponsible to me.
To me, this reads pretty clearly as an allegation, and I think not checking with a lawyer in that case is irresponsible.
Have you spoken to any lawyers about this? This seems like important due diligence, that I would personally feel was important to carry out before posting something like this.
For me it just redirects to a run-of-the-mill domain squatting type website on yet another domain.
Yeah, it’s changed to point to something a lot less directly malicious since I last checked this morning. (But, well, no reason to think it won’t change again tomorrow.)
Obviously, when someone keeps making dummy accounts over and over again to circumvent forum moderation, they should be disabled immediately. (Also, you should stop doing that.)