Yay Meristinoux

Karma: 57

Made this anon account to post things without them being tied to me personally & being taken as e.g. the views of my employer.

Yay Meristinoux 22 May 2026 7:16 UTC
58 points
16 ∶ 0
on: EA sexual harassment: Where’s the evidence we’re worse than baseline?
(I made an anon account to post this; I’m a longtime EA and Forum user).
The discussion in the comments so far focuses on two claims:
1. We can’t easily tell from this data whether EA is better or worse than baseline
  1. I agree, though I do think it’s some evidence we’re not much worse.
2. Why does it even matter whether EA is better or worse than baseline? Community members are welcome to hold EA to a much higher-than-baseline standard, if they want to.
I want to discuss this second point from my perspective, as a woman who’s been in EA for some years.
Here’s an analogy:
Often, I hear the criticism of EA: ‘man, they have bad epistemics and huge problems with groupthink.’
I sort of agree. I can list many instances where I think EAs are driven by groupthink and social incentives in our beliefs, rather than rigorous epistemic standards.
But, I sort of disagree.
That’s because I can’t think of any community [1] that does better on epistemics and groupthink than EA. Everywhere else I am vaguely involved, the groupthink is way worse, and they have very narrow standards for “acceptable” beliefs. In fact, in most communities, you can’t even discuss epistemic standards at all without getting yelled at or dunked on!
I feel like it would be very reasonable for someone to approach EA like:
Ooh, I should be looking out for places where there’s potential groupthink, and views driven by status rather than evidence.
But I think it’d be unreasonable for someone to approach EA like:
Damn, EA is a community where there’s rampant groupthink — I should be suspicious of views I hear from EAs, moreso than views I find elsewhere.
Partly, that’s cause the views you find elsewhere will also have those problems — and are actually likely to be even worse on the very metric of groupthink!
… So to bring it back to sexual harassment:
The reason it matters to me whether EAs believe that EA is above or below baseline on the rate of sexual harassment is that if EA is above baseline, then it’d be very reasonable for people to approach this community like:
Damn, EA is a community where there’s rampant problems with sexual harassment — I should be suspicious of whether there are sexual harassment issues at play here & how they’re being dealt with, moreso than in everyday interactions.
But if EA is in fact below baseline, then that’s an importantly unreasonable response. That is, everyday interactions would have a higher likelihood of sexual harassment and poor responses to it.
I think it’s good for people to be cautious about the risks of sexual harassment. But [2] I don’t think it’s good for people to feel like EA is a place where there are very high risks.
I do think there are unacceptably high risks — in the sense that I do not think any harm is “acceptable”, and we should strive to create a world free from suffering — but it doesn’t follow that an appropriate response is suspicion of EAs in particular.
[This comment is already really long, so I’m loath to add length, but the main response I anticipate is ‘people aren’t saying they’re suspicious of EAs moreso than others, they’re saying they’re suspicious of EAs simpliciter.’ I agree, but I think the net effect of these comments and discourse and the meme that EA has a sexual harassment problem is to make people suspicious of EAs moreso than others on this metric, and to make women in this community very afraid of sexual harassment, and to make men in this community very afraid of being a sexual harasser. I just think that’s unreasonable if they don’t also have that attitude everywhere else in their life — which I think is what’s happening, based on anecdote / personal experience hanging out with EAs]
[1] Any community of a vaguely comparable size — obv a community of a dozen, or even a hundred or so could do much better. Also maybe rats are better but TBH I’m not totally sure.
[2] And now I show my hand… I do in fact guess that EA is better than baseline, based mostly on my personal experience dealing with sexual harassment inside and outside of EA :)