December 2023 edit:
I've done a lot of reflection since February and my perspective on many things has shifted. You can see a statement update here. I've left my original statement unedited (except in one place where noted) below:
Original post
Since the Time article on sexual harassment came out, people have been asking for information about one paragraph of it, about an “influential figure in EA”. I wanted to respond to that.
This is talking about me, more than five years ago. I think I made significant mistakes; I regret them a lot; and I’m sorry.
[March 2024 edited to add:] I've recently discovered that some people had interpreted the act in question to have occurred after she arrived at my house. I want to clarify that it happened before she arrived (I wanted to reduce the extent to which attraction was a significant part of my experience when she was there), but disclosing that to her (which I now think was extremely poorly judged) happened afterwards.
Context
I think the actual mistakes I made look different from what many readers may take away from the article, so I first wanted to provide a bit more context (some of this is straightforwardly factual; other parts should be understood as my interpretation):
- We had what I perceived as a preexisting friendship where we were experimenting with being unusually direct and honest (/“edgy”)
- Including about sexual matters
- There was what would commonly be regarded as oversharing from both sides (this wasn’t the first time I’d mentioned masturbation)
- Our friendship continued in an active way for several months afterwards
- I should however note that:
- We had met via EA and spent a good fraction of conversation time talking about EA-relevant topics
- I was older and more central in the EA community
- On other occasions, including early in our friendship, we had some professional interactions, and I wasn’t clear about how I was handling the personal/professional boundary
- Including about sexual matters
- I was employed as a researcher at that time
- My role didn’t develop to connecting people with different positions until later, and this wasn’t part of my self-conception at the time
- (However it makes sense to me that this was her perception)
- I was not affiliated with the org she was interviewing at
- I’d suggested her as a candidate earlier in the application process, but was not part of their decision-making process
On the other hand I think that a lot of what was problematic about my behaviour with respect to this person was not about this incident in particular, but the broad dynamic where:
- I in fact had significant amounts of power
- This was not very salient to me but very salient to her
- She consequently felt pressure to match my vibe
- e.g. in an earlier draft of this post, before fact-checking it with her, I said that we talked about “feelings of mutual attraction”
- This was not her experience
- I drafted it like that because we’d had what I’d interpreted as conversations where this was stated explicitly
- (I think this is just another central example of the point I’m making in this set of bullets)
- Similarly at some point she volunteered to me that she was enjoying the dynamic between us (but I probably interpreted this much more broadly than she intended)
- e.g. in an earlier draft of this post, before fact-checking it with her, I said that we talked about “feelings of mutual attraction”
- She was in a structural position where it was (I now believe) unreasonable to expect honesty about her experience
- As the person with power it was on me to notice and head off these dynamics, and I failed to do that
(Sorry, I know that's all pretty light on detail, but I don't want to risk accidentally de-anonymising the other person. I want to stress that I’m not claiming she provided any inaccurate information to the journalist who wrote the story; just that I think the extra context may be helpful for people seeking to evaluate or understand my conduct.)
My mistakes
In any case, I think my actions were poorly judged and fell well short of the high standards I would like to live up to, and that I think we should ask from people in positions of leadership. Afterwards, I felt vaguely like the whole friendship wasn’t well done and I wished I had approached things differently. Then when I found out that I’d made the person feel uncomfortable(/disempowered/pressured), I was horrified (not putting pressure on people is something like a core value of mine). I have apologized to the person in question, but I also feel like I’ve let the whole community down, and I would like to apologize unreservedly. It’s extremely important to me that our community is a welcoming place for everyone, and I feel dismayed that I have contributed to it not being so. If there’s anyone else whom I’ve ever made feel uncomfortable or pressured, I’d love to hear about it — I think I might benefit most from a conversation, but I’d also welcome anonymous feedback.
Was this incident an isolated case? Yes and no. I think this was by some way my most egregious mistake of this type. However, in my time in EA there have been four other occasions on which I expressed feelings of attraction towards someone in a way that — in retrospect as I’ve developed a more nuanced understanding of power dynamics — I regret. (In most of these cases I’m still on very good terms with the person.) I’ve slowly been improving my implicit models (so I never quite make the same mistake twice), but honestly it’s gone more slowly than I think it should have done.
There were several intertwined mistakes here:
- I was not attendant to implicit power dynamics
- I was aware that hard power (like employer relationships or grantmaking) mattered, but I was pretty blind to the implications of the soft power that came from being older and more central in the community
- I entangled personal and professional (without being clear about how I was handling that)
- I was aware that it was important not to let personal relationships cloud professional judgements, but I didn’t understand the point as deeply as I do today; moreover I was not properly alive to the importance of keeping these legibly-to-others separate (& I didn’t discuss how I was approaching it with this person)
- I didn’t respect normal societal standards about what’s oversharing, or what conversational implicature might be, especially re. anything sexual
- I think this meant that misunderstandings were especially likely; I think it was particularly egregious when combined with the above issues
- I made decisions about how to communicate while flinching internally
- I should have been more conscious that I was feeling a lot of shame (over all kinds of things, including the fact of being attracted to people!), and that this meant I would think less well than normal. I should consequently have taken steps sooner to address this
(How could I have come to make these mistakes? I was leaning into my own view-at-the-time about what good conduct looked like, and interested in experimenting to find ways to build a better culture than society-at-large has. I was newly open to polyamory, and newly exposed to circling and saw something powerful and good about speaking truths even when they were uncomfortable. And I was naively optimistic that we could ~do away with interpersonal power dynamics, so that of course someone would tell me if they were ever uncomfortable. (I now think that this kind of power differential represents exactly the circumstances in which it’s unfair to expect the disempowered person to be able to correct conversational dynamics which are off.) And then I was making decisions quickly without reflecting appropriately — and I was slow to correct mistakes after the fact — because shame impeded my metacognition from looking closely at what was going on.)
What can you expect from me going forward?
Some updates I’d already made (simplified):
- Before 2020:
- Don’t be edgy
- Make sure that anything intimate comes up only in relationships where there’s a good existing foundation of trust
- Don’t consider romantic engagements in cases where there’s a big age gap
- It’s good to make handling of personal/professional matters legible to others
- 2021:
- Attend significantly to implicit power dynamics for anything relating to attraction/romance
- You won’t always know if someone is uncomfortable, or is feeling pressure in some direction
- 2022:
- Attend significantly to implicit power dynamics even for things that aren’t romantic
- Avoid communicating while triggered
- Consider not being open to polyamory (NB I’ve been in a relationship with my wife for 17 years, which has in practice been monogamous, but for the last few years we’ve been open to the possibility of polyamory)
- Shame is a big problem for me
- Talk to a therapist to sort it out (this plan actually got interrupted by the FTX crisis)
- Don’t express feelings of attraction towards anyone (except my wife) until I’ve sorted this out
What’s the right thing to do now? First, I want to ensure never to repeat these mistakes. I won’t know what my final personal policy updates are for a while longer — some of them might be quite subtle, and I’ll continue to work on these with a therapist, but in the interim I’m planning to hold off on:
- Expressing feelings of attraction to anyone
- (this is a continuation of the 2022 policy update; it’s because I want to sort out what’s up with my dubious track record on this, not because I think that nobody should ever express attraction)
- Being open to polyamory
I don’t know whether I’ll be open to these again in the future. In any case the timeframe on which I might pick these back up will be decided in consultation with my therapist.
Second, I think it’s helpful if the community is able to process this with my visibly not being in any positions of power. Therefore I have resigned from the EV UK board, my most substantive position in the community, and am consequently no longer in an oversight role for any of its projects. (Although I’m still listed on the FHI website, I actually left FHI over a year ago.) Note that I'm not saying "I deserve to lose my positions of authority" — in this case that would ultimately be a decision for the rest of the board. Rather, I think it's best if right now I give them and others as much space as I can to consider the most appropriate actions.
For right now, I am also pausing other activities which may give me power:
- Starting any new mentor relationships;
- Recommending funding for anything or connecting people with funders;
- Organizing events (in the immediate, I’ve stepped back from any decision-making for the Summit on Existential Security).
Again I’ll make decisions about when to resume these in consultation with my therapist.
(I don’t think I have a way of fully giving up soft power without committing not to be a part of the community in the future, something which doesn’t feel like the right move to me. Instead I will just share that I love it when people do the things that seem to them to be good and true, even when I disagree, or where the consequences might be bad for me personally.)
Third, I think it’s important to ask how the culture or structures we have could be different in ways that would reduce the risk of such harms. I know that this is also important to the person whose story appears in Time, who said in a recent email to me "I deliberately did not name you as I want to draw attention to [systemic issues]. We should expect individuals to make misjudgements over time.". I don’t want to shirk responsibility here — I absolutely think that I could and should have made better judgements. But I also think that holding my flaws at a fixed level, I might not have made these errors in a different culture, and it’s generally good to look for multiple different levels on which things could have been fixed. I don’t think I should be the arbiter of what should be implemented here, but I think it’s possible I have access to helpful inside-view data, so I plan to continue reflecting on this. Topics that I especially want to think about:
- When is radical openness good, and what are the bounds on that?
- When is oversight important, and what types would meaningfully help?
- What tools could help people better track soft power, and its impacts?
- Are there mechanisms that could help to empower the voices of the disempowered?
I then plan to feed thoughts to the community, CEA’s Community Health team, or other parties as appropriate.
I’ll leave things there for now. I’m very happy to hear thoughts of other things I should be doing. (Though some of the conversations around this I won’t want to have in public, in order to protect people’s privacy.) But in closing let me say again: I’m so, so sorry to anyone whom I’ve ever made uncomfortable, and I’m so sorry to the broader community for having contributed to these dynamics.
While I understand that people generally like Owen, I believe we need to ensure that we are not overlooking the substance of his message and giving him an overly favorable response.
Owen's impropriety may be extensive. Just because one event was over 5 years ago, does not mean that the other >=3 events were (and if they were, one expects he would tell us). Relatedly, if it indeed was the most severe mistake of this nature, there may have been more severe mistakes of somewhat different kinds. There may yet be further events that haven't yet been reported to, or disclosed by Owen, and indeed, on the outside view, most events would not be suchly reported.
What makes things worse is the kind of career Owen has pursued over the last 5+ years. Owen's work centered on: i) advising orgs and funders, ii) hiring junior researchers, and iii) hosting workshops, often residential, and with junior researchers. If as Owen says, you know as of 2021-22 that you have deficiencies in dealing with power dynamics, and there have been a series of multiple events like this, then why are you still playing the roles described in (i-iii)? His medium term career trajectory, even relative to other EAs, is in... (read more)
I want to make a small comment on your phrase "it could have a chilling effect on those who have their own cases of sexual assault to report." Owen has not committed sexual assault, but sexual harassment. If this imperfect wording was an isolated incident, I wouldn't have said anything, but in every sexual misconduct comment thread I've followed on the forum, people have said sexual assault when they mean sexual harassment, and/or rape when they mean sexual assault. I was a victim of sexual abuse both growing up and as an adult, so I'm aware that there are big differences between the three, and feel it would be helpful to be mindful of our wording.
As someone with a fairly upvoted comment expressing a different perspective than yours, I want to mention that personally I had never heard of Owen until this post except for the disturbing description in the Time article, and that personally I have no interest in advancing my career based on any of my political opinions, so his power is irrelevant to me. While I appreciate that the last section of your comment came from a place of wanting to be supportive towards early career people like me, I think it oversimplifies the issues and found it a bit condescending. I’m trying to encourage women in my position to speak up more because we have important things to say.
I think it's likely that the difference in the replies to this post and the replies to the official statement by EV UK are from people not reading the link in the EV UK post, and so not getting the full context of the statement.
Edit: Also, if I was trying to impress Owen, wouldn't I be agreeing with his current perspective instead of arguing that he had over-updated?
Seconding that it's a bit condescending to imply that people who are not digging into Owen might just "like Owen" or "face cognitive dissonance"
I also find the concept in the last sentence that commentors might look like they are "backing" powerful community members, to be gross. It's not a zero-sum situation. This might not be exactly what Hattie meant by "backing" but I think others night feel vindicated that that's a good way to look at it. But Owen and the woman herself collaborated on the piece so I'd be surprised to find that anyone involved thinks of this situation as like...winner v loser going forward.
I agree with (edit: many parts of) this comment and I've made a mental note to stay extra vigilant in this regard and go out of my way to consider that I might be biased in Owen's favor (I tend to really like people who seem unusually introspective and open about their exact motivations, potential flaws, etc).
Also, I want to emphasize that while I made comments here that tried to shift the balance more in one direction, I wouldn't necessarily describe and condense this as"taking Owen's side." (I feel like the only comment that "took Owen's side" without any caveats has more than 120 disagreement karma, which is a pretty clear statement.) And I want to say somewhere that this incident was a negative update for me not just in a social-implications sense (pattern of having made people uncomfortable in asymmetric power dynamics). It also affected my impression of the strength of Owen's orientation and ability to overcome "self-serving traps." Especially for the longtermist project where we can't help but rely on the best judgment of a few expert researchers (because there aren't really any short-and-unambiguously-relevant/helpful feedback loops we can check instead), having peopl... (read more)
I want to highlight this. The more general thing to flag is that this is only Cotton-Barratt's side of the story, albeit apparently checked by several people. The prior is that at least some of this presentation to be slanted in his favor, subconsciously or otherwise.
I don't think it's reasonable to take either the facts or (especially) the framing of this story at face value without entertaining at least significant doubts, and I'm surprised at the number of commentators who appear to be doing this.
I realized you’ve made a good point, and don’t feel as confident about my takes as I used to because of this. People may not have been comfortable being honest when they gave Owen feedback on this post because of the similar power dynamics at play that seem to have made them unwilling to be honest in the first place. Although the policies about sexual misconduct of “Big EA” seem to have evolved substantially since then, so I hope it wouldn’t have been quite as bad.
The statement about pausing some exercises of soft power is rather indefinite:
There's no timeframe on that (could it be a month?). There's no meaningful external accountability or oversight of the decision to unpause (only "consultation" with a therapist who is bound by confidentiality).
Much better would be: I will not conduct these activities for a minimum of A months, and will not conduct them unless and until [pick one: B and C leaders / a independent
therapistpsychologist or other professional(edited to: psychologist or other professional)
As a friend pointed out, relying on Owen's own judgment regarding whether or when to restart mentorship, event organizing, and funding recommendations seems a really bad idea given that the problematic cases happened in the first place due to errors in Owen's judgment. I think it should go without saying that these decisions should be made by a separate body.
(I don't think these two types of judgments are perfectly correlated, but they seem somewhat correlated. Also I don't mean to take a stance on whether/how Owen should be involved in the future; I think it's good to consider the full range of options.)
Personally, I think it's useful if this decision is made by people who competently investigate the case and gather all the information, not by people acting primarily based on public information like this post. Even though I know Owen well, I personally find it hard to say how likely Owen is to make mistakes again; it seems plausible to me that he can learn from his mistakes and continue to be highly involved in the community without causing any further issues, and it also seems possible that he would continue to make similar mistakes. It seems to me that the main way to find out would be by seeking out conversations and investigating.
I personally think the community health team (after implementing some improvements) would be suitable for deciding his future involvement. Even though they didn't deal with this particular case well, I think overall their track record seems strong, and I think they can learn from this case. They have a lot more relevant context than external investigators.
I feel most confused why the therapist is important here. The therapist recs might be a necessary condition but clearly not sufficient. Therapist are not trained in this (it might be that his therapist is an expert in dealing with such situations, but then I expect he would have mentioned this).
I feel there's a bit of a "missing mood" in some of the comments here, so I want to say:
I felt shocked, hurt, and betrayed at reading this. I never expected the Oxford incident to involve someone so central and well-regarded in the community, and certainly not Owen. Other EAs I know who knew Owen and the Oxford scene better are even more deeply hurt and surprised by this. (As other commenters here have already attested, tears have not been uncommon.)
Despite the length and thoughtfulness of the apology, it's difficult for me to see how someone who was already in a position of power and status in EA -- a community many of us see as key to the future of humanity -- behaved in a way that seems so inappropriate and destructive. I'm angry not only at the harm that was done to women trying to do good in the world, but also to the health, reputation, and credibility of our community. We deserve better from our leaders.
I really sympathize with all the EAs -- especially women -- who feel betrayed and undermined by this news. To all of you who've had bad experiences like this in EA -- I'm really sorry. I hope we can do better. I think we can do better -- I think we already have the seed... (read more)
I appreciate you writing this. To me, this clarifies something. (I'm sorry there's a rant incoming and if this comunity needs its hand held through these particular revelations, I'm not the one):
It seems like many EAs still (despite SBF) didn't put significant probability on the person from that particular Time incident being a very well-known and trusted man in EA, such as Owen. This despite the SBF scandal and despite (to me) this incident being the most troubling incident in the Time piece by far which definitely sounded to be attached to a "real" EA more than any of the others (I say as someone who still has significant problems with the Time piece). Some of us had already put decent odds on the probability that this was an important figure doing something that was at least thoughtless and ended up damaging the EA movement... I mean the woman who reported him literally tried to convey that he was very well-connected and important.
It seems like the community still has a lot to learn from the surprise of SBF about problematic incidents and leaders in general: No one expects their friends or leaders are gonna be the ones who do problematic things. That includes us. Update no... (read more)
These cases seem very different to me. One big update from the FTX situation was "in case you didn't already notice, dark triad traits can be really bad." By contrast, while I'm still processing the update from Owen's case, I think it's gonna be something more like, "probably there really is something unusually bad/unwelcoming with aspects of EA culture even outside the Bay area, sorry I didn't see this earlier." I don't see how I could've made that update just from the FTX scandal.
For what it's worth, I did have significant probability mass on the influential EA figure mentioned in the TIME article being someone who is indeed still influential within EA, despite the fact that the TIME article misrepresented the degree of involvement and centrality of one of accused in one of the other incidents they described. So, it's not like I thought "no way this could happen to EA." The main thing I was taken aback by is that it ended up being someone who was not only very influential within EA, but also some... (read more)
Yeah, I mean I don't disagree with a lot of what you wrote. Maybe my comment was complicated by me trying to word it in such a way that anyone can "get it" whether they believe Owen did a anything "bad", from a minor faux pas (socially bad, not ill-intentioned) to actual SA (morally bad, or creepy and otherwise badly and selfishly-intentioned)
At the end of the day what I'm trying to get at is something like:
"Not every scandal/negative incident is a black swan event. Everything relevant to this situation from 'your supposedly-sage leaders do PR-risky professional misconduct' to 'your trusted friends and idols do SA within your community' should be in your model of the world already.
On the other side of the coin, just because an incident is not a black swan event, doesn't mean you think you should have been able to predict it. Surprises exist. The community shouldn't feel a need to do a lot of handwringing about the community, society, and what happened. At least not if having these types of surprises (SAs or professional misconduct, including by leaders) were factored in. Why suddenly do a lot of self-flagellation in response?
That the incident is confirmed an... (read more)
I find this characterization of the journalist to be wildly uncharitable, overblown and exaggerated. I'll explain why in detail with reference to this incident, which is the only one where we know anything close to the full story.
Here is the passage from the article:
... (read more)Other context (reader decide importance):
Regardless, I think that counting facts is not fully the right approach here. Like I say, I think a mal-intentioned journalist is going to use nuggets of truth, but put the whole truth on the backburner and a scandalous narrative upfront. When evaluating the intention of the journalism, it's the comparison of the facts to the words surrounding the facts that matters. You don't have to call it lying exactly if that term implies too much forethought to you. But the journalist definitely seemed to be acting in service of a narrative about EA not of the truth.
[I've also discussed this (what I and many would call "lying") being an unsurprising human tendency here, using veganism as an example EAs might "get" more. I also discuss two groups I think are necessa... (read more)
I've had several experiences where I think men used their relationship status as a shield/to get me to let my guard down/to push my boundaries. Like, they would engage in behavior that I would have otherwise interpreted as them hitting on me, but I would instead assume I was misreading the situation. If I'm confident someone is hitting on me, I can shut them down, but the more unsure I am, the more presumptuous/awkward it is to do this. So, if the woman in this situation knew he was married, but didn't know he was poly (which she might not have, since he says his marriage was "in practice... monogamous"), that makes things worse, not better, imo.
Yes I agree that that is a possibility, albeit a slimmer one as we are travelling down the chain of qualifiers now. You are right that it is worthy context whether she knew he was trying poly or not [or interested in this woman]
Yeah, for sure! I mainly made this point because this is a mistake I’ve made several times (letting my guard down on the basis of relationship status), and I didn’t want others to make the same mistake (“reader decide importance”).
This is more than a mere "nugget of truth". It's majority truth , with some context missing. (I don't think your added context adds much, given that Owen was polyamorous and self-admittedly attracted to the woman. Also, he could have pushed the org to pay for a hotel room but didn't)
As for the larger picture, this anecdote was used to prove the point that there was "sexual misconduct" in EA. This absolutely fits that description.
As for the wider point, the article title implies that there is a "toxic culture of sexual harrassment and abuse" in EA. (It only explicitly claims that "these women" say that, but in general it sides with the idea that this is true).
The victim in this case (who again, was 100% honest in her account) claims that there are "systemic issues" in EA. Owen himself claims that the culture of EA contributed to his sexual misconduct. We also now know that a third party in EA (the org hiring) failed to see the problems in her situation, and was not willing to pay for a hotel room to avoid it.
Does this prove, on it's own, that EA has a "toxic culture"? Certainly not on it's own. But it is evidence in it's favor, and this is only one anecdote. You can disagree with the conclusion if you want (I don't think it's entirely fair), but no part of this was "lying" or dishonesty.
Regardless of my own views about which are the largest cultural problems in EA, what's your prior that people who do wrongdoing are accurate in their public assessment of factors that diminish their moral responsibility and/or make themselves look better? Your italicized bolding implies that you think this is an unusually reliable source of truth, whereas I pretty straightforwardly think it's unusually bad evidence.
"As for the wider point, the article title implies that there is a 'toxic culture of sexual harrassment and abuse' in EA."
But this is the part I don't agree with and I think the journalist could have found that the alarm-ringing they chose to go with was easily downgradable in many senses.
You can even tell from the title that put salaciousness before accuracy and in implication, which I consider a bad-faith move:
Title: "Effective Altruism has Sexual Harassment Problem, Women Say"
Better title: "Some Women Say Effective Altruism has Neglected a Toxic Culture Toward Women"
I realize the person who wrote the title is likely not the journalist, but surely you can see how their actual piece prioritizes the scandalous first narrative while putting the second (a truth many more can get behind) on the backburner? It's messed up tbh. [I realize this is normal in journalism but that's why many people find it to be a messed-up field til proven otherwise, and "normal practice" does not mean "okay practice" or "epistemically honest practice"]
And I think all groups have a toxic culture and "systemic issues" around gendered experience. I don't think EA has more of either than the world or tech at l... (read more)
I think it's better than tech at large or basically anywhere else I've found. [Edit: Nobody just writes a Time piece about a community that needs the same level of improvement as other places. Come on.. the world knows this and let's not pretend otherwise. The world therefore should not be happy and shrug its shoulders and allow its attention to be collectively wasted in such a way? Readers should be able to trust that if something is published in Time that it is important and actually noteworthy. To publish something non-noteworthy in there is inherently espistemic dishonesty. So no, that "improvement is needed" is not the only thing that matters when it comes to the question of whether the journalist was dishonest, mal-intentioned, etc]
And I think an investigative journalist absolutely could have found more claims to the actual contrary, yeah, and actually should have before blasting a narrative on a nation-wide scale. I see them as basically paying lip service to neutrality by quoting Julia there (if they were truly neutral, they could have just said that themselves, as I see similar qualifying sentiments in Kelsey Piper's journalism). And paying lip service to neutr... (read more)
I realized I neglected your question above about how I feel about the women. Sorry about that:
- Actually I am very glad the women came forward and even glad they tried a new method than the CH team (those who had reported already but weren't happy with the outcome). And I respect them for doing so. [My impression is that women were and are still bouncing off EA because of mismatch in professional and cultural expectations so this needed addressing. And I believe it is important for anyone who suspects they might view something awry with our culture to try to raise alarm bells so it can be fixed.]
- I am much less happy that the method chosen was to speak to Time. Is any EA happy about this reality specifically? Are the women? I think other methods, like posting anonymous incident reports on the Forum or something with actual usable details (which still no woman has done), could have led to faster resolution, including outcomes like OCB stepping down from the board and prompting a period of reflection where he and other men figure out why he/they'd been so slow to improve and notice perspectives of women before (in other words, both tangible and intangible systemic improvements).
- BUT I si
... (read more)I'm happy to leave it here too. I hope I did not get too argumentative in this conversation, I respect your opinion and I appreciate that you are willing to write a lot of detail on it, especially considering the heated topic matter.
As my last word, I'll just point out that the some of the women did try going through EA channels like the community team and making posts on this forum, but were unhappy with the results, feeling ignored and belittled. Whereas it seems like the article has caused at least some positive change.
If we want to discourage future articles from coming out, we need to ensure that the people coming forward are treated with the kindness and respect they deserve, and that their reports and concerns are taken seriously.
Sorry, what was your prior belief here? Upon reading that section in the Time article, I definitely did not interpret (paraphrased) "telling a job interviewee staying at your house about your masturbation habits" as a one-off incident by someone who never otherwise does creepy things, and I doubt the average Time reader did.
EDIT: I'm confused about the disagree-votes. Did other people reading the Time article assume that it was a one-off incident before Owen's apology?
EDIT2: Fwiw I thought the rest of the comment that I replied to was a good contribution to the discourse, and I upvoted it before my comment.
My honest reaction was: This is finally being taken sort of seriously. If an EVF board member acted badly then the community can't just pretend the Time article is about people totally peripheral to the community. At least we got some kind of accountability beyond "the same team that has failed to take sufficient action in the past is looking into things."
It honestly does feel like the dialogue is finally moving in a good direction. I already knew powerful people in EA acted very badly. So it's honestly a relief it seems like we might get real change.
Thanks for writing this <3
Thanks for everyone's contributions. I am learning a lot. I see that the author made significant mistakes and am glad he is taking action to correct them and that the community is taking them seriously, but I want to make a small comment on the sentence "She was in a structural position where it was (I now believe) unreasonable to expect honesty about her experience." I don't know enough about the specific relationship in the post to comment on it directly, but felt it could describe enough dynamics that it could use a diverse array of perspectives from women in the structural positions described.
I want to encourage other women in early stages of their careers like myself to continue striving to overcome shyness. I don't think it's too much to expect us to be honest if we dislike a higher status man flirting with us who doesn't have direct power over us, or if we dislike any other thing they do. I hope this post encourages shy lower status women to feel like they would be heard if they were assertive about behaviors they don't like, that one way of making the behaviors stop could be to be more direct.
I also think in general the Ask Culture norm prevalent in EA is very ... (read more)
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I think it's good to have a diversity of views and that the forum is better for it. I think your view is empowering, but one thing I want to say is that I don't think we should describe this as "shyness". The point is that when there are power-dynamics at play, such as the one described, people are less likely to say how they feel since a lot may be on the line, such as their livelihood. This isn't just general shyness, because the same person may feel confident to say how they feel in other settings where the same power dynamics don't exist.
Thank you for your contributions Rebecca and Lauren. My career is the most important thing in the world to me, so I have empathy for women who would take actions that feel drastic to me to protect theirs. I've worked hard to see things from your perspectives, but in thinking about them I actually came away more confident that women should feel comfortable standing up to powerful men.
It dawned on me that until I changed my career plans this month, most of my male friends held positions of power in my field very similar to the power gap that I think the post described. They had no direct power over me, but a word from them would have been extremely helpful in getting an interview or a job. I criticize them freely about all sorts of things, and think this is the best way of engaging in these friendships that honestly feel more like peer relationships than relationships of different status to me. The idea of trying to be strategic by not being honest if one of them flirted with me and I didn't like it makes me even more uncomfortable than not being honest with them in general would. Wouldn't that mean I was trying to get ahead based on something other than the quality of my work?... (read more)
Hi Sonia, thanks for your thoughtful response. Maybe this scenario will show an example of a more complex power dynamic than the one you describe having with your friends:
Jen gets a small grant from x and starts working with senior people at y company. She knows all of their names because they are well known people in z community, but doesn't know them personally. She slowly gets to know them by working with them, and knows that having them as contacts, references, etc will be really important to the future of her career (perhaps she wants to even stay at this company longterm). She has spent a year working with them now, and her ability to get future career opportunities within this community, field of work, and/or company is reliant on them being good references for her, or longterm co-workers. One of the senior males begins to get extra friendly with her. At first it seems like normal friendly banter that may push her professional boundaries a bit further than she'd like, but after a few months it is clear that he is interested in her sexually, and that the other senior people in the group know about this, and talk about it in a way that makes it seem as though they are co... (read more)
Oh yes, I agree this would be a very different scenario than the one in the OP and with my friends, and I would feel much the same way you do about it.
Thanks for sharing. I actually think that quote from the post describes my relationship with my friends very well except for the saliency and pressure part, although it's vague enough that it's possible it's describing something different too.
I am updating that so many women seem to care so much more about power differentials than I do that norms that cater to them would probably be net positive because otherwise we would have far fewer women in the movement.
This isn't really about sexual misconduct anymore for me, but a broader issue. If women don't feel comfortable declining romantic interest from senior men outside the workplace, they must be abstaining from criticizing them in all sorts of other ways too. I'm very disturbed by the mass of knowledge we are missing out on if they are refraining from speaking up at the rate it seems like from the conversation around this post. Do you have any thoughts about how we can encourage women in EA to care less about power differentials outside of sexual misconduct problems?
I think the onus needs to be placed on the people who are abusing their power. There are ways to do this. If the community acknowledges that this isn't ok, there can be a shift in the broader culture. People need to be aware these power dynamics exist and speak out against people who abuse them and I don't mean the person on the receiving end of the abuse of power, but their colleagues.
Some concrete steps I can think of moving forward would be:
a) Workplace training on power dynamics and professional boundaries.
b) An external source where complaints can be made where the people receiving the complaints do not have connections to the EA community such as personal friendships/collegial relationships.
I'm not sure if this answers your question at all, but I am enjoying this discussion and appreciate the way you are approaching our conversation. Thanks!
Edit: I want to make it crystal clear here that I'm not talking about sexual misconduct at this point, or denying that actual power differentials are a huge problem in EA. I'm learning that the forum requires a clearer writing style that I'm still new at.
The concrete steps you mentioned make sense to me, although my weakly held view is that people with less power caring too much about power differentials is an even bigger problem than actual power differentials. Maybe more workshops about overcoming imposter syndrome would help? I think epistemics would be weaker in the community if we don't make a large effort to encourage people to be as assertive as I am in the face of power imbalances, but maybe that's a price I'm willing to pay if it means more diversity? A lot depends on how tractable different interventions are, and ultimately I just care about getting people's voices heard. I also appreciate how you've approached this conversation! I hadn't said anything controversial on the forum before this weekend, and this has been much less scary than I expected.
(Sorry you are getting downvotes as soon as you affirm that commenting on the forum is less scary than you expected. The irony is real and hopefully you can laugh at it.)
I've continued to work hard to see things from the perspective of women like you over the last couple days, and just had another surprising realization. I've actually experienced a conversation in EA that I think could have gone in the Time article (similar to some of the milder examples they gave like the man who expressed an interest in adult relationships with large age gaps to a young lower status woman, not the OP's example). I will give no details because I don't want to get anyone in trouble. I enjoyed the conversation and it took this intense dialogue for me to realize a different woman in my position might feel opressed by it. Not being able to have as many fun, edgy (to me) conversations like that anymore will decrease my quality of life. However, the pain that people are experiencing seems a lot more intense than the joy I get from edgy conversations. I'm really looking forward to the results of the polls EA is putting together about this. My sense is I'm in a minority for my gender and status, but I have no idea by how much.
I'm sorry to be pushing on this when it seems like you are doing the right thing, but could you elaborate more on this sentence from the article?
Why was she being put up in your house and not a hotel, if you weren't affiliated with the group she was interviewing for? I think this is the part a lot of people were sketched out by, so more context would be helpful.
Sorry I'm mostly trying to take a day away from the forum, but someone let me know that it would be helpful to chime in here. Essentially what happened:
(I'm eliding details to reduce risk of leaking information about the person's identity.)
This is a lot worse than I was expecting. This makes it clear that the woman was in a situation where it was extremely hard to refuse Owen's offer of accommodation.
Firstly, the organization screwed up majorly. You should not be arranging accommodation for someone on the same day they fly to a foreign country. I know I would have been fairly distressed if this had happened to me.
Secondly, we need to remember that this was an organization she was interviewing for, and Owen was the one that recommended her, and was presumably on good terms with the org. It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that making a fuss about staying at Owen's house could hurt her chances with the org.
Thirdly, the power imbalances in their friendship might make her concerned about what would happen to her position if refusing accommodation hurt said friendship.
Fourthly, it's often very expensive to get a last minute hotel. Refusing to stay with Owen could have occurred a large financial penalty.
This was not a case of "hey do you want to crash at mine when you fly over next month?". This is a case of "no better options". It's extremely inappropriate to push boundaries on someone who is in this situation. I'm very saddened at the extreme lack of empathy and judgement that was shown here. I'm relieved that Owen is no longer in leadership positions in EA, and I deeply hope he has sincerely reformed since this encounter.
To clarify, do you think:
(1) Owen should have pushed the organization to find other housing for the interviewee?
(2) If the organization would or could not do so, Owen should not have agreed to host the interviewee for an evening (leaving her to find an expensive last-minute hotel?)
One potential concern with a yes to (2) is that -- assuming it would have been OK to offer lodging in this situation to an older male to whom Owen wasn't attracted -- this could be seen as imposing extra costs on the woman for being young, female, and attractive to Owen.
(Personally, I would never make the hosting offer to any candidate.)
The most important thing he needed to do was to not mention masturbation or anything else sexual. The situation makes it significantly harder to for her to push back against unwanted behavior. (I think this would also have been wrong if she had agreed in advance to stay there, but the fact that it was foisted on her on the day makes it worse).
I absolutely agree with 1), I definitely think the org should have paid for a hotel, given how badly they screwed up it's the least they can do. I'm not too sure about 2), I think an offer of lodging could be okay if it was the absolute last resort and kept strictly professional.
From the article, it sounds like her flights to the UK were paid for by the org (although it's a little ambiguous, could read it as Owen paying, although that wouldn't really make sense to me). If they can pay for flights, it seems reasonable that a hotel room is not an excessive extra cost.
I've stayed at a (non-EA) professional contact's house before when they'd invited me to give a talk and later very apologetically realized they didn't have the budget for a hotel. They likely felt obliged to offer; I felt like it would be awkward to decline. We were both at pains to be extremely, exceedingly, painstakingly polite given the circumstances and turn the formality up a notch.
I agree the org should have paid for a hotel, I'm only mentioning this because if baseline formality is a 5, I would think it would be more normal to kick it up to a 10 under the circumstances. It makes this situation all the more bizarre.
[Edit: I'll redact this comment once someone who knows more actually clarifies it. My intent was to help provide a way to connect the concern to OP's piece as-written. If you don't want that and want perfect clarity instead, just skip this thread]
(I'll throw my hat in the ring that this doesn't surprise me, now seeing that he was pretty sure that he had a friendship with this woman. Personally If I arranged for a friend to have an interview at an effective nonprofit in my city, I would definitely ask them if they wanted to stay in my spare bedroom. I'd always offer because (1) I personally greatly prefer to stay in a place with a kitchen and some opportunity for social interaction over a hotel room, and (2) hotel costs are counterfactual donations and trades of this flavor have been going on in EA for a decade now.
It's bad if he didn't clarify first and give her the option of hotel or not. And possibly, due to perceived power dynamics, it would even be bad anyway to offer his space... like maybe it's important that he had been totally hands-off with her entire work-related visit since their friendship was not actually so cemented. But this whole housing dynamic seems qualitatively similar to the type of mistakes and misunderstandings of power dynamics that he made elsewhere, and is now working on improving and addressing proactively in future. So I personally do not continue to be worried about the housing aspect although it was not named in this apology piece.)
"she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home" seems to preclude the notion that Cotton-Barratt asked her first, so I'm not sure why you're writing as if we're not clear whether they discussed it beforehand.
Sorry I'm on mobile and it's hard for me to see exactly how my comment comes off in the scheme of larger discussion. I agree it sounds like he didn't ask her first. My main intention with my comment was to say that his treatment of that situation seems qualitatively related to the idea that he needs to address power dynamics and find clarity more proactively.
[[Edit: That said I can come up with an exchange where he would consider himself to have asked. I don't really want to theorize this as likely to have happened, but maybe it can illustrate why I try to speak hesitantly about the actions people might or might not have taken. Example dialogue:
Owen: So normally in this situation I'd just host the interviewee at my place rather than having people faff around with a hotel. Is that cool here?
Woman: (thinking: damn that's expected huh? Im surprised) um I guess so
My second paragraph appears to go off on a tangent but I was actually thinking in response to a potential exchange like this and trying to get ahead of anyone who might think that asking would always be good enough. I'm not necessarily ensorsing asking as a singular plan though I'd probably do it myself in some situations. The only sure solution is the solution that Owen appears to be taking, more proactivity and avoid these dynamics when possible anyway]]
Yes, that is one possible explanation for the sentence. There are also other, more problematic possible explanations, such as if the org itself told her they had a place for her and then sprung the surprise that it was at Owen's house.
I tried to avoid speculation like this with my original comment because we can just ask what happened. We don't need to make up stories, we can just find out what actually happened from the OP and the woman and put the matter to rest.
Yes I agree and I do hope someone who knows chimes in. I waited hours to comment here hoping someone else would, but in the hours I waited the original comment got over 60 more upvotes. It seemed like a growing and urgent concern for people, and I was becoming less confident that Owen or the woman would chime in in a timely manner.
I commented in parentheses to try to imply I was just dropping in, but now I really regret not writing something like: "I'll delete this comment once someone who knows more actually clarifies it"
Ah, thanks! I've retracted my first 2 comments here.
context: I'm relatively new to EA, mid 20s, and a polyamorous woman. Commenting anonymously because I am not yet totally "out" as polyamorous to everyone in my life.
I feel that this post risks conflating and/or unfairly associating polyamory with poor handling of power dynamics and personal/professional boundaries. Such issues can overlap with any relationship structure. Sexual misconduct exists throughout our society, and throughout both monogamous and non-monogamous spaces.
I've experienced a range of sexual misconduct prior to my involvement in EA, and so far have found my dating and professional interactions with men in EA to be high quality, relative to high personal standards. In particular, the openness to and active solicitation of feedback I've experienced is something I've never really experienced outside of polyamory within EA. Since I learned about EA thanks to polyamory (not the other way around), I think I have a pretty different experience than that shared by women in the Time article. Their experience is not a representation of what polyamory done well actually looks like.
Additionally, the Time article fosters skepticism about restorative justice approaches to ... (read more)
Totally agree that Owen was mainly meaning to say "the only person I will date in the immediate future is my wife" and think that's a smart decision for him while he works on himself.
I think the part that came in the zone of unfairly associating polyamory with poor handling of power dynamics and persona/professional boundaries comes here:
"How could I have come to make these mistakes? I was leaning into my own view-at-the-time about what good conduct looked like, and interested in experimenting to find ways to build a better culture than society-at-large has. I was newly open to polyamory, and newly exposed to circling and saw something powerful and good about speaking truths even when they were uncomfortable."
Here, Owen lists new openness/exposure to polyamory/circling almost as if they are reasons/explanations for his mistakes. Which to me simply isn't the issue, plenty of people explore polyamory/circling without making such mistakes, because they come from a background of already having done work to understand their identities and social positions. To me the issue appears to be primarily a lack of a sufficiently formed critical lens for his own position of powe... (read more)
I knew Owen at university. The circles he moved in regularly had conversations about: gendered dynamics, power imbalances in relationships, rape culture. Metoo did not invent these ideas, feminists have been talking about them for decades & longer.
He has no excuse not to have learnt minimal human decency when dealing with other people.
Thank you for sharing. In particular, I find your mention of shame vs edginess interesting.. But I expect that at least one person reading your story will think "Uh sounds like you need more shame, dude, not less" so I'd like to share a perspective for any such readers:
If I understand Owen anyway, I'll say that I relate in that I also have had some brazen periods of life, prompted by a sort of cultural rebirth and sex-positive idealism. An outsider might have labelled these brazen periods as a swinging of the pendulum in response to my strict religious upbringing, but that isn't quite right.. It's hard to notice how it is related to shame but in my case:
For a very shame-prone or shame-trained person, it can be very difficult to parse out "What is the actual harm here? What are the actual bad acts and why, when I know that most of these things I'm programmed to feel shame about simply are not wrong or shame-worthy?" This can lead to a sort of idealistically-motivated throwing out of all feelings that look like shame. Anxiety, hesitance, guilt, and self-criticality are examples of possibly-adaptive-feelings that can be mistakenly thrown out here. This, I think, can lead to soci... (read more)
This is such a good comment, thank you! I've also been mulling over the shame/inappropriateness connection. Another, complementary frame is something like, if you have strong psychological parts that shame you, while at the same time other parts recognize that this shaming is toxic and overpowerful, those parts might well be like 'F*** you, I refuse to be shamed anymore!' which might lead to leaning hard in the opposite direction and doing things that healthy shame/embarrassment might have warned you not to do.
[Edit: this comment was a tangent... now I wish this thread was better organised]
Totally. I think that even when living "shame-free" starts out idealistically, from there, ppl can move into the territory of valuing willfulness and recklessness intrinsically. And that value swap can be hard to catch for them, because they threw out one of their major tools (shame) for noticing when they were behaving self-interestedly and recklessly. Although they may still have conscious intent to behave ethically, safely, and considerately, it becomes easy to miss the ways you are betraying those values, especially if you are surrounded by people who also value edginess intrinsically.
(Idk what happened in Owen's case but I think I've seen this in the BM community)
Largely in response to the final paragraph of Ivy's comment: FWIW, as a woman in EA, I do not feel "healed" by Owen's post. I feel *very* annoyed and sorry for the person who was affected by Owen's behavior. In response to the final sentence ("extra obligations like board responsibilities on hold til you have things sorted"), I would be concerned if Owen was in a board position in EA because he has clearly proved himself incapable of doing so in a way that doesn't discredit legitimate actors in the space and cause harm. I'm surprised, and again really annoyed, this is already a topic of discussion.
I agree with everything you wrote. I guess I think some things are so obvious they don't need to be said. The intention of my comment was to make overt things which were probably not obvious.
Okay, Ivy. I did really like your other point about shame. Thank you.
I am also a woman in EA, and do not feel "healed" by this post. That comment really rubbed me the wrong way, and I'm confused why the OP assumed to speak for many women in EA.
I also wish the empathy that is evident in that comment was directed towards the person on the receiving end of his behaviour rather than him.
I think my sentiments are not only my own though? Just as I'm sure your sentiments are not only your own and it is important that you say them. I never said I speak for all. I also never said I was fully healed nor that anyone should be fully healed by reading this piece.
I do have empathy toward that person too. I think that went without saying. In future I really hope that others will not try to map any particular women like me and other women who do feel healed and/or hopeful about moving forward to any particular side of any fence.
Same and I'm also annoyed that the comments here are so fluffy versus the blistering skepticism against women who do post when they've had a bad experience. I'm not advocating being unkind to Owen but I am wondering why the chasm-like discrepancy.
Also while I am collecting downvotes instead of doing my actual job: Why is the community health team getting more criticism than Owen himself?
For my part, I'm not sure who disagrees with Owen's current position, or what that would change going forward. Ritually chanting "You Did Wrong" around him doesn't seem useful to me. I don't know what I want him to do differently now. Some of that is that it's harder to talk about an individual that I don't know than the policies a team should take.
What he did was unacceptable. The existence of repeated incidents of this sort is more concerning.
Right now, I have not been able to discern any plan from the Community Health team more extensive than "Julia screwed up and will try not to do that again."
I'm not saying that they acted less badly. I have more opinions on what they should do differently going forward. I suspect that that is fairly common.
There is absolutely a point to "ritually chanting you did wrong at Owen." It's the same point underlying why a lot of EA leaders issued statements condemning FTX and it's the reason I'm commenting on this post at all: There are a lot of people, particularly women, who are viewing the comment section of this post to see how we as a community respond to allegations like these and deciding whether this is a safe and welcoming space for them. I know because I spent most of my workday yesterday speaking to at least 6 of them, 1 of whom was in floods of tears. For most of yesterday, the 2nd to top comment thanked Owen and essentially told him to take a break before coming back and running boards again) and the top thanked him for doing the right thing. I have to say that undermined my ability to emphasize the community doesn't condone this type of behavior. I'm not into retributive justice (I think it's pretty gross actually) but there are very good reasons to send a solid signal here and people are watching to see if we do.
Thank you. It's hard for me (and I think for many people) to remember to say what feels obvious to them.
FWIW I was assaulted (not in EA). It was not obvious to me at the time that people either believed me or took it seriously. Some people go into these conversations with a different sense of what is obvious than others.*
*Please read my tone here as sad/wistful not angry/preachy.
Hi Keller -
Regarding
> Right now, I have not been able to discern any plan from the Community Health team more extensive than "Julia screwed up and will try not to do that again."
(Note that I’m speaking as interim head of the Community Health team)
I’m planning on spending significant time over the next several weeks on the plan I laid out in this comment (which is on a different top-level post, so you might have missed it if you are only reading this post’s discussion).
Discussing retrospectives with senior manageme... (read more)
Thanks for pointing this out; I agree. I feel like the TIME article was held to a standard of scrutiny that was unusual and unwarranted, and that was frustrating and felt bad.
[Edit: My reaction was informed by the "People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You" post having 330 upvotes, and the comments there suggesting many people were reluctant to update much/at all in the direction of "EA has a problem with sexual harassment" on the basis of the TIME article. Unless people had good reasons to strongly hold the prior that EA doesn't have a problem with sexual harassment—which some may—this seemed misguided to me, given the reporter had spoken with 30 EAs who shared anecdotes that ranged from "ambiguous but worrisome" to "clearly bad." That is relatively good evidence in the context of the kind of evidence we generally get about sexual harassment, which is notoriously difficult to study and report on, and in the absence of much other evidence about sexual harassment in EA, seemed worth taking seriously. But I also understand why some people felt differently.]
Hmmm, I thought people were pretty supportive of the Time article and looking back most of the top comments are supportive. I guess you mean the article that was taken down? I guess there is a bit of a double standard here though even before we knew who this story was about the reaction has generally been horror.
Agree-also, do we have any indication that Owen is doing this because of "transparency and accountability", rather than a forced response because this was information that was going to come out anyway?
Even the claims about him volunteering his own mistakes to Julia, which normally seems like a commendable action, could be interpreted as him trying to get ahead of any reports to a sympathetic ear inside the system. Given the community health team's relative inaction about this case until the TIME article's publication, it's hard to discount this possibility without other information.
EVF UK is under statutory inquiry for conflict of interest concerns among other things, and I think it is reasonably likely the CC would have asked about the Time article. I would not want to be in a position of explaining to the CC why the board hadn't sacked Owen over this.
In other words, I don't think there was any viable universe in which Owen wasn't leaving the board. So one might weigh that in evaluating transparency and accountability vs. a forced response.
My impression is that many bad actors* are literally incapable of doing this. They never volunteer this sort of information. It's bizarre – I don't know why they don't do it.** It would probably make them more credible if they occasionally disclosed extra information or admitted to having made mistakes you don't already know about. In any case, because many bad actors are psychologically weird in this regard and seem incapable of admitting anything that makes them look worse than you already suspected, it still counts as evidence that someone is high on integrity if they proactively share information that had a good chance of not coming to light. I think this an instance where it makes sense, incentives-wise as well as epistemically, to give a person significant credit for disclosing things.
(Obv... (read more)
It might be reasonable for you to think that it wouldn't have come to light but it would also be reasonable to think that it would. This really depends on how bad the case was, and how the interactions between OCB and the victim a few months ago went. Unless you have nonpublic information, we don't know what the truth is here, and it feels weird to say that it "makes sense" to give him credit for this given these uncertainties.
Also, it's possible that something has a good chance of not coming to light but that this still does not count as evidence that someone is high on integrity. For example: Owen sees Julia as someone who at least empirically has protected his interests. Or perhaps he thinks the case a few months ago was "less bad" than the masturbation case. Whatever the reason, he feels comfortable that sharing will be unlikely to lead to a bad outcome for him, and in fact may have a chance of reducing the risk of a bad outcome by getting in first with his version of events. If true, I don't see why I should reward this behavior. The continued inaction of the community health team, and the fact the OCB did not suffer any meaningful negative consequences as a result of his actions prior to the TIME article could also support this hypothesis. I'm not claiming that this is what's happening, but given this is a live possibility, I think you're being too charitable here.
I agree that we should give no credit if there was a high chance of something further coming to light.
I guess I also agree that we don't actually know what the status is of these other cases. (I don't have non-public information.)
Owen's account is here:
I feel like saying "in most of these cases I'm still on very good terms with the person" isn't the sort of thing that's easy to lie about. If several future accusations were to come out, it'll become clear that this was wrong, which would defeat the purpose of preemptively saying something.
Of course, for anyone who just hears the story itself and d... (read more)
I’m the woman who Julia asked on a hunch about her experiences with Owen, and one of the women who Owen refers to when he says there have been four other less egregious occasions where he expressed feelings of attraction that he regrets. I’m sharing my experience with Owen below, because I think it’s probably helpful for people reflecting on this situation (and by default, it would remain confidential indefinitely), but as an FYI, I’m probably unlikely to participate in substantive discussion about it in the comments section. (I’m posting this anonymously because I’d prefer to avoid being pulled into lots of discussions about this in a way that drains my time and emotional energy, not because I’m afraid of retribution from someone or negative consequences for my career.)
- Several years ago, I stayed at Owen’s house for a while while I was visiting Oxford. Owen and I were friends, I had been to his house several times before, and he had previously offered that I could stay there if I was in Oxford. I was working at an EA organization at the time that was not professionally connected to Owen.
- Towards the end of my stay, Owen and I went on a long walk around Oxford, where we ta
... (read more)Hi all,
Nine months later, I wanted to provide a brief update, in service of letting people make informed decisions about how to interact with me, and in service of helping people to understand the patterns that can cause harm.
Professional updates
I previously said I was pausing some professional activities, such as starting new mentor relationships or organizing events, and actually paused a larger class (e.g. posting on the forum; attending professional events I’m invited to). I'm now cautiously resuming some of these activities. In some cases (like posting things online) this is just a decision in my court, though I’ll continue to seek advice. In other cases there will be decisions for others to make about how to interface with me[1] (e.g. whether to have me at events) — in such cases I’d like to cooperate with the relevant parties to help them reach whatever decisions they’d most endorse. I'm making this change after working in-depth with a therapist, integrating more feedback, asking advice from wiser folks, and reflecting to better understand what I did wrong, how it was problematic, and how to act appropriately going forwards.
If anyone has any bad experiences interacting ... (read more)
Thanks for the public update. Some readers might also be interested in what actions and decisions EV and the Community Health team have been taking around this.
People actively considering the choice of whether to work with Owen based on the balance of information available are welcome to reach out to us for input as part of their decision making process. Feel free to reach out to me (catherine@centreforeffectivealtruism.org) if you are in this position.
I had ChatGPT rewrite this. Probably not the best place to share this, but if I don't post here it here, might not post it anywhere.
My impression is that young women new to the community have at the least felt uncomfortable or uneasy in EA in some of their interactions with men who've been in the community longer and are a bit older. There's probably enough of an issue here that it warrants a systemic solution.
As for myself, I admit that I have contributed a bit to the problem. Being a bit older and having been in the community for a while, I have engaged romantically and sexually with women who are younger and new to the community. Looking back, I recognize the problematic power dynamics at play and think there are things I would take back if I could. Nothing egregious, just stuff that wasn't ideal.
I'm uncertain about the ideal systematic changes and norms, and where to draw the line when it comes to engaging in romantic relationships. While not abusing power is obvious, the gray area is unclear.
In my opinion, the best changes will come from a deeper understanding of the current situation and how we got here. From what I've seen, heterosexual men in the EA community wh... (read more)
Something about this comment rubbed me the wrong way. EA is not meant to be a dating service, and while there are many people in the community who are open to the idea of dating someone within EA or actively searching for this, there are also many people who joined for entirely different reasons and don't consider this a priority/don't want this.
I think that viewing the relationship between men and women in EA this way - eg. men competing for attention, where lonely and desperate men will do what it takes to to get with women - does a disservice to both genders. It sounds like a) an uncomfortable environment for women to join, because they don't want to be swarmed by a bunch of desperate men, and b) an uncomfortable environment for men, because to some extent it seems to justify men doing more and more to get the attention of women, often at the cost of women being made to feel uncomfortable. (And many men in EA do not want women to feel uncomfortable!)
Let's zoom out a bit. To me, it's not that important that everyone in EA gets a match. I find the gender imbalance concerning for lots of reasons, but ‘a lack of women for men to match with’ is not on my list of concern... (read more)
Does anyone have data on retention rates in EA by age and gender? This comment makes me wonder if the effects of a hostile environment for young women would be demonstrated in that data.
Are men more likely to attend EA London events? Attendance data, 2016-2018.
Sorry if this is uncharitable, but this sentence rubs me the wrong way. It reads to me like "hey people who I might have harassed, it would be good for me if you talked to me".
I think the priority here should not be what YOU benefit from.
You may be right, but FWIW, I read that sentence as, "I think I might understand a lot more and be able to update my behaviour in a more appropriate way if we have the benefit of the back-and-forth of a conversation, but of course I'm also open to anonymous feedback if that's what you prefer." (Versus him coming from a place of something like, "I'd personally feel most comfortable with a conversation.")
Yeah, I agree with that, and I'm really glad how much Owen expresses he's keen to work on himself.
I'm not sure my anger is appropriate here, but I've been in similar situations as this woman. If one of these people asked me for a conversation about their behaviour, I imagine being impressed/glad by them wanting to change but also feeling a bit like, 'You already made me feel shitty, and now it's my job to make sure you don't do this again?'.
I think this is especially because the quoted sentence does not acknowledge the person much - even an addition of something like
'If there’s anyone else whom I’ve ever made feel uncomfortable or pressured <<I'm deeply sorry and regretful this happened. I would like to make sure I never put anyone in that position again.>>"
would have made me feel less bad about the phrasing.
Thanks Laura, I agree. It feels that whenever these incidents are brought to light, women must still take on a large part of the work in educating men on why/how their behaviour was bad. It is exhausting.
Hey everyone,
Note that there's also a statement from EV UK board, and there is some discussion in the comments there. We suggest centralizing the discussion there if you think a comment could be written on either post.
Edit: unpinning this comment because there are now several independent conversation threads on the two posts, with little overlap
Another mod here. We think that discussion has not centralized there. That's ok — there are different flavors of conversation it kind of makes sense to have on these different posts. We've unpinned this comment.
I sense there is a lurking disagreement about whether what Owen did was clumsy or really bad and I guess that will make a lot of this pretty hard to discuss.
My take is the action is quite bad, though its origins were in clumsiness. But people not intending to do harm can still do quite bad things. I have two theories as to what Owen even meant, one of which is much worse than the other, but both still result in the action itself being quite bad.
One version is, Owen felt attracted to this women, her presence caused him to want to masturbate, and so his sharing this information meant (at least to him) "I am very sexually attracted to you and cannot treat you 'normally' until I have masturbated." This is truly appalling behavior, though I can understand why someone who is socially obtuse about these things might not realize the extent of its harm/its appalling nature. It's just this whole implication of "Frequently, I do not think of you in terms of your accomplishments or personality, but rather your looks and body. I indulge in my sexualization and objectification of you and am making little attempt to remedy that. I want you to know that I think of you sexually, and I will leave and think about your body as I go engage in this sexual act. Only after this will I be able to think of you as a full, fully fleshed out person with valu... (read more)
Do you think one can feel sexually aroused by a person while at the same time not objectifying that person / not reducing the person to their body / while thinking of them as a full person with value? Am surprised you seem to suggest this is not a possibility here, seems somewhat more plausible to me.
Thanks a lot for the elaboration, I appreciate that!
I don't have time to read into the literature right now, just very quickly responding to give you some impression of my thoughts and points of potential disagreements (which I haven't reflected on too much yet, so really interested in your responses):
- I spontaneously weigh the evidence of fMRI recordings of "objectification" very litte (my background is in cogsci and I worked a little with fMRI, though far from having any expertise, just general impressions of fMRI data being really hard to usefully connect to interesting psychological phenomena), but I agree there's definitely a "there" there where women's physical features are generally much more central in terms of what men find sexually attractive than for men's sexual attractiveness to women.
- I would not use the term "objectification" to also include thinking of a person as a potential romantic partner. That seems to invite misunderstandings and paint things that are predominantly very beautiful (having a crush) in a problematic way.
- (Definition from Wikipedia: "In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person, as an object or a thing. It is part of dehumani
... (read more)Your Phoebe example is interesting and not something I had considered much before. :) The idea that discussion about her romantic/appearance aspects could crowd out discussion of her personality or talents would make sense if we assume that the total amount of talk about Phoebe versus the other man is the same. In practice, I suspect that if someone has a crush on Phoebe, he'll talk about her way more than the other man to his friends, including about both romantic/appearance and personality/talent attributes. One might even expect Phoebe to get an advantage relative to the other man due to this.
A number of female political commentators and celebrity female politicians are unusually attractive, and this is probably because their appearance makes people more interested in all aspects of them, including their intellectual/policy contributions. The main unfairness here would then be to crowd out the less attractive women and men whose work is of equal quality.
I feel pretty scared to say this.
I think some people might read this not in the context of this case, but in general, that you can never talk to your consenting friends about sex. That isn't the case. Many people do, and it's usually fine.
What made this bad was a repeated pattern of upsetting people, not thinking about the fact that she was alone in his house, in a foreign country and that they didn't understand one another's boundaries well. And perhaps that he had a lot of soft power in general, though I find that harder to parse.
But to those reading who aren't in those situations who have friends with whom they sometimes talk about sex, that's fine. If you feel uncertain - just ask if someone is comfortable talking about it in a way they can say no to.
I don’t think we have nearly enough infortmation to make conclusions like the ones you’re making here.
For example, we have no idea what sort of exchanges the parties had previously. We do know, from the OP, that this wasn’t a comment made to a stranger, which would be considerably worse - their relationship was established, was “unusually direct and honest”, including talking about sexual things and “oversharing”. For all we know the first person to make a sexual comment might have been the woman in question, thus setting the tone for him to make his comment. I think that would be a significant mitigating factor in how “bad” Owen’s actions were (ie could be reasonably have expected the comment he made to be in keeping with the tone of the relationship they already had).
This needn’t excuse making someone else feel uncomfortable, but the context of which we have no knowledge is hugely important in establishing just how bad an infraction this was.
hmmm
my feeling is
-in general I'm pro erring on the side of deferring to the people affected, there's likely a lot of information missing
- i feel like there's a benefit to a norm of 'if people are obeying the letter of the law/widely agreed community norms and acting in good faith we should try to make them feel assured they'll be left to their private lives and can work through their dumb mistakes on their own'
if we're deciding this merits an intervention we should decide what the community norm violated should be, because this does seem to be good faith
Since I expect some people to be a bit confused as to what exactly was the bad thing that has happened after reading this post, I think it would be great if the community health team could write a post explaining and pointing out exactly what was bad here and in other similar instances.
I think there is value in being crystal clear about what were the bad things that happened because I expect people will takeaway different things from this post.
Since noone else has, I'll try, downvote if you think this isn't worth reading. The badness is broken up into a number of different factors.
Most interactions don't lead to upset. So If we trust Owen's narrative, then he misread social cues in a way that upset his accuser by talking about masturbation when she didn't want to and so upset her. If you are a consequentialist, upsetting people is bad. If you are a deontologist, not taking time to understand boundaries such that you overstep them is bad.
If we trust his account, which I guess I do, they had talked about this kind of thing before. But she still didn't want to and she is still upset about it 5 years later. This caused harm and so was an error.
If there was nothing else at play I guess personally I think this was a bit bad. Worth sitting down and evaluating how one communicates. I think some men you know will have done something like this (though I think it was avoidable and that the costs weren't worth it). I imagine there is disagreement on his bad this is. I guess some of those reading this aren't thinking "will I talk about sex despite not wanting to" but instead "will I be as upset as this woman is. I'd like to avoid th... (read more)
I'm not sure if this is actually a point of disagreement, but just to be clear:
I think the "if there was nothing else at play" is doing a lot of work here.
My view is that choosing to offer his room and confirming this with the hiring organization first, instead of checking in with the friend first about the situation and asking her what she options she would feel most comfortable with first, while this was being arranged on the day of her flight rings serious alarm bells to me, and suggests a significant lapse in professional judgement, awareness of power dynamics and a lack of empathy to his friend (or at least poorly communicated).
I'm not excluding the scenario that she in fact was given multiple options and had a fair chance to consider these options and the opportunity to ... (read more)
Yeah as an extroverted male reading this makes me wonder if I'm supposed to be threatmodeling that I'll be promoted and gain movement power some day? Because being around for longer than someone else is informal power (?) and I'm responsible for futures in which that becomes formal power?
Everyone is confused and there's not a clear takeaway, IMO.
I don't think the only reason the women felt uncomfortable here is because of power dynamics. The power dynamics just made the situation much worse. But you should generally try to avoid making people uncomfortable, particularly in a way that touches on their membership in part of a marginalized group.
So, one way I think all men, not just those in power, should modify their behavior is to refrain from making sexual comments. Especially with people you don't know well yet. If you know someone quite well, and they seem to be making these comments themselves, and you have a level of trust and security with each other, you can be much more open with what you talk about. But for people you don't know that well, for people who haven't initiated this sort of thing themselves, just don't make sexual comments.
For the times when I have been done wrong to, I would have been really happy if the injuring party had been as reflective, genuinely self-critical and (from what I can see) steadfast in trying to do better as you are.
From what I can tell, you didn't have to "out" yourself for this. I respect the move to do this and to make amends and doing so (from what it seems) with the person you wronged. It's impressive that (from what it seems) they're keen to see things put right and giving you some support in this regard (if only fact checking this post).
I've more often felt like the younger woman in this scenario did. But the depths of your reflections Owen are leading me to think more critically about how I can be careless / flippant from my relative position of power and how that would make others feel.
Whether someone has had a big fuck up or minor infractions, I think this stuff is life long learning. There is no simple algorithm (though some guidelines, always evolving); diversity of people and emotional world's mean that it's just hard work to understand other people better, and not become complacent or over-confident when you think you're doing is well or dismissive and derisive if you're dismayed by lack of success.
This might not be true. Effective Ventures's statement on the matter says that they were informed of this by Julia Wise, so at least they knew, and it's possible that someone would have outed him more publicly had he not done so himself.
Right, I think it would have been perilous for the board not to remove Owen with a statutory inquiry by the Charity Commission already underway.
So looking at the set of polls I wrote, what would the community have had happen here? Seemingly on net we don't think that people should publicly report immediately or that behaviour like this is instant disqualification. I guess many believe Owen acted wrongly, but there is little agreement afterwards.
In short, I'm confused as to what agreed ideal behaviour was here, beyond not making this woman uncomfortable in the first place.
Also, there seems to be a big difference between the two accounts of this event. In the accusers account it is clearly awful and Owen has a lot power over her and women like her. In Owen's account they previously know one another, it's unclear why she ends up staying with him and he has little power over her job.
Seems underrated how different those are.
I would not conflate "the accuser's account" with "the account of the Times article".
My best guess is that the author heavily cherry-picked statements by the accuser and set up context to make things seem maximally scandalous. Indeed, the Times article really doesn't score highly on accuracy, and this post seems to corroborate that.
I think the perspectives might still differ a lot, but we don't know, we only have info through a highly filtered lens of the times article, which I would not treat as a reliable source about anyone's sentiments.
I'm not sure the accounts actually are that different. The only statement in the article that owen said was false was that he wasn't an official recruiter at the time. However, if we look at the statements:
This implies that while he wasn't officially a recruiter, it was reasonable for her to think that he was. It's plausible to me that he was playing the role unofficially at the time, but thought he was just helping out friends with recommendations. He did confirm that he "suggested her as a candidate" and had "signficant power".
I think some of the context was flattened in the editing of the times article, but I don't see any contradictions between the accounts.
I agree this definitely has to happen if Julia became aware of more cases through further complaints or through an investigation unearthing other things that are at least 50% as bad as the incident described by Owen.
However, if these "other cases" were just Owen going through his memory of any similar interactions and applying what he learned from the staying-at-his-house incident and then scrupulously listing every interaction where, in retrospect, he cannot be 100% confident that he didn't make someone uncomfortable (and regrets the way he expressed interest), then it's a bit different. (In that case, removing him from the board doesn't seem mandatory to me, but I also don't find it unreasonable.)
Edit: And this seems like the interpretation you'd arrive at if you believe Owen's account. I'm quoting it here for context:
... (read more)Perhaps people who pushed back or even attacked the Time article should have some reflection?
If anything this post supports some of the criticism – the account in the TIME article suggests OCB was responsible for finding promising students and placing then in high-profile jobs (neither of which was the case). It makes no mention of the fact he and the accuser were seemingly already friends with an "unusually direct and honest" relationship (a statement the accuser presumably agrees with, as she's had a chance to vet this post). And that once he learned he had overstepped he was horrified and sought to make amends.
In my mind that's a lot of important context that was elided, and suggests an awkward misstep rather than something more sinister.
A lot of the criticism went way beyond "Time omitted some important context". In this highly upvoted post, the OP states that:
Well now we have the full picture for at least one of the accusations, and we have found out that, according to the accused:
- The accuser was entirely honest in her account. They may have made a slight mistake in thinking his role of recommending people for jobs was official at the time, but Owen states that this was entirely reasonable to think. It sounds like he was already doing some of it unofficially.
- The man in question did do something wrong, self-admittedly. He was attracted to this women and pushed boundaries with her in a way that made her feel pressured and uncomfortable. He was not mindful of the significant power imbalances in play that made it difficult for her to push back on unwanted behaviour.
- Self-admittedly, the culture of EA played a contributing factor in Owen's wrongdoing. This is very important, as it implies that there areas where EA could easily improve to prevent this occurri
... (read more)I guess I'd just say that the missing context from the TIME article seems hugely important in understanding exactly how much of a boundary/norm violation this event was.
Not that I endorse it, but Aella's position that in 80% of the anecdotes the accused did nothing wrong is not incompatible with this anecdote being (mostly) accurate.
Adding to your points, I think the Time article is very likely understating (I think by a significant margin) the amount of sexual harassment or otherwise unwanted male advances. For example, there was only one case about Owen in the article but he himself admits (see below quote) there were at least 4 other occasions where his actions might have been misguided / overstepped the mark.
Generally, I think we can expect to see some "survivorship bias" e.g. reporters who want to uncover instances of sexual harassment might struggle because people who have faced these experiences might never engage properly with the EA community. For example, say someone new attends an EA event and faces some level of misogyny by male attendees - they will just never attend an EA event again. So of course an article about reported cases will miss a... (read more)
The post does not say that they actually had a unusually direct and honest relationship, but merely that OCB perceived things that way at the time:
'We had what I perceived as a preexisting friendship where we were experimenting with being unusually direct and honest (/“edgy”)'
[hastily written]
Never ever would I have guessed this. You were living proof to me that at least some, if not many, decent
menpeople exist. I am completely devastated.EA has been dying. But for me, this is the ultimate death blow.
[Edit: Comment was modified to no longer refer to a specific demographic group.]
How do you define "decent"?
I'm a straight guy, and I grew up in an era of pre-#metoo, sex-positive feminism. The doctrine of the day was "men and women are pretty much the same in every way and it's sexist to claim otherwise". "Slut shaming is bad, women can be just as horny as men, wanting women to be chaste and pure is patriarchical and bad, trying to give women special protection from harm is benevolent sexism and therefore bad, treating people the same regardless of their gender is good and desirable."
An anecdote from this era of feminism -- I once read a woman claim something like: if a man hears a new dirty joke, and he tells it to his male friends but not his female friends, that's sexism.
I figured: "OK, well if men and women are pretty much the same in every way, and treating women as delicate flowers is sexist and bad, that means I can model women's dating preferences by just putting myself in their shoes and asking myself how I would feel if I was in their situation. Women are just people, after all!"
Obviously, at a certain point I figured out that this was a bad heuristic. I believe I've technically been the victim of sexual assault (rot13'd: n qehax thl ng n cnegl t... (read more)
I think it can be somewhat useful to talk explicitly about factors likely to make flirting welcome or unwelcome. But a problem I have with this is that it's wrong to interact with people based on averages, basically. If 70% of EA women like or dislike being flirted with in X way, what do you do? Do the 30% minority just have to put up with discomfort (or, less seriously, a lack of enjoyable flirting)? Are you 70% flirtatious (pleasing no-one fully)?
I think the problem with checklists is that fundamentally, negotiating social interactions so that everyone is happy and comfortable, and flirting and appropriate escalation, are social skills. And social skills tend to be fuzzy and involve very different types of thinking than analysis, or rule-following. So when people throw their hands up in despair, or ask for explicit rules, it feels a bit like they're getting annoyed that they can't just throw their technical skills at a social-skills problem. (Written as someone who finds some social skills hard, including in the areas of flirting/romance)
But most professional contexts outside of EA have more explicit norms/rules than EA does. Those professional cultures presumably developed those more explicit norms/rules for a reason (most likely learning from experience). So I think one has to be careful with assumptions about why people want clearer rules. Maybe, for instance, they don't trust other people's social skills.
I agree this is a problem, but I don't think we solve this problem by ignoring it.
Right now men are choosing to flirt with women/not flirt with women based on some mishmash of: past experiences, flirting intuitions, cultural conditioning, etc. My claim isn't that the approach I suggested is perfect. My claim is that it's likely an improvement on this baseline.
I'd suggest getting the community health team to analyze the survey results and generate some guidelines that are acceptable to, say, 95% of women surveyed. Publish the guidelines and say "if you don't like the guidelines, we recommend you avoid EA events".
I think if EA has a major problem with sexual harassment, an approach like this could be really effective. On the other hand, if sexual harassment is not actually much of a problem in EA, we may as well continue with the current appro... (read more)
I'm commenting as a moderator right now.
I'm really sorry that you're feeling this way. I think a lot of us have strong emotions about this news and don't know how to process it. Given that you wrote "[hastily written]," I assume that this comment is helping you process the news.
At the same time, I think it's important for us to not slip away from our norms on the Forum, which include making sure the space is welcoming to different groups of people, including men. There are a few different ways to interpret the part of your comment that's about men. Unfortunately, I think right now it's not clear whether you're saying that "there are no decent men" (which would be norm-violating). (If you replace "men" with a different demographic group, you clearly see that the statement is not acceptable. This test doesn't always work — sometimes there's a long history of stereotype or power that makes statements about a demographic group much worse than the same statement about a different demographic group, but I think it's a useful signal here.)
So it might be worth clarifying what you mean in the comment. In the future, please avoid sweeping statements about demographic groups.
Thank you Lizka. You are making a good point and I have edited the comment above to no longer refer to a specific demographic group.
I would not want anyone to get the impression that Owen's poor behaviour is merely a strong negative update on men. It is a strong negative update on the decency of everybody.
(Though I would expect women to show a lack of decency in slightly different ways than men.)
I still expect some decent people to exist. I just now think there are even more rare than I previously thought.
Fwiw, my read of Denise's comment was more like "My previous impression of Owen was that he was an outstanding example of what a decent man should look like, and thus this news is especially disappointing and devastating", rather than something like "Owen was the last decent man, and this shows that there are no decent men".
Or: "learning of this significantly updated my assessment of the number of decent men downward, especially in EA."
As a man, I wasn't offended in light of the circumstances of the statement (though I don't speak for all men).
Although I'm not endorsing the wording, the message that Owen's behavior harmed people other than those directly involved, and eroded community trust in multiple ways, is an important message for him and others to hear.
However, I completely understand why Lizka wrote the mod comment and think it was a balanced comment.
This was also my interpretation, though I can imagine others interpreting it differently.
I would also like to clarify that I strongly disagreed (but didn't downvote) Denise's post strictly in response to the final paragraph, to express something like "Let's not overreact to recent events. EA has accomplished great things and will likely recover from these setbacks. And I hope you don't leave EA, Denise!" This strikes me as a case where the meaning of the disagree vote count is particularly opaque, so it seemed worth adding this clarification.
I appreciate Denise's hastily written comment. As others have noted, 'feelings' are missing from this thread - strong feelings that many people (women) are feeling. Her reactive comment gives us a good glimpse into the harm being felt, even if it's hyperbolic .
I assume EAs think I'm speaking a bit sharply here? These discussions are hard because EAs often place a very high value on polite/unemotional discourse, whereas non-EAs often place a higher value on discourse that won't cause harms to groups/people and think that sharper or more emotional discourse can sometimes be an appropriate response (or even the only appropriate response) in such cases.
Just gonna flag that I feel like -100 agreement for someone being sad feels weird to me. Sure I guess you can disagree that it's the deathblow of EA, but I dunno, just feels a bit much. Not telling anyone off, or trying to create some complex social rule, but maybe it should be % or something.
I imagine that most of the disagreement is with (implied, but not stated) conditional "that Owen did this means that decent men don't exist".
I think there are couple of discussions happening here at once:
Re: circling/radical honesty
I remember being on a circling retreat a number of years ago (indeed, I think it was one Owen was on/ CEA people did sometime Nov/Dec 2019) and I remember, for whatever dumb stupid reason my system 1 freaked the fuck out at the instructor and said "do not trust this person"
and you can hang as many 'radical honesty' signs on the door as you want, it is very difficult to tell someone 'hey for whatever dumb reason my gut is freaking the fuck out at you, probably not anything personal' when you feel like this
and this did not help with my system 1 flipping out, it just felt like there were uncomfortable truths other people could tell and I couldn't tell uncomfortable truths back
apparently the guy also hosts these things but more for sexuality? I guess this seems like a reasonable idea in theory given what circling is about but you'd certainly need to make explicitly sure feelings like these are welcome/encouraged? like even when stuff goes well dealing with anxiety around this is an important cost of doing business. (I don't feel reassured that this was likely to be the case, but I may be mistaken)
not saying circling/radical honesty is bad, i do see a lot of value in these practices
just
be careful with this shit mk.
This seems really unrelated to Owen, but because I saw this, I'd flag I also went to a circling retreat in Oxford around that time, it might have been the same one.
I found to be personally fairly uninteresting, and got weird vibes from the instructor. In a discussion that Friday (the first day), he mentioned a lot of metamodernism stuff including a lot of stuff by Ken Wiber. Spirituality vibes similar to what I know of some communities in the Bay.
I did some online searching that evening, and found some reports of sexual harassment and similar around the upper parts of Circling Europe.
My general impression is something like, "Issues of sexual harassment and similar are just endemic in alternative communities."
I know lots of other people I respect have gotten valuable things from circling and similar circling retreats. I've also done a bit of circling without the official mediators and found it to be mostly fine.
I just attended on the first day, and decided not to join for the next two. (That said, in fairness, I find incredibly few activities better than my best non-retreat activities, so this itself isn't saying much).
At the one I was at, maybe 20% of the group seemed like it was EAs, I don't remember specifically.
Yeah, I've never done circling, but it wouldn't surprise me if your system-1 was spot on (though I guess this wasn't the point of your comment – you're more commenting on double standards of how people reacted to your system-1 freaking out).
I believe anyone who pitches people to participate in circling with others who are pretty much strangers to them (and not super-carefully-vetted) and applies implicit peer pressure and doesn't warn them that this sort of thing can be psychologically risky and unsafe, is either dangerously clueless or a bad actor.
(I'm mainly noting the potential for abuse. I have no reason to believe that the majority of people who run these things in EA and adjacent spaces are doing things irresponsibly.)
For what it's worth, I live in the Bay Area, where there are large spirituality communities and surprisingly related "professional development" communities. These practices seem surprisingly normal in these communities.
I think that the leaders of these groups are typically very overconfident in their approaches, are a bit desperate to sell them, and not very epistemically sophisticated, so very rarely give adequate warnings and help.
Honesty, never-mind radical openness, is usually impossible if one party is dependent on the other. This is honestly one reason I hate how intensely hierarchical the EA community is. Hierarchy destroys openness.
Can you explain how the EA community is intensely hierarchical? From what I've seen, EA tends to have a relatively flat orginazational structure and very high tolerance for contradicting or questioning authority figures, but maybe others have had different experiences with this than I have.
I think thats the public image but isn't how things actually work internally. Id really recommend reading this comment by Buck about how "You've also made the (IMO broadly correct) point that a lot of EA organizations are led and influenced by a pretty tightly knit group of people who consider themselves allies". Notably the post is pretty explicit that any proposed changes should be geared toward getting this small group onboard.
It is less public (at this point) but some of the core EAs have definitely been capricious in terms of who they want to receive any kind of support or endorsement. And they feel quite willing to do this without any community buy in.
Okay so, if you'll bear with me a moment, your comment has actually convinced me that EA is in fact not hierarchical, but I do agree with your intended point.
Buck's comment, and the parent post by ConcernedEAs, point out that there's a small, tightly-knit group that's involved in many of the core EA organizations, who all know each other and collectively influence a lot of funding outcomes.
This is not the same thing as a hierarchy. There's no middle management, no corporate ladder you have to climb, and (as far as I've seen) no office politics you have to wade through before you can reach the top of an organization or receive your grant funding. EA is far less hierarchical than anything similar you could compare it to, such as 501(c)(3)s, academia, government, or for-profit corporations. It's more like a loose collection of 100 startups.
But the point I think you are making when you (and other comments I've seen) call it hierarchical is that this small group of influential people have a lot of power, and if most of your professional life is within EA, your outcomes are dependent on them and their decisions.
I think there is an aspect in which EA does really well with this: if you hav... (read more)
Seems like you’re confusing hierarchy with ‘formal corporate hierarchy.’ There is what I would call an informal hierarchy in EA. Most of your post seems to agree with that so frankly I’m a bit confused as to your point?
One of the reasons this type of setup is so problematic is that informal hierarchies pretend to be open while secretly keeping power tight. In that way it can be far worse than other organizations you list.
My confusion here is not so much this event, but the other things that have happened in the last 5 years. I feel like if I upset someone and was pretty high up in EA I would be more cautious than to let bad stuff happen another 3 more times in the next 5 years.
From what you describe, it sounds to me like you didn't really express truths when they were uncomfortable.
The truth was that you felt shame. It's easier to be edgy and say "I have to masturbate before I see you" than to say "I feel ashamed of the attraction I have for you. I think I should masturbate so that I don't get aroused by your presence before seeing you.". Saying "I feel ashamed of th... (read more)
(Speaking in a private capacity) Fwiw, I suspect that >90% of the worlds in which I found the masturbation comment uncomfortable, I would have found your suggested comment uncomfortable.
I don't know what the vibe of the situation was here, but speaking to the more general case: in my experience, one thing about vulnerability is that if someone comes off as needy (which can be easy to do by accident), it can amplify other discomforts, because then I'm being put in a position of power or control over this person's shame or other bad feelings, so then I feel like it's on me to fix their bad feelings.
I would like to ask for some of your perceptions of the relative importance of the different problems that coincided here. I see three problems with the situation (am I missing some?):
No. 1 seems easy to avoid. I hardly ever talk about such private things. Generally the topic of "Things to do with sex" seems relatively sharply defined to me, so that I don't find it challenging to avoid it categorically.
The other two seem like things I could more easily get wrong, so I find it disconcerting how e... (read more)
I think offering people couchsurfing is good and nice, but you should do it before they arrive.
I basically think the masturbation comment is bad and was made especially bad by the other things. I think it's not exactly additive or multiplicative but that the three of them together created a Situation that was worse than either of them individually. The masturbation comment disturbed her, AND because she was staying at his house she couldn't easily remove herself from the disturbing situation, AND because he was powerful it was hard for her either to ask to be re-accommodated or to say "eww, don't make gross comments like that".
Poll:
People who have behaved like this should publicly apologise as close to the time as possible.
Agreevote to agree. I don't necessarily endorse this but I think it's valuable for us to know what we think on stuff like this - I bet we disagree a surprising amount.
I actually endorse the idea of polls on this but don’t want to make one. Why? I’m in several text and real life conversations with women right now and none of them are commenting here because we’re sad and annoyed and frustrated. So they’re not voting.
Poll:
There should be a way for people who have behaved like this to hold community roles afterwards if they can meet some standard.
Agreevote to agree. I don't necessarily endorse this
Some of you should write other polls in this post, so we can figure out what we think. I'm not gonna write them, but I suggest women in EA might want to figure out what they think, because again, I sense a broad set of views and many people who don't want to comment, but might agree/disagree.
I struggle with seeing polls like this as being a valid source of information that change my beliefs because we have no way of knowing who is actually voting and whether or not they are trolls.
I think you're right to be cautious, although most of the other sources of information I could think of have some significant flaws of some sort as well. So it's probably best to look for consensus from several different information flows that don't have too many overlapping weaknesses.
Also they really exploit the forum's karma system. Should we strong vote for strong agree? If so, mine would be worth about 3x the average forum user's. Even if I only 'weak' vote, it automatically gives +/-2 to the karma score now.
Even if sock puppet accounts do not currently influence votes, the more the EA community will use such polls to decide on things the more likely such influence will become.
I think the amount of press EA has gotten lately makes it more likely for there to be trolls but I could be wrong.
Good point. Maybe the forum could introduce up- and downvoting restrictions until a new account has reached a few milestones, like being active for more than a month and adding comments with overall positive upvotes. This is how I remember StackOverflow handling this.
We have at least some basic tools to detect account-creation and mass-voting. I don't think the voting system is perfect, but at least on LW I would notice if someone was creating multiple accounts to vote, as I have noticed multiple times in the past.
Poll:
What Owen did was (given the best of our knowledge) wrong and very serious.
Agreevote to agree. I don't necessarily endorse this
Here are some reasons to downvote this poll and all the other polls (I have not yet done this). Some people feel very frightened and stressed etc, and for them, it is not yet the time to engage with these polls.
In addition, it feels wrong that justice is ruled by a weird anonymous voting procedure which does not include a bunch of deliberation (and that does not include more people that are specialised in this problem) . EA is not a democratic organisation (for good or bad reasons) - ultimately, this is not how EVF makes decisions. Suppose, someone did X (X is clearly morally wrong), a community does a vote, and more than 50% think it is acceptable, that does not mean the behaviour is acceptable (or even if 80% agree).
The EVF board hired an external group to look into this issue (see their announcement post)- I don't understand why you don't first trust them (you can still disagree if they conclude).
Thanks for saying why you disagree.
Perhaps, though by that argument maybe we shouldn't have long and complex arguments either. We are already engaging in discussion while upset and stressed. What I would like is for us at least to be able to see some of the landscape.
I don't think this suggests justice, I think it allows us to see what each other think.
It's not that I don't trust the external group - it's that I am interested in what we all think and feel.
Some personal thoughts about the the polls generally - apologies in advance if this comes across confrontational, as I know you are well-intentioned! Also to be clear, I enjoyed and appreciated what you did with the cluster poll, as they provided new information RE: clusters - I'm referring mainly to comment polls like this.[1]
I understand your desire and goals RE: polling, but I personally find many of the polls to be of unclear value, and it often clogs up the comment sections (even if they are downvoted to the bottom, as this is, I often stay updated by looking at "recent discussion" on the front page).
I hear that you are interested in what we all think and feel - I am too! But I don't know if the polls actually answer this, or at least I find it difficult to meaningfully update on them.
I'd much rather just see more discussion on the actual question being polled, because then people provide their reasoning. In this case, even if those who aren't on the forum or aren't in a position to comment or engage, I can see if I agree with the reasoning myself, and update more strongly on... (read more)
Quick thoughts:
- Thank you for raising this. I appreciate pushback.
- I don't think this issue is being brigaded. If it were we'd see a load of chat on twitter. I think that explains too much. I just would bet it isn't the case. Some people are making new burners but I'd guess that's it.
- My top level comment is in positive karma. Just as you don't like the polls, many people do. In fact I've received 2-3 messages to that end. What you and those who agree with you are doing is expressing a preference. Others have different preferences. And the evidence suggests that your preference is not the overwhelming majority.
- I would like to be better and more gracious at doing this. But I think that it provides information on balance. Again, as the karma shows, people agree.
- I like polls sure, and martyrdom, but also feel scared and tired and like the truth is getting ignored because it's impolitic. The truth seems to be that people have more complex views on this than is comfortable, in many directions.
- I am deeply confused by the idea that we want to make comments and look at the voting (which we do, people regularly comment on it) but that trying to establish simple ideas is
... (read more)Alternative possibility: Assuming that immediate removal was not warranted (but not taking a position on that either way), Owen should have been given a stern warning that (1) any future incidents would warrant removal, and (2) for any future reports, the reporter would get the benefit of the doubt.
(Agreevote to agree/disagree: I'm not committing to a position, mainly pointing out that there are options between removal and doing very little.)
Sure but in this case, what is the issue with what happened? I guess maybe there were other smaller behaviours afterwards?
I don't feel comfortable doing it here, but on another topic I'd attempt to write a concensus statement of what parts we all agree with and what we think should have happened. Feels like that might be a useful process.