I just found this post from August 2022, which I found super helpful!

Especially the appendix is useful. In it, Julia Wise lists the 19 cases that they worked on the previous 12 months. That was elucidating and reassuring to me. I had expected there to be hundreds of cases, maybe about one per day, and sweeping bans in many or most of them. In fact there are only those 19, and even so the community health team did not ban people in a number of unclear or minor instances. 

This is not to say that I pin all my ethics on CEA, but the community health team is identifiable and approachable, so that their opinions, priorities, and behaviors are more legible than normal.

Excellent, done!

I wonder if it might help you to talk to someone from Community Health and ask them to tell you (anonymized) stories about the sort of things that led them to ban people from conferences, or enact other penalties.

Yes, that’d be great! Or better yet a public summary of all the clusters of bad behavior so that it’s useful for others too, and I don’t need to deanonymize myself.

fwiw tho, please don't mask your excitedness - I really don't think people will interpret that as flirtatious by itself

Thanks for the encouragement! :-D

Maybe you'll say 'that won't help me, because even if I can avoid those specific actions, I won't know the rules that they violated'. Maybe CH can tell you what rule or heuristic was violated too!

Depends! Your reply to a previous comment of mine was useful in that regard, and I’ve also asked other people. Once I notice that I don’t understand some particular thing, it’s much easier to ask questions about it than it is now when the question basically is, “Is there something I don’t know yet?” I’m sort of like a Stuart Russell kind of AI that may not know things about the world but is eager to get and update on feedback on seemingly great plans, ideally before it implements them.

If it would help, I'm happy for you to message me and ask me questions about stuff like this, no question too silly

Oooh! Thank you!

My interest is more in writing down rules that already exist. So that shouldn’t change anything about the rules except that there’s a place where one can check what they are.

This ties in with:

Believing that your values and behavior associated with your culture and class are the only right ones and everybody should know, understand and follow them, is fundamentally different from assertively vocalizing your boundaries and needs.  The second is a great, mature behavior. The first feels a bit elitist, ignorant and has nothing to do with safety, equality and being inclusive.

It’s basically a third alternative. Not assuming that all rules are universally known, not figuring out what the boundaries are on a case-by-case, person-by-person basis, but collaboratively writing down some set of rules that has already emerged. I imagine (hope) almost all of them will be super obvious so that we don’t need to memorize them.

Could you please tell if  being able to ask somebody designated what actual social rules are in case you have any doubts would help? 

That’d be amazing! That could also be a public forum that allows for anonymous questions, so there isn’t so much of a burden on one person to answer everything objectively. A single person will probably sometimes have trouble telling how widely shared their personal preferences are. 

Could you please let me know why would you perceive them as that harsh?

Hmm, I don’t have any experience with their process, so I think I made wrong assumptions about it. When I went to my first EAG conference (as opposed to EAGx), I thought that a different blacklist applied and so was afraid that I might already be banned without knowing it, maybe in analogy with the US no-flight list. Turns out I wasn’t. I’m probably just unusually anxious about such things.

From some of the posts in the last couple of weeks I’ve rather gotten the impression that the community health team always or usually (?) talks to the perpetrator before banning them, so that it would’ve been unlikely for me to be banned without knowing about it. (Plus, the same list probably applies to both EAGs and EAGxs.) 

Then again, even when I’m given a chance to explain and apologize, there are still the related problems that (1) some of the harm has been done, i.e. I scared someone, (2) I can’t really prove my intentions, and (3) even if I’m believed that my intentions were harmless, it’s complicated to understand what that really changes. For me it usually makes a big difference whether someone does something intentionally or not, but that varies a lot even among my friends. They might forgive me on a cerebral level but still retain the same new fear response on an intuitive level.

I think in my comment I didn’t mean to put so much focus on the community health team and their standards… They’re in a good position to describe the ways in which they make their decisions because they have a lot of records to draw on at this point. So maybe it would be easier for them to observe social rules in EA than for any other individual. Then again a public forum could work too.

That makes me wonder, maybe I can infer from the absence (?) of public complaints about people’s appearance on the EA Forum that it’s very hard to do something wrong in that area in the EA context. Or maybe it just so happens that it’s not acceptable to complain about someone’s appearance because that’s an outgroup thing to do, but deep down it still disturbs people, and so they’re more likely to seemingly overreact to something else the visually-weird person does because they’ve long formed a comprehensive model of them being weird and have just been waiting for signals of weirdness that it’s okay to verbalize? Or social norms around what it’s okay to complain about might change, and then a long record of weird appearance might surface all at once?

Perhaps such a forum for social norms should be wholly anonymous so that people are encouraged to also report on negative gut reactions that they have when it’s not, at the time, acceptable to voice them?

Thank you so much for bringing in a non-neurotypical perspective. 

What is particularly important for me – and perhaps others who are similarly insecure about their social skills – is some sort of reassurance that I will not traumatize someone, get banned from conferences, and be asked to leave the community so long as I stick to some known rules. 

I don’t even care much what the rules are. You’re all smart and considerate and will come up with good rules. I’m in a privileged position here with my particular preference ordering (e.g., little interest in casual sex), so I can see that that’s different for others. My primary need is for “legal clarity” as they say. Hopefully I’m at least not the only one with that preference ordering.

All the rules that have been discussed – not initiating flirt at conferences, not initiating flirt if organizing some event, not talking about sex in the context of any EA functions, not offering couchsurfing if there is a risk that the other will perceive the power differential as greater than in the average couchsurfing situation (opinions seem to vary here), etc. – all seem fine to me and I can just adopt them all preemptively in case they catch on. I have so much shame around sex anyway that it’ll take weeks or months of getting to know me before I’ll feel safe enough to touch on the topic. None of this will even have any counterfactual effect on my behavior. I already don’t do those things.

But I’m worried that these rules are incomplete, i.e. that there are plenty of rules that remain unspecified. For all of the above rules there was a time when I had never heard of them. By extension, there are probably all sorts of unwritten rules that I’m still oblivious of. E.g., I had filed my couchsurfing experience under “elite lifehacks to make a guest feel safe,” not under “patently obvious basic decency.” For neurotypicals it seems to fall into the second category, and there are many things that I have less experience with than with couchsurfing.

Metaphorically speaking it’s a big minefield where I can see and recognize some of the mines, but where I have to assume that there are more that I cannot see because I can’t tell them from stones or because they’re too well hidden.

This is all about things that I don’t know, so it’s impossible for me to give the actual examples, and the examples I can come up with will maybe sound lame. That said, some lame examples:

1. People have told me that I often come across as excited to them. Excitedness, especially about awesome people I meet, is a core part of my personality. Especially EA is full of inspiring, exciting people, so naturally I’m particularly excited at conferences. I’m also excited about my partners, but I’m excited about maybe 80% of EAs, among them a majority I’m not otherwise attracted to. But I could imagine that excitedness is part of flirt, so that I could easily scare or hurt someone inadvertently because they may interpret it as flirt. I could try to mask really hard and try to project super mellow seriousness, but that would feel exhausting, sad, and dishonest. (But I’ll do it if necessary!) 
2. I would like to experiment with the way I look. That’s also a kind of visual communication, so I imagine similar rules apply to it as to verbal communication. For example, if someone had Hitler’s beard and hair style, they’d probably get banned from a conference. But maybe there are other hair styles or colors (I particularly like unnatural colors) that would elicit a similar reaction but that I can’t predict. I’ll go through conference photos and make sure that there are precedents for any aesthetic that I like, but explicit rules around such things would make me feel a lot (“legally”) safer.
3. Then there are also all these “dog whistles.” I think I know what to say and what not to say to express or avoid expressing group membership within EA, but there may again be unknown unknowns. Probably a super silly example, but someone might mention really liking Huel to me, and I might mention that I like eggplant, and because of the shape and because it’s not even in any narrower reference class and because I might’ve seemed “weird” to them anyway, they might interpret it as an innuendo and report me whereas it really was just a random thing I like to eat that popped into my head at that moment (maybe I had some earlier that day). (A different version of this has actually happened to me.)

These particular examples are probably silly and maybe not egregious enough to warrant a ban, but as I said, the ones that I’m afraid of are exactly the ones I can’t predict.

Maybe the reasons for past bans from conferences can serve as a guide for writing such rules. It could also become a collaborative effort with people submitting individual rules in comments and other voting on them.

I still feel “legally” safe enough to go to EA conferences, but then again I’ve also been to plenty of EA conferences already and have never run into trouble (for all I know). Someone who is new to EA and insecure about how to navigate all of this might not have those precedents to lean on and so will choose to rather stay away. I’ve certainly stayed away from countless other social things because I didn’t know whether I might get into situations there that I wouldn’t know how to navigate.

Thank you!

Above I also read some comments about offering the couchsurfing itself being bad. But I got some numbers meanwhile, and people say that offering the couchsurfing itself didn’t cross the line yet (outside some hypotheticals that may or may not have happened) but that the comment had a factor ~50x effect on the badness, which did cross the line. 

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?):

1. The masturbation comment
2. The couchsurfing
3. The power differential

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 easily this mistake could've happened to me.

Couchsurfing is something that I've offered before, regardless of the gender of the guest. It itself puts me, as the host, in a position of power because I know the place, have keys, etc., and the guest doesn't have an easy fallback option. So I'm usually quite careful with it and use a phrasing like, "By the way, if you want to crash at my place just let me know. It's quite small and messy though and there's all the construction work. You can probably find something nicer." (Typically with some links to the main EA couchsurfing sites.) That gives the guest a plausible reason so they can refuse without having to give a reason. (Or would people not do that because they'd feel it's misleading/dishonest to refuse an offer for a reason other than the implied one? Or would they understand that I’m giving the pretend reasons on purpose so it's okay?)

But apart from that my general feeling was that offering couchsurfing is good and nice and should be done? (I like to save costs for hotels if possible, so I want to pay it forward or give back to the community.) Or should there be guidelines for when offering couchsurfing is appropriate and when it is not? I mean, refusing when someone asks would be awkward, but just not offering it in the first place if the other person is newer to EA, more junior, or younger could work, apart from the fuzziness of those terms?

The third one is particularly tricky because I don't usually perceive myself as being in a position of power (except in, to me, known cases like couchsurfing), but someone else might easily perceive me as more powerful, unbeknownst to me. E.g., I can't tell people's ages very well. And a lot of EAs usually seem really impressive to me, so if more people are like me and we meet, we'll be intimidated by each other without realizing this about each other. At one point I had just given a talk, and suddenly there was someone talking to me all flustered-like. It took me a moment to realize that giving the talk must've increased my perceived power charisma, so that I tried to be extra silly to get it down again. But I could've easily missed or misattributed the flusteredness and probably have in many other cases.

Would it be acceptable to quite generally (when there is any doubt about the power dynamics, so like 80% of the time) to be like, "I'm generally concerned about power dynamics. I'm a bit intimidated by your accomplishments, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you also see yourself in an equal or higher position of social power. What is your impression? Do you think it might be more prudent to try to find another solution than the couchsurfing?" Something like that?

So in summary:

There are my questions above about guidelines for offering couchsurfing and about how to find out about the other person's perception of power.

But I'd also be interested in the relative importance of the three (or more?) factors: Is it more additive, and if so, is like 10 bad + 10 bad + 10 bad = 30 bad or 27 bad + 1 bad + 2 bad = 30 bad? Or is it multiplicative: 10 bad x 10 bad x 10 bad = 1000 bbbaaaddd or 10 bad x 2 bad x 5 bad = 100 bbbaaaddd? I mean, the sum/product is not important. I just get the feeling that there's an understanding that the masturbation comment was bad, but it's less clear to me whether the other two factors were equally bad or half as bad or much less bad.