Women and Effective Altruism

One of my objections is similar to benjamincosman's — people not taking no for an answer in romantic/sexual contexts is a problem I've seen in people of all ages, races, cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic status, social status, and points on the autism spectrum. It was a big problem at both my urban public high school and my elite private college.

Yes power differentials make it worse, yes it's more of a problem in an environment as gender-imbalanced as EA or the wider Bay Area tech scene, and yes people who are striving to be moral should hold themselves to a higher standard. But trying to use the existence of these problems as an indictment of the community proves too much — I don't know of any community of any kind that successfully avoids them.

I am not opposed to an honest discussion of the gender issues in EA or rationality or the Bay Area as a whole or whatever other scene. I'm a woman and I care about this. But this post completely fails at "Aim to explain, not persuade". It uses inflammatory rhetoric, makes sweeping generalizations like "EA/rationalism and redpill fit like yin and yang", and lumps polyamory in with the problems in an apparent attempt to score points, when polyamory is something that many people practice in a way that's healthy, happy, and consensual for all parties involved.

I also take issue with the specific line

There are also upsides [to accepting the sexual advances of men in power], as reported by CoinDesk on Caroline Ellison.

This reads to me like you're implying that Caroline only got into a position of power because she was sleeping with Sam? That's internalized misogyny if I've ever heard it. Whatever her recent actions may have been, Caroline is an extremely smart person who was a successful trader at Jane Street before ever joining Alameda. When I heard she had become CEO, that made sense to me based on her experience, intelligence, and seniority at the company.

Maybe I am just feeling frustrated about everything lately and am taking it out on you, but come on. If you want people on LessWrong to respect what you're saying, at least try to write with epistemic honesty, instead of whatever this is.

EA is an optimization of altruism with “suboptimal” human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it

I so utterly disagree with this statement. Indeed I think one can almost summarize EA as the version of altruism that's been optimized for morality, instead of solely empathy (though it includes that too!).

I downvoted, not because I necessarily thought the topic was bad, but because I'd kinda prefer "EA community stuff" to live on the EA Forum (where I see you also posted). I realize the line between rationalist community and EA community is blurry sometimes, and you maybe could have written a similar post about rationalist communities. But I think there are some subtle distinctions in norms and culture that are better to not blur together more.

I am not at all doubting your unpleasant experiences with some EA men. But when I read this, one thing I wonder is how much this is actually correlated with EA, vs just being a 'some men everywhere are jerks' thing? (I am not at all condoning being a jerk - saying it might be common does not mean I'm also saying it's ok!) But e.g. I would not at all be surprised to find there are (to pick some arbitrary groups) some female doctors writing on their doctor forum that

From experience it appears that, a ‘no’ once said is not enough for many male doctors.

and that there are female chess players writing on their chess forum that

So how do these men find sexual novelty? Chess meet ups of course.

I do agree that the polyamory thing is definitely correlated with EA, but I'm not actually sure it's very relevant here? E.g. would it be any better if the jerks aggressively propositioning you were serial monogamist jerks rather than poly jerks?

To be clear though, I certainly don't have any evidence that it's not an EA-specific problem; I am legitimately asking for your (and others') thoughts on this.

It was good that this post was written and seen.

I also agree with some of the comments that it wasn't up to usual EA/LessWrong standards. But those standards could be used as excuses to downvote uncomfortable topics. I'd like to see a well-crafted women in EA post, and see whether it gets downvoted or not.

EA needs to implement a stricter code of conduct, in line with Title IX, and align on this code in EA group houses / social events/ communities. They also need better processes for resolving and reporting sexual misconduct incidents - Julia Wise’s work is a beginning but is nearly not enough. Libertarian style community mediation of sexual assault cases common in EA communities need to be dumped in favour of police intervention because it leads to gross mismanagement such as this or this.

I am confused about the meaning of this paragraph. The last sentence sounds to me like a suggestion to use professional intervention (with proper training and legal power), instead of an ad-hoc solution designed by the community. Yet the first sentence sounds like a call to design such ad-hoc solution.

The epistemic standard for LW posts is higher than this. The post doesn't adhere to any of the default comment guidelines:

• Aim to explain, not persuade
• Try to offer concrete models and predictions
• If you disagree, try getting curious about what your partner is thinking
• Don't be afraid to say 'oops' and change your mind

Separately, to repost my comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] from another thread which was cross-posted from the EA forum:

I think the main issue here is that Less Wrong is not Effective Altruism, and that many (at a guess, most) LW members are not affiliated with EA or don't consider themselves EAs. So from that perspective, while this post makes sense in the EA forum, it makes relatively little sense on LW, and to me looks roughly like being asked to endorse or disavow some politician X. (And if I extend the analogy, it's inevitably about a US politician even though I live in another country.)

So this specific EA forum post is just a poor fit for reposting on LW without a complete rewrite.

In this particular case, the post does mention "LessWrong style jedi mindtricks", but as it's fundamentally confused about what EA is ("Akin to how EA is an optimization of altruism with “suboptimal” human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it" - what is it even supposed to mean to have altruism without morality?), I'm very skeptical that it accurately attributes whatever harm was done to LW content.

And separately, I'm just tired of the pattern of posts accusing community X of having a sexism/racism/whatever problem, without making the slightest effort to argue that community X does in fact worse on those dimensions than whatever an appropriate reference class would be.

Once again, if there's a version of this post that's epistemically sound and doesn't require me to trust the author's accusations on blind faith, I'd be interested to read that.

strong upvote: this seems like a great post on a difficult topic that a lot of people are going to feel a little bit touchy about and therefore downvote unnecessarily, I am personally enthusiastic about the idea of poly being a thing near my social circles, but I also agree that there are a lot of men and women who are not great at boundaries and who push on boundaries too much, [edit: convinced by replies that this clause is wrong: and who assume that dating is ok in professional contexts]. I suspect that a fair portion of them are intentionally agentic about pushing on boundaries and another larger portion of them are unaware of how boundaries normally work; there have been previous reports of people having agentically bad behavior sexually.

however, I would contest the claim that police are the best solution to this; they have a bad track record of being helpful to communities. while I would not completely write them off as useless, I would say that they have a track record of simply not doing much and taking a lot of effort to get them to not do much. in this respect I would not say the police are that different from any other form of community safety group, other than the fact that they also carry weapons and so invoking them means inviting people who are used to being on the wrong end of weapons to try to deal with a sensitive situation.

EA needs to implement a stricter code of conduct, in line with Title IX, and align on this code in EA group houses / social events/ communities. They also need better processes for resolving and reporting sexual misconduct incidents - Julia Wise’s work is a beginning but is nearly not enough. Libertarian style community mediation of sexual assault cases common in EA communities need to be dumped in favour of police intervention because it leads to gross mismanagement such as this or this. 

The post was mostly plausible until this part. 
 

This seems like advocating for establishing an entire bureaucratic system to regulate behaviour?

I’m not part of the EA scene and I do agree there are significant numbers of associated shady folks, with that estimation likely increasing for everyone, given recent events. 

Yet this proposal seems to be inviting even more moral hazards?