Posting these links here for cross-reference:
- Remembering the passing of Kathy Forth (a)
- If I Can’t Have Me, No One Can (a) [Content warning: a suicide note that deals heavily with sexual violence]
Posting these links here for cross-reference:
As I said previously, I'm glad you are working on this problem. However, I suspect you are defaulting too strongly to public communication and coordination on this forum. My impression is that many EA orgs tend to keep their analysis private and publish only if there's a compelling reason. For this particular issue, I see a few reasons to default even more strongly to privacy: First, there are reputational risks to the EA movement. Second, public online discussion of topics like this can degrade notoriously quickly. Therefore, I suggest that instead of soliciting public comments, you put together a small group of advisors, people with a few different perspectives from a few different stakeholders, and ask them to provide views on things like what the right set of questions to ask is. I suspect that this approach will get you better advice than drive-by internet commenting, while also mitigating the risks I described.
I have some more thoughts, but I'm following my own advice and sending them via a personal message :)
I am also not an expert on designing surveys, but it seems really hard to get meaningful data on something like the 'consent philosophies' that you describe, at least without broadly-understood and theorised examples of different versions of them. Imagine trying to get an idea of the different ethical views of EAs without being able to rely on terms like 'utilitarianism' and 'condequentialism' and others that have a well-developed meaning from the philosophical literature.
Asking people to describe their ethical views in such a situation seems like a really bad idea - not only would it require a ton of work in reading through all the responses to get even a vague idea of the common threads, it requires the survey-taker to do a ton of work in writing up their views; not only to describe them, which itself might take some time, but also to reflect and come up with verbal descriptions of things they don't neccessarily think explicitly about.
Well this seems to make sense, though it's worth remembering that unconventional definitions and standards on this subject could be picked up by progressive activists and used as a political weapon against us. And while good definitions are important for research and arguments, I'm not sure if creating a better set of definitions would provide much added benefit in terms of helping us reduce sexual crimes in the organizational sense.
I'm not sure exactly what you're proposing as a plan of action. Surveys? I'll always be happy to fill one out. Now I presume that EA organizations have discrete channels for reporting sexual harassment and assault; if not then that sounds like obvious good practice.
Some people get rejected from EA Global, so the comparison would have to look at visitors who applied to visit subsequent conferences.
As an aside, I find talking about 'leaving EA' on the basis of personal issues to be sort of distasteful as it trivializes the importance of reducing poverty, factory farming and so on, as if they were less important than our own experiences. Probably it is better to say more careful things like "I am going to work to reduce poverty on my own in accordance with Peter Singer's philosophy without being involved with the EA community", or something of the sort. As a rule, communities seem to be strong when they have negative attitudes towards defection and leaving.
Mate, she was already 2 days dead when you wrote this.
For a really good cognitive exercise in empathy, which is what Kathy was all about at the end of the day, go re-read all your communications with her in this context. It's literally the first thing I did when I heard, and my communications, arguments, debates, and love with her go back to 2001.
Then re-read her main article.
Then reiterate to yourself how "probably it is better to say more careful things" to a person who suicided and whose entire life work was literally her cry for help that the community she cared so much about did not seem to hear.
Then maybe ponder again the insular nature of this little community.
I only know of EA through Kathy. I do not know if you've read her 30-page suicide note; it is online now, so probably not too hard to do. I do know, however, that she intentionally died in a deliberate attempt to make people aware of something sick in society than goes FAR beyond this little self-important online subcultural ghetto. She was willing and ready to burn EA and this whole society to the ground if necessary to make things right. While the ethics and expediency of such an approach is certainly debatable at the very least, as her friend and former partner I will do everything I can do, until I die, to stoke the flames of the fires she was trying to light.
"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."
I interested Tee Barnett and Peter Hurford in adding sexual violence questions to the survey. Therefore sexual violence definitions need to be created. There are various challenges involved. Below I have listed the challenges and proposed a set of questions that I think will help work around them. (This does not mean Tee and Peter will include my particular questions. I am making a proposal and outlining specific challenges that I am aware of.)
An r or python script can be run in an installation of r statistics on one of the CEA computers. *Only* the table containing the completely anonymized numerical totals needs to be shared. So yes, this is quick and dirty and would only output a rough estimate. The only way to get really accurate data is for CEA to have an internal person write the script.
If we use a mainstream source of sexual violence definitions, it will stigmatize people who need to use body language rather than explicit verbal consent. They probably aren’t going to change their behavior, since that would result in sexual dysfunction. Also, I’m concerned that there probably is not enough research on people with this preference for us to have any understanding of them. Without thorough research, stigma is unjustified.
If we don’t use definitions that require explicit verbal consent, this may open the floodgates for a lot of people who are confused by motivated reasoning and bias. It is probably safer if people prone to motivated reasoning and bias do *not* try to use body language to figure out what others want. They need to work extra hard to make distinctions and I suspect it helps them to be told clearly and explicitly what is wanted.
Proposed definitions:
The things I care about the most are things like whether someone is traumatized, whether they become suicidal and whether they leave or intend to leave the movement or their job.
What would be *really* interesting is to ask *both* “did things A, B, or C happen to you” *and* “did it cause you to experience X, Y, Z harm”?
This would be long because there’d be a subset of questions *about* each of the questions in the main set. Also, since multiple offences can happen to one person, you’d need to be able to answer each question and subset question more than one time. This sounds complicated and I’m not sure it will happen since surveys have length constraints.
This would be awesome because we would have an opportunity to understand this so much better by taking a peek at which behaviors cause the most harm.
If it needs to be concise, I’m imagining something like this:
This wouldn’t give us the sort of result that’s directly comparable to external sexual violence statistics. However, it would give us the sort of result we care about: whether people’s preferred consent philosophies are being violated, and whether the violations are causing harm. Most importantly, we’d actually have some data about the impact on specific areas including psychological health, suicidal thoughts, turnover intentions, and intentions to leave the community.
The results would be harder to compare from one year to the next because tying sexual violence definitions to people’s individual ideas about consent adds more complexity than brutalizing all the subtleties to create standardized verbiage. It *is* possible to make survey results comparable *if* people put in the effort to thoroughly document all the different sets of preferences they have, name each consent philosophy or variation, and publish these. I think encouraging people to do this is a good thing because it encourages us to deepen our understanding and communicate more clearly.
Tying the definition to people’s individual preferences just seems a lot more sane than trying to come up with sexual violence definitions that work for everybody at a time when so much more research needs to be done to understand all the variation in responses and preferences, not to mention solving whatever it is that has been resulting in insane loopholes.
Nonetheless, I think something in this general direction would be much better at tracking the things we care about the most: whether preferences are being respected, and whether harm is being done.
I’m not an expert on designing surveys. There will be people on the survey team looking this over and it may need to be changed. This is step one in the process: post a draft to get feedback on!
Please provide your feedback.
References:
Laband, David N., and Bernard F. Lentz. "The effects of sexual harassment on job satisfaction, earnings, and turnover among female lawyers." ILR Review 51.4 (1998): 594-607.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001979399805100403
Sims, Carra S., Fritz Drasgow, and Louise F. Fitzgerald. "The effects of sexual harassment on turnover in the military: time-dependent modeling." Journal of Applied Psychology 90.6 (2005): 1141.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Fritz_Drasgow/publication/7453306_The_Effects_of_Sexual_Harassment_on_Turnover_in_the_Military_Time-Dependent_Modeling/links/584adce408aeb989251b2b0e.pdf
Merkin, Rebecca S. "The impact of sexual harassment on turnover intentions, absenteeism, and job satisfaction: Findings from Argentina, Brazil and Chile." Journal of International Women's Studies 10.2 (2008): 73.
http://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1228&context=jiws
Merkin, Rebecca S., and Muhammad Kamal Shah. "The impact of sexual harassment on job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and absenteeism: findings from Pakistan compared to the United States." SpringerPlus 3.1 (2014): 215.
https://springerplus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2193-1801-3-215
Salman, Maheen, Fahad Abdullah, and Afia Saleem. "Sexual Harassment at Workplace and its Impact on Employee Turnover Intentions." Business & Economic Review 8.1 (2016): 87-102.
http://www.imsciences.edu.pk/files/journals/vol82/Paper%206-Sexual%20Harassment%20at%20Workplace.pdf
Sandada, Maxwell. "The influences of sexual harassment on health, psychological condition, work withdrawal and turnover intention in South Africa." Journal of Business 1.2 (2013): 84-72.
http://www.jbs-re.com/journals/JBS-05122017%20.pdf
Thanks for your dedication to this issue. I'm compelled to point out that that briefly speaking about a particular issue in an informal manner should not be seen as an endorsement on behalf of myself or Rethink Charity.
In response to the comment that was deleted below, we do not intend to ignore this issue.
I fucking hope not. RIP Kathy <3
Can we put a lid on all these disclaimers being thrown everywhere by everyone who does anything in EA? It is getting stifling and degrading. Just state what you believe.
Is the "collaboration" mentioned here referring to the same brief informal conversation?
Whether you effective altruists decide to track and solve this issue or discover the consequences of ignoring it is up to you. Choose wisely.