I’m sorry I didn’t handle this better in the first place. My original comments are here, but to reiterate some of the mistakes I think I made in handling the concerns about Owen:

• I wish I had asked the various women for permission to get a second opinion from a colleague or to hand the case over to a colleague. 
• In the case where Owen told me he believed he’d made someone uncomfortable, I wish I had reached out to the woman to get her side of the story (if she was willing to share that). This would have given me a clearer picture of some of his actions that I didn’t know about until after the investigation.
• I wish I had been clearer to Owen about specific changes he should make.
• I wish I had flagged my concerns earlier and more clearly to people at CEA and EV. Two of the people I told about some of my concerns were on the boards of EV US or EV UK (then called CEA US and CEA UK), but I didn’t properly think through Owen’s role on the board or flag that to them.

Some things that are different now, related to the changes that Chana describes:

• The community health team has spent months going through lessons learned both from this situation and from other cases we’ve handled. Based on reflecting independently and together, and now with the input from the HSF investigation, we drew up a list of practices to change and additional steps to add.
• Each month the casework team goes through cases we’re handling, and checks whether we’re implementing the practices we agreed on.
• To me, the most important change is getting more advice and support from other caseworkers when handling difficult cases, especially if the case involves someone with influence or power in EA. I think this helps correct for an earlier pattern where there was too much deferral to individual judgment. We had started this change before 2023, and now I feel it’s much better-established. For example, when working on a recent difficult case, two of us went over the information and wrote up our questions and proposals independently, then discussed together and came to a joint set of proposed actions. This takes more time, but I think it’s a more robust process.
• Over time our team has grown, and it’s more viable than it once was to hand off cases when one of us has some entanglement or conflict of interest.
• As Chana describes, we’re developing a process for getting independent opinions when a concern relates to EV leadership or someone else who has power over the community health team.

@EV US Board @EV UK Board could you include Owen's response document somewhere in the post? It contains a lot of important information and it's getting lost in the comments. 

Thanks for posting this update. I prefer to have it out rather than pending, and I think it’s appropriate that people will get a sense of approximately the scope of what happened. I deeply regret my actions, which were wrong and harmful; I think it’s a fair standard to expect me to have known better; I will of course abide by the restrictions you’re imposing.

I spent a lot of last year working on these issues, and I put up an update in December; that’s still the best place to understand my perspective on things going forwards.

I think that the first-order impression given by these findings is broadly accurate — I did a poor job of navigating feelings of romantic attraction, failed to track others’ experiences, took actions which were misguided and wrong, and hurt people. For most readers that’s probably enough to be going with. Other people might be interested in more granularity, either because they care about the nature of my character flaws and what types of mistakes I might be prone to in the future, or because they care about building detailed pictures of the patterns that cause harm. For this audience I’ve put my takes on the specific findings in this document. My December update also includes implicit discussion of some subtle harms not discussed in EV’s findings.

I continue to care a lot about this community, including making it a very safe, inclusive, and welcoming space. I am pained that I’ve hurt individuals, and harmed the fabric of the community itself. I’d like to do whatever I can to contribute to it continuing to build towards being the best version of itself, but I expect I’ll continue to tread cautiously in community interactions for a while (as well as avoiding romance-related things altogether).

I do not know Owen. I am however a bit worried to see two people in these comments advocating for Owen while this affair does not look good and the facts speak for themselves; there is a certain irony to see these two people coming to defend Owen while the community health head, Julia, admits to a certain level of bias when handling this affair since he was her friend. It seems that EA people do not learn from the mistakes that are courageously being owned up here. This posts talks about Owen misbehaving: it does not talk about Owen's good deeds. So this kind of comment defeats the point of this post. 

Can you put yourself two seconds in the shoes of these women who received unwanted and pressing attention from Owen, with all the power dynamics that are involved, reading comments on how Owen is responsible and a great addition to the community, even after women repeatedly complained about him? What I read is 'He treated me well, so don't be so quick to dismiss him' and 'I've dealt with worse cases, so I can assure you this one is not that bad'. 

Do you really think that such attitudes encourage women to speak up? Do you really think that this is the place to do this? 

Edit: I want to thank those who have written this post and highlight the courage that it has taken. I know that I am flagging up the things that are not okay, e.g these comments, but I am very happy that this does not stay within community building circles and gets shared. Yeay for transparency, yay for honesty, yay for highlighting what is wrong if we want to do better. I know of instances where such bad press has been kept within closed doors, and I'm glad this one has not. So, thanks. I yell a lot (I wish I did not have to, of course) but I also want to be grateful.

Over the years, I’ve done a fair amount of community building, and had to deal with a pretty broad range of bad actors, toxic leadership, sexual misconduct, manipulation tactics and the like. Many of these cases were associated with a pattern of narcissism and dark triad spectrum traits, self-aggrandizing behavior, manipulative defense tactics, and unwillingness to learn from feedback. I think people with this pattern rarely learn and improve, and in most cases should be fired and banned from the community even if they are making useful contributions (and I have been involved with handling several such cases over the last decade). I think it’s important that more people learn to recognize this; I encourage you to read the two above-linked articles.

I feel worried that some readers of this Forum might think Owen matches that pattern. Knowing him professionally and to some degree personally, I think he clearly does not. I’ve collaborated and talked with him for hours in all kinds of settings, and based on my overall impression of his character, I understand his problematic behavior to have arisen from an inability to model others’ emotions, an inability to recognize that he was in a position of power and influence, and moral scrupulosity (obsession about whether he’s a bad person or not for inappropriately feeling attracted to someone). 

This obviously doesn’t make his past behavior any less bad and doesn’t excuse any of it. But it makes it more likely that he makes a real effort to learn and improve, and based on some conversations I’ve had with Owen, I believe this learning has indeed happened. I think Owen is unlikely to repeat his mistakes, and his document seems honest and he’s not just trying to tell us what we want to hear (in fact, I think his moral scrupulosity makes him unusually honest in this situation).^[1]

Personally, I hope Owen can be involved in the community soon again. I think a temporary ban is important, both as an incentive against bad behavior and as a precaution so the harms don’t continue. That said, two years are a long time, and I hope other EA orgs won't take his loss too lightly and will consider inviting him to participate again. I think we would benefit a lot from his participation, both in terms of ensuring the community is safe and welcoming for everyone (where I've seen him go out of his way in the past), and in terms of getting more of his contributions to the causes we all care about.

(This comment is intended as sharing my impression from knowing Owen personally, which I figured might be helpful context for some readers. I welcome others sharing different perspectives, especially if you disagree. By default I won’t engage in much discussion due to lack of time.)
 

1. ^{^}

   I think a significant share of sexual misconduct or unwelcome sexual attention in EA is caused by the broad cluster of poor theory of mind and autism-spectrum / OCD-spectrum personality traits, as opposed to the more broadly publicized manipulative/sociopathic/narcissistic spectrum. The latter seems characterized by not caring sufficiently about the victim’s experience, whereas the former seems characterized by a lack of understanding of the effects of one’s actions, which makes it more tractable. I think Owen’s example could be instructive and hope it helps others avoid similar mistakes.

As the post says above, I’d like to share updates the  team has made on its policies based on the internal review we did following the Time article and Owen’s statement as a manager on the team and the person who oversaw the internal review. (My initial description of the internal review is here). In general, these changes have been progressing prior to knowing the boards’ determinations, though thinking from Zach and the EV legal team has been an important input throughout.
 

Changes 

Overall we spent dozens of hours over multiple calendar months in discussions and doing writeups, both internally to our team and getting feedback from Interim CEA CEO Ben West and others. Several team members did retrospectives or analyses on the case, and we consulted with external people (two EAs with some experience thinking about these topics as well as seven professionals in HR, law, consulting and ombuds) for advice on our processes generally. 

From this we created a list of practices to change and additional steps to add. The casework team also reflected on many past cases to check that these changes were robust and applicable across a wide variety of casework. 

Our changes, in rough order of importance:

1. Defaulting more often to getting input from more people on the team (especially if a case involves someone with power in the EA community) by having multiple caseworkers on a case and/or involving managers for oversight
   1. Specifically, most cases now get seen by more than one person, particularly cases that involve someone with sufficient power in the community (confidentiality constraints may limit how many caseworkers work on a case.)
2. For the cases we take on, we have a lower bar for proactively reaching out to members to the community in order to get more information. For example, if this same case came up again, we would weigh more highly the importance of getting additional information from the woman Zach mentions above. Our previous approach pointed in this direction as well, but this change will make it less likely we miss an important opportunity.
3. We are creating a system that automatically flags to us when complaints about the same person come to different caseworkers, making us more likely to catch patterns of poor behavior (this previously was caught in a less systematic way)
4. We have lowered the bar for what’s considered a personal conflict of interest and improved our systems so it is easier to pass a case on to another caseworker. For instance, if the same case came up again, we would have it owned by someone else.
5. We’ve added and improved written internal guidelines for considerations to take into account during cases, particularly for cases involving someone with power in the EA community. Previously these were distributed across different documents and tacit understanding; they are now more formalized. 
6. Automatic reminders for follow-ups on old cases to see if any more action is needed
7. An update towards overcommunication and explicitness when giving feedback to people whose behavior we’d like to change; an update against assuming the feedback has been understood and incorporated
8. An update towards escalations to boards, legal teams and HR departments where relevant. 
9. Better systems (reminders, templates in meetings, etc) for making sure balls aren’t dropped based on when or how information comes in
    

The casework side of our team meets monthly to check that we are using our systems effectively, that we have implemented these changes with new and existing cases, and to update our internal guidelines as needed.

Some notes on the changes

I’m glad we have these changes, though I think it’s worth noting my guess that a big part of what will end up driving change here is also in large part due to CH team members’ individual reflections on the original events (Time article + statement from Owen + original case). 

The list of changes is not exhaustive, since many of the changes stemming from this internal review (depending on your bar for “policy change”) are quite small e.g. “adding a consideration to our list of factors that may make a case more serious.” I think those “nudge” type changes are important and useful for incorporating data without over-updating or over-bureacratizing, though they are harder to assess externally. In general I’m trying to convey our high level changes without creating a laundry list. Nonetheless I hope the descriptions of our process changes help people make accurate updates and have accurate expectations about our team.

There is some broader context, which is that the casework team’s approach in January of 2023 (before the Time article came out) was already in significant ways different than in 2021. For instance, since Catherine joined in late 2021 (and even more so since Charlotte joined in 2023), the casework team has been able to double-check cases more often and have a lower bar for passing on cases where there was a personal connection. The changes as a result of the internal review add on to these previous shifts. 

We’ll be checking in as a team at regular intervals to reflect on the value of these changes at getting better outcomes. This refers both to whether the increased time and effort per case looks like the right call (relative to e.g. handling more cases) and whether the decisions made are overall better (rather than the changes overfitting to this specific instance). 

What’s still underway

In addition to the changes in how we handle personal COIs (with some person one team member has a COI with), we’re still working on a general approach to institutional COIs and what constitutes one, e.g. if a case involves someone in EV leadership. So far our planned approach is to ask for a person external to EV to give an independent view when such an institutional COI comes up in a case we take on, but it’s not obvious that there will always be an appropriate person willing. This will need more work to figure out.

As Zach indicates above, we’ll be working on a more formalized version of our current processes for escalation, COIs, and anything else the boards ask for.

I mostly want to +1 to Jonas’ comment and share my general sentiment here, which overall is that this whole situation makes me feel very sad. I feel sad for the distress and pain this has caused to everyone involved. 

I’d also feel sad if people viewed Owen here as having anything like a stereotypical sexual predator personality.

My sense is that Owen cares extraordinarily about not hurting others. 

It seems to me like this problematic behavior came from a very different source – basically problems with poor theory of mind and underestimating power dynamics. Owen can speak for himself on this; I’m just noting as someone who knows him that I hope people can read his reflections genuinely and with an open mind of trying to understand him. 

That doesn’t make Owen’s actions ok – it’s definitely not – but it does make me hopeful and optimistic that Owen has learnt from his mistakes and will be able to tread cautiously and not make problems of this sort again.

Personally, I hope Owen can be involved in the community again soon. 

[Edited to add: I’m not at all confident here and just sharing my perspective based on my (limited) experience. I don’t think people should give my opinion/judgment much weight. I haven’t engaged at all deeply in understanding this, and don’t plan to engage more]

[Liberally edited to clarify / address misunderstandings]

I assume it's obvious to everyone that it's a bad idea to make [things that are perceived as] unwanted romantic or sexual advances towards people, and that serious action should be taken if someone receives repeated complaints about that. I assume everyone agrees that "ignore complaints of harassment if a few people say they're pretty sure the perpetrator is a good person / they're a pillar of the community / their work is valuable / etc" is a bad policy. 

I assume everyone has a shared goal along the lines of "make the community safe and welcoming for people in general, and especially for underrepresented, vulnerable, or easy-to-make-feel-unwelcome groups".^[1]

As a potential member of such a group who has had significant interactions with Owen, I think I have information that might help people to pursue that goal more effectively. I assume one sensible way to make decisions that improve the welcomingness for particular groups is to ask representatives of that group whether a particular decision would make them feel more or less welcome. In the absence of general solicitation to that effect (at least with respect to this decision), I am giving my unsolicited opinion (which obviously introduces bias, but I'm thinking the value is mostly by pointing out that some type of opinion exists rather than thinking that anyone should make strong inferences about the distribution of opinions).

Here is the information I have that might be useful:

I have many interactions with Owen, since 2015 or so, originally as a much younger (late teens), new-to-EA, and female person, and in many situations where he had substantial power dynamics relative to me. I found him extremely respectful, kind, supportive, and empowering. He actively increased my intellectual and social confidence and made me feel safe, comfortable and welcome in the community. I think it would have been a big loss to me personally not to have interacted with Owen, and from my perspective he substantially improved the fabric of the community. For me, I expect that having Owen present in a community space would make it feel safer and more welcoming, even if I didn't know him already. 

More specifically with respect to safety and unhealthy power dynamics, there was a particular episode (related to people who are no longer part of the community) where I was in a situation which was pressuring and manipulative and had weird power dynamics. Owen's support and advice was helpful for me keeping my sanity and perspective and avoiding getting sucked in. This was downstream of particular personality traits and ways of interacting with people that would likely be helpful to other people he interacted with too, including: listening intently and taking people very seriously even when they're junior; presenting his opinions in a way that doesn't force them onto others; being generally calm, reasonable and gentle in manner.

Similar to comments by Emma and Jonas, I want to prevent people taking away what I would consider a misleading picture of Owen's behavior, because I think people having a misleading picture will make it harder to achieve the goal of making the community more welcoming.

I think people might read from this post that it matches a pattern of predatory or nefarious behavior - which definitely does exist, and which I think should be handled very aggressively by removing people from the community, which I have advocated in other cases.  Whereas, I think the pattern in this case is social clumsiness, some misunderstandings, and some psychological hangups around scrupulosity and needing to confess attraction and receive moral validation. 

I think the latter pattern of behavior should be handled differently than the former, and I think it's very important information for people to know when deciding e.g.:
-  how likely is Owen to cause similar problems in the future?
- what is the net effect of Owen's presence in a community space?
- in what way do they personally want to interact with Owen?
 - what interventions could be undertaken to prevent problems like this from occurring in the future?
- what warning signs indicate that someone might be at risk of causing similar problems?
- what should they take away from this situation as to what their response should be to someone who is displaying predatory behavior? (in particular, I think that if this was part of a pattern of sociopathic or predatory behavior, I think the response is significantly too mild, and I wouldn't want people to reproduce this response in that situation)

I am also somewhat worried that the accounts as stated might provide a slightly inaccurate picture of the events; I am particularly surprised about the claim that "Owen did not stop making repeated unwanted attempts at contact after being asked to do so". Based on my experiences with him, I personally would strongly predict that this was based on misunderstanding or confusion about what the other person wanted rather than Owen knowingly ignoring someone's requests. This is obviously not hard evidence, but if many people had similar reactions it might suggest there was either something wrong with the investigation, or with the framing of the conclusions, or with my and other people's ability to predict people's behavior!

Again, I obviously can't know how much harm Owen's actions caused other people. But if I was asked to give an overall judgement, in terms of:
- harm caused to people from interacting with Owen
- benefit to people from interacting with Owen
- how inviting vs unsafe community spaces feel for people, if they know that people are excluded on the basis of behavior like Owen's
then I would guess that it is substantially better to include Owen in community spaces.

More generally, I feel subjectively highly confident that Owen is broadly well described as:

• highly morally scrupulous, kind, and careful person
• would hate to cause someone to feel unsafe or uncomfortable
• thinks a lot about other people’s comfort and how to make them feel happy and safe,
• would only ever cause someone to feel uncomfortable by accident
• would make concerted + successful efforts to change if he was told something he was doing was causing problems for someone
• tries hard to view and interact with people how they would want to be viewed and interacted with
• acknowledges his limitations and takes careful steps to compensate for these 
• engages deeply and sensitively with different perspectives and understands that good intentions are not sufficient for avoiding causing other people harm

and is not well-described as:

• someone who is callous about other people’s needs and sense of safety
• puts his own needs ahead of theirs
• feels entitled to ask things of them
• isn’t interested in learning about how his actions affected people or changing his behavior
• views or treats people in a sexualized or objectified manner
• doesn’t acknowledge power dynamics, social and societal context, highly subjective nature of social interactions
• thinks that if they weren’t deliberately doing harm, and it seemed fine to them, then everything’s fine and anyone complaining of being harmed is just making a fuss

I am sharing this under a pseudonym for reasons like "not wanting this content to be something that comes up if someone searches my name in a professional context". I'm hoping I can confirm my identity to the EA forum team and they can attest that the factual claims about my demographics and interactions with Owen are correct.
 

1. ^{^}

   Possibly more controversially, and not pertinently to the rest of this comment, I personally think we should give non-zero weight to the impact on the wellbeing of a category of people something like:  "neurodivergent or otherwise socially unskilled people who have serious difficulties and/or mental health issues related to shame, social anxiety, and deprivation of social/romantic connection". My guess (which is anchored very strongly to my subjective experience of the intensity of suffering from these two kinds of harm and from talking to a small number of other people who have experienced both, and therefore could easily be changed by testimonials from other people who feel the intensity obviously goes the other way ) is that there is a significantly larger amount of suffering caused by social anxiety, shame and loneliness than there is by sexual harassment in the EA community. 
    
   Somewhat relatedly, I think:  there is a meaningful way in which the treatment of Owen here is plausibly unjust, namely: in terms of the amount of harm caused, and the level of vigilance that would be required to avoid that harm, I think Owen and people similar to him are being held to a much higher standard than we hold other people to with respect to different types of harms. That is to say, I think most people have done many things that are more blameworthy (in terms of the amount of harm caused, and the effort that would have been required on their part to avoid it) as the things listed here. I think if we banned everyone from the community who had caused this level of suffering with this level of avoidability, I'm not sure there would be anyone left. This kind of justice or proportionality is obviously not the only criteria on which decisions like this should be made, and there are good reasons to have strict policies around particular types of harm even if those policies sometimes lead to locally unjust decisions, but I think it bears acknowledging.

I'm glad to see:

1. The Community Health team adopting more robust procedures
2. Transparency regarding the changes made and the reasons for them
3. The boards of EV taking an active role in overseeing this and in acting even against a well known and powerful figure.

I was also glad to see Owen step down from his role, taking full responsibility and apologizing for his actions, cooperating and attempting to improve himself. This sets a good example.

In at least one case, Owen did not stop making repeated unwanted attempts at contact after being asked to do so[2].

I’m surprised and confused as to why the EV Board did not include that Owen says that he has written evidence showing that this isn’t true. (See the “On feedback” section here)

Did the investigators look at the evidence and disagree that the evidence was exculpatory? Or did they not look at the evidence at all and just post anyways, despite Owen telling them he had evidence (great article here about why this is suboptimal)? 

Given that Owen has been more than forthcoming about everything so far, so it’s unlikely he’s hiding anything, and he says he has written evidence to the contrary, I am inclined to believe that this accusation is false or misleading until I get more evidence to the contrary. 

I would appreciate if @EV UK Board @EV US Board  shared more information about what they did in this case, since it seems like a very cruxy accusation. 

If the only thing he did was express romantic interest in people who weren’t as influential as him, I think that is a much less bad thing (even not bad at all), and the 2 year banishment seems unwarranted. 

Thanks to the boards for thinking through this and thinking about how Community Health can do better in the future.

I’m sorry for my mistakes here and the harms my mistakes have caused. In particular, I should have given more support to Julia’s decision-making by getting more details about the case, forming my own inside view and double-checking the actions taken in this case. I think that would likely have caused us to take different actions here and prevented some harms. Our changes, listed in more detail in Chana and Julia’s comments, make a mistake like this much less likely in the future.

I also wish I had ensured I had a clearer set of principles and policies for when, either as a board member or the manager of the Community Health team, an issue needed escalation to the whole board. We’re working on a team-wide policy to this effect.

In general, I’ve also made a lot of personal updates in line with the mistakes listed above (e.g., I put higher weight on the value of pre-agreed-upon policies relative to case-by-case decision-making than I used to). I'm grateful for everyone's work and support on the changes our team is making; I think it’s making us better and more robust.

I would like to recognize that I have a lot of empathy for the EV board. I think that no matter what decision they made, they would get criticized. That's a really hard position to be in and I hope that their friends are reaching out to them and sending them comfort and funny gifs. 

I personally don't hold anything against them, because I think it's really hard to do things like this and ethics is complicated and fundamentally unsolved. 

I hope they can find some solace in this situation: if people are going to critcize you no matter what you do, you can simply make the decision you think is right instead of trying to please the public, which are fundamentally unpleasable, because there's too many of us.  

Owen says in his response

My understanding is that I always followed the letter of policy on when to recuse. 

I'm curious to hear whether the OP disagree with this. Do they think that he broke the rules on conflict of interest? Or do they think that he did indeed follow the rules, but there were some instances where there were unspoken rules or hard to make judgment calls that he didn't realize? 

Edit: I wrote the following without consulting with my team, in private manner only. This does not represent the position or views of EA Germany, nor is it intended as an official statement.

Thanks to the EV boards for deciding to publish this. 

As someone who's directly supported several people right after, and in the months after other sexual misconduct situations, I want to support @Vaipan's sentiment. The comments defending Owen Cotton-Barratt's character are clearly well-intentioned and not meant to harm those women who remain silent and anonymous. Although they are not meant that way, the comments might hurt those women and discourage others in similar positions to come forward. Reactions like these are part of the reason why victims of abuse and assault remain silent, they are perceived as reminders that the perpetrator matters more than the victim(s). Depending on he severity of the harm caused, they might cause retraumatization by giving the impression that everyone is supporting the person in power and not caring about the people harmed.

I don't think there's an easy fix for that: Owen Cotton-Barratt is not anonymous, and a prominent figure (at least in the UK community). As such, people will want to give their personal testimony of what threat he might pose or not. The women who reported him remain anonymous - no one will come to defend their character or great deeds for the community, since no one knows who they are. [To make this clear: they should remain anonymous for as long as they wish.]
This pattern also happens in a context of similar reactions that people grow up with (e.g. media coverage of sexual assault cases). So while the comments in this case might not want to defend Owen's actions, they are still easily perceived as hitting the same note. 

 [I previously suggested some ways to comment here, but deleted them after further discussion with others. I just wish we wouldn't forget the victims so often.]

There seems to be two main accusations here:

1. “Owen expressed sexual and / or romantic interest in women who were younger and less influential than he was.”
2. “In at least one case, Owen did not stop making repeated unwanted attempts at contact after being asked to do so”

I’ll address 1 here and 2 in another comment. 

For 1, why is expressing romantic or sexual interest unethical? Why is this worthy of a two-year ban? 

I imagine that the power difference is an important thing to the OP. I imagine, given that this is a common argument, that it’s because they felt uncomfortable saying no because he was powerful and if they said no, he could then harm them with his power. 

I’d first like to say that this particular dynamic, let’s call it the Scorned Powerful Lover dynamic, totally does happen, and we should figure out ways to prevent it. 

However, never expressing romantic or sexual interest if there’s a power difference seems like a poor solution. Lots of people would like to date somebody who has more power than them (e.g. wouldn’t it have been horrible for the world if Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz or Bill and Melinda Gates couldn’t have dated because there was a power difference?). 

Also, it will lead to essentially classism. Lower power people are going to be scared to ask the higher power person out because of exactly the same fears. Higher power people can’t ask people out for the above described reasons. This will then lead to not being able to date outside of your class. Poor people can’t date rich people. Less successful people can’t date more successful people. This seems bad. 

I don’t know the particular solution, but the current solution of banning people who’ve asked out somebody with less power and didn’t exhibit any Scorned Powerful Lover dynamics seems suboptimal. I think we can find something better.

Especially given that in this particular case, nobody is claiming that Owen was retaliatory. So that’s direct evidence that he didn’t do the Scorned Powerful Lover dynamic, so there was nothing bad, consequentially, that happened. 

I’ll write another argument about this in a separate comment so people can vote on particular arguments instead of the whole package. I wrote other reasons for believing that expressing romantic interest is not unethical, even if there's a power difference, here and here

Some thoughts:

• Seems this situation could have been handled worse.
  • When I was a christian several churches I was part of had serial sexual harassment by powerful men that was discovered years later. This seems unlikely in EA
  • My friends in political communities imply sexual harassment is rife
  • Cotton-Barratt could have been thrown out without any possibility of discussion. I am reliability told this is the policy of some UK universities.
  • Lesswrong user Mingyuan writes usefully on how difficult due process is here
• This topic feels costly to discuss. It is my general view that communities need to be able to have discussions on what their norms should be. I don't think EA has really been capable of that here. 
• When did the worst of these cases happen? If the worst cases happened 5 years ago, that seems materially different than if they happened 1 year ago. eg, where does the majority of the 'predictable harm' fall on the timeline? Likewise, Cotton-Barratt has been de fact ostracised for months now. Seems like this should count towards the ban time.
• To what extent is this about Owen and to what extent is this as an example? I would softly hold that some parts of this decision are to show that even powerful people should be held accountable. I think we should be honest with ourselves if this is the case.
• "After February 11th, 2025, Owen Cotton-Barratt will need to appeal to the boards of EV US and EV UK to participate in any overnight events or to be a member in an EV coworking space." I note there is no path for Cotton-Barratt to become a typical member of the community again. Personally I guess I want this for restorative justice. Such standards might be very high, but some notion of community forgiveness/normalisation is important to me.

We’ve also included some detail about the process in an appendix below.

The Google doc isn’t set to be publicly available.

Another consequentialist argument for it not being unethical to express romantic/sexual interest in somebody, even if there’s a power difference: it’s always uncomfortable to reject a guy. 

It seems like a lot of the argument relies on the idea that the women were upset or felt uncomfortable when he expressed interest. See “Multiple women expressed being upset by Owen’s advances.”

Speaking as a woman who’s had to turn down many guys in my time and as somebody who’s more comfortable saying no than probably 99% of women, I can assure you - it’s always upsetting to reject somebody’s advances. 

At least for me, there’s always the compassion, thinking that I’m hurting their feelings. I’m also worried that it might make our friendship weird in the future (which sometimes does happen but usually doesn’t). Many people are worried that the guy will respond with hostility, which is never fun. And tons of people find it really uncomfortable to say no in general. 

So using as an argument that they felt upset rejecting his advances would mean that anybody who’s ever asked somebody out and been rejected has behaved unethically and should be exiled from EV events for 2 years. This proves too much. 

We can feel compassion for people who feel upset rejecting advances, but that doesn’t mean that then we should just stop all advances, unless we’re absolutely certain they’re reciprocated (which is impossible). This is a standard that, if equally applied, would mean that virtually no EA men could attend EAGs. 

This addresses just one argument against just one accusation. I cover other aspects of the accusations and other counterarguments here and here

There's been some complaints from a banned EA Forum user that the timing of this post, and the timing of comments that bolster the character of Owen, have been coordinated. Whilst I think it's unlikely this is the case, I would love to see the following: 

- Confirmation from OP (@EV UK Board) that Owen was not given advanced warning on the posting of this report. Or if he was, some discussion around the potential issues with doing so. 

- Some further discussion in the EA Forum team, and perhaps rules set, on coordinated posting (AKA "brigading").