I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.

I'm glad you made your post about how Kathy's accusations were false.  I believe that was the right thing to do -- certainly given the information you had available.

But I wish you had left this sentence out, or written it more carefully:

But they wouldn't do that, I'm guessing because they were all terrified of getting called out in posts like this one.

It was obvious to me reading this post that the author made a really serious effort to stay constructive. (Thanks for that, Maya!)  It seems to me that we should recognize that, and you're erasing an important distinction when you categorize the OP with imprudent tumblr call-out posts.

If nothing else, no one is being called out by name here, and the author doesn't link any of the tumblr posts and Reddit threads she refers to.

I don't think causing reputational harm to any individual was the author's intent in writing this.  Fear of unfair individual reputational harm from what's written here seems a bit unjustified.

I want to strong agree with this post, but a forum glitch is preventing me from doing so, so mentally add +x agreement karma to the tally. [Edit: fixed and upvoted now]

I have also heard from at least one very credible source that at least one of Kathy's accusations had been professionally investigated and found without any merit.

Maybe also worth adding that the way she wrote the post would in a healthy person be intentionally misleading, and was at least incredibly careless for the strength of accusation. Eg there was some line to the effect of 'CFAR are involved in child abuse', where the claim was link-highlighted in a way that strongly suggested corroborating evidence but, as in that paraphrase, the link in fact just went directly to whatever the equivalent website was then for CFAR's summer camp.

It's uncomfortable berating the dead, but much more important to preserve the living from incredibly irresponsible aspersions like this.

While this is important (clarifying of misinformation), I want to mention that I don't think this takes away from the main message of the post. I think it's important to remember that even with a culture of rationality, there are times when we won't have enough information to say what happened (unlike in Scotts case), and for that reason Mayas post is very relevant and I am glad it was shared.

It also doesn't seem appropriate to mention this post as "calling out". While it's legitimate to fear reputations being damaged with unsubstantiated claims, this post doesn't strike me as doing such.

I came to the comments here to also comment quickly on Kathy Forth's unfortunate death and her allegations. I knew her personally (she subletted in my apartment in Australia for 7 months in 2014, but more meaningfully in terms of knowing her, we also we overlapped at Melbourne meetups many times, and knew many mutual people). Like Scott, I believe she was not making true accusations (though I think she genuinely thought they were true). 

I would have said more, but will follow Scott's lead in not sharing more details. Feel free to DM me.

(some of) Kathy's accusations were false

just to draw some attention to the "(some of)", Kathy claimed in her suicide note that her actions had led to one person being banned from EA events. My understanding is that she made a mixture of accusations that were corroborated and ones that weren't, including the ones you refer to. I think this is interesting because it means both:

• Kathy was not just a liar who made everything up to cause trouble. I would guess she really was hurt, and directed responsibility for that hurt to a mixture of the right and wrong places. (Maybe no-one thought this, but I just want to make clear that we don't have to choose between "she was right about everything" and "she was wrong about everything".)
• Kathy was not ignored by the community. Her accusations were taken seriously enough to be investigated, and some of those investigations led to people being banned from events or groups. Reddit may talk shit about her, but the people in a position to do something listened.

(I should say that what I'm saying is mostly based on what Kathy said in her public writings combined with second-or-third hand accounts, and despite talking a little to Kathy at the time I'm missing almost all the details of what actually happened. Feel free to contradict me if something I said seems untrue.)

(edit 2023-10-09: revised "more than one" to "one" because I'm sure that's true and am not sure the "more than" is true)

For the record, I knew Kathy for several years, initially through a local Less Wrong community, and considered her a friend for some time. I endorse Scott's assessment, but I'll emphasise that I think she believed the accusations she made.

Relevant to this post: Many people tried to help Kathy, from 3 groups that I'm aware of. People gave a lot of time and energy. Speaking for myself and what I observed in our local community, I believe we prioritised helping her over protecting our community and over our own wellbeing.

In the end things went poorly on all three, for the community, other individuals and especially for Kathy. But it wasn't for lack of caring.

If something similar happened today, we would have much more support, through the EA community health team. (I was more involved in LW at the time, and wasn't aware of support available through EA. The team might not have existed yet in a formal capacity.)

I don't take Kathy's letter at face value. However I'm glad to see Julia's comment confirming that Kathy's accusations were investigated (I would expect no less) and in one case acted upon.

As for the analytical vs emotional – it's hard to express my emotions around this in written words. And especially hard to do so without saying more than I think is appropriate.

(This is the first public comment I've made on this subject. I only make it because it's understandably still an issue of concern, and few people have much context for it.)

Regardless of the accuracy of this comment, it makes me sad that the top comment on this post is adversarial/argumentative and showing little emotional understanding/empathy (particularly the line "getting called out in posts like this one"). I think it unfortunately demonstrates well the point the author made about EA having an emotions problem:

On the forum in particular and in EA discourse in general, there is a tendency to give less weight/be more critical of posts that are more emotion-heavy and less rational. This tendency makes sense based on EA principles… to a certain extent. To stay true to the aforementioned values of scientific mindset and openness, it makes sense that we challenge people’s ideas and are truth-seeking in our comments. However, there is an important distinction between interrogating someone’s research and interrogating someone’s lived experience. I fear that the attitude of truth-seeking and challenging one another to be better has led to an inclination to suspend compassion in the absence of substantial evidence of wrongdoing. You’re allowed to be sorry that someone experienced something without fully understanding it.

Responding to the attention on Kathy's specific case (I'm aware I'm adding more to it) - I think we're detracting from the key argument that the EA community as a whole is neglecting to validate and support community members who experience bad things in the community 

In this  post, it's  women and sexual assault primarily. But there are other posts (1, 2) exempifying ways the EA community itself can and should prioritise internal community health.  To argue the truth of one specific example might be detracting from recognising that this might be a systematic problem.

edit: after discussion below & other comments on this post, I feel less strongly about the claim "EA community is bad at addressing harm", but stand by / am clarifying my general point, which is that the veracity of Kathy's claims doesn't detract from any of the other valid points that Maya makes and I don't think people should discount the rest of these points.

A suggestion to people who are approaching this from a "was Kathy lying?" lens: I think it's also important to understand this post in the context of the broader movement around sexual assault and violence. The reason this kind of thing stings to a woman in the community is because it says "this is how this community will react if you speak up about harm; this is not a welcoming place for you if you are a survivor." It's not about whether Kathy, in particular, was falsely accusing others.

The way I read Maya's critique here is "there were major accusations of major harm done, and we collectively brushed it off instead of engaging with how this person felt harmed;" which is distinct from "she was right and the perpetrator should be punished". This is a call for the EA community to be more transparent and fair in how it deals with accusations of wrongdoing, not a callout post of anybody. 

Perhaps I would feel differently if I knew of examples of the EA community publicly holding men accountable for harm to women, but as it stands AFAIK we have a lot of examples like those Maya pointed out and not much transparent accountability for them. :/ Would be very happy to be corrected about that.

(Maya, I know it's probably really hard to see that the first reply on your post is an example of exactly the problem you're describing, so I just want to add in case you see this that I relate to a lot of what you've shared and you have an open offer to DM me if you need someone to hold space for your anger!)

Can you link to your post? I'm asking in order to avoid the (probably already existing) situation where people see that "some of Forth's accusations" are allegedly not true, but they don't know which, so they just doubt all of them.

This is a really good comment IMO, especially the final paragraph which I'm reproducing to avoid it getting lost in a comment which mostly focuses elsewhere.

Cultural change also can’t all be handled by CEA or any one centralized source. We want to support organizers, employers, online spaces, and other EA spaces in building a healthy culture. To anyone who's an organizer or other person shaping the culture of an EA space, we’re here to talk if you’d like to.

(saying this in a friend capacity and in shock that I haven't introduced you two already) - you two should definitely talk! 

Hi Kathryn,

I'm not yet involved in Magnify Mentoring but would love to be and would love to chat! I'll message you privately.

I think you may be on the right track with how you wrote this comment actually -- taking a moment to let the person know they were heard before switching to problem-solving mode.

IMO social media websites should sometimes give users a reminder to do this after they hit the "submit" button, but before their comment is posted.  Perhaps the submit button could check whether a particular tag is present on the original post?

This is well put.

I think people can say that debating is their way of trying to care. Not a full solution but I think people don't sometimes realise this.

Maybe one way to address this would be separate posts?  The first raises the problems, shares emotions.  The second suggests particular actions that could help.

I really appreciated your comment and think it's important to acknowledge and ensure neurodiverse people feel welcome, and I'm coming from a place where I agree with Maya's reflections on emotions within EA and am neurotypical.

Not sure I have time to post my thoughts in depth but I think the rational Vs. intuitive emotional intelligence tension within EA is something worth a lot more thought. It's a tension / trade-off I've picked up on in the EA professional realm: where people aren't getting on in EA organisations, where people aren't feeling heard, and where the working culture becomes one that's more afraid of losing status / threat mindset than supportive, to the detriment of employees.

Maybe as a counter to what you're saying, some of the people who helped me best own and articulate my emotions (in the context of another EA repeatedly undermining me) are bay-area rationalist EAs who you might describe as neurodivergent. Why? I think a lot of people from that community have just done the work on themselves to recognise emotions in themselves, and consequently in others. And this is driven by valuing emotions / internal worlds intrinsically - in that integrating head and heart way you write about - and then getting better in that domain.

So to link this back to Maya's post;

1. agree with making sure EA is truly inclusive and, in being better at responding to emotions and traumatic experiences, doesn't swing to excluding neurodivergent people,

2. I think this tension / trade-off goes beyond social realm, and into the professional, and

3. I would like to play up how many neurodivergent people - especially those who might instinctively behave in a way that creates the culture Maya has highlighted as problematic - can actually be really good at creating an emotionally responsive and caring environment.

Happy to discuss further time permitting (which is sadly not on my side!)

Throwing out one possible approach:

1. People think about where they have blindspots around reading certain styles of writing, and acknowledge that in those areas, they may not get the point being made, even if there is an important point

2. When someone makes a post that communicates in a way that you identify as your blindspot, you think about whether you can respond in the same style that they communicated.

3. If you can - do so. If you can't - you don't have to respond to the post at all. This is the crux of my suggestion. If you just see the world differently from someone else, so much so that responding to it would involve a clash of your worldviews, it's okay to just leave it alone. I think "let it go" is an undervalued approach on every internet forum, and especially so here.

That's my best guess at a strategy that works both for someone who systematizes a lot reading an "overly" emotional post, and for someone who systematizes very little reading an "overly" analytical post. But I agree this is something of a wicked problem and we need some way to tackle it. In the absence of an explicit approach, I think the OP is right to point out that people will just respond in an analytical way to emotional posts and that may not help anyone at all.

Thank you very much for your perspective! I recently wrote about something closely related to this "emotions problem" but hadn't considered how the EA community offered a home for neurodivergent folks. I have now added a disclaimer making sure we 'normies' remember to keep you in mind!

Hey AllAmericanBreakfast. I'm Catherine from the Community Health team. I'm so so sorry to hear that your friend was raped. If at all possible, I want to make sure they have support, justice, and that the perpetrator doesn't have the opportunity to do this again. It doesn't matter if your friend doesn't identify as EA, if your friend, or the perpetrator are  involved in the EA community in anyway we're here to do our best to help.  I'll reach out via PM.

And that’s not to mitigate: a friend of mine was raped by a member of the Bay Area AI safety community. Predators can get a lot of money and social clout and use it to survive even after their misbehavior comes to light.

I'm very sad to hear about this.

I don't understand why the community health team is not able to handle this kind of thing.  Did your friend make a report?  Does the community health team need more funding or employees? Are they afraid to take on people with clout?

Even if the accused is doing a lot of good work, if the accusation is found to be credible, at the very least we should ensure the accused does not occupy a position of responsibility.  If they are serious about AI safety, they should agree to this measure themselves, for the sake of guarding humanity's future.

EAs should work to ensure that positions of responsibility are occupied by people of exemplary moral character, in my view. (Edit for clarification: I don't want my view rounded off to "EAs should work to ensure positions of responsibility are occupied by the people who are hardest to cancel". For example, my notion of "exemplary moral character" accounts for the possibility that failure to report on false accusations made by Kathy Forth could represent a character deficit, even if such failure-to-report makes one harder to cancel. I also think that everyone is flawed, and ability to recognize and learn from one's mistakes is really important.)

Polling seems like a good idea

I'm worried a lot of this is missing the point, and potentially missing important solutions. I'm going to use EAG for my examples here, as I think it is the strongest case of what I'm describing, but I think my argument generalises to a lot of scenarios and spaces in the EA community.

In my mind, there are two competing things going on here:

1. At an EAG, you are likely to meet people who are at a similar stage in their life to you, who have similar interests, and who are likely to be both intelligent and altruistic, both attractive qualities. If you meet one of these people, and they feel similarly about you, you could enjoy some flavour of romance together, and it would be mutually fulfilling. Things being mutually fulfilling between parties is self-evidently a good thing.
2. At an EAG, some people, primarily women, have bad experiences as a result of others' romantic attention. These experiences can range from uncomfortable to traumatic. I think these negative experiences can then be grouped into two further categories:
   1. Those that are are the result of malicious intent
   2. Those that are the result of power dynamics, and can arise despite positive intentions.

I think your solutions are primarily concerned with the 2a category, and when reading it I was reminded of this comment, which I think puts it better than I could. There are people with malicious intent in every community, and I don't think EA requires any particularly novel solution to deal with them. I agree with Isabel in that I'm also worried that when these threads come up, people will spend their efforts trying to either gauge the size of the problem, or theorise the optimal solution, rather than take any meaningful action.

I think 2b can be equally as damaging, and more should be done about it. Because EA is such a small, well-resourced community, there are especially strong power dynamics at play between individuals. As discussed in the blog post linked above, the EA community does not have strong boundaries between professional and romantic lives, in fact it seems especially tolerant of this intermingling - I claim this is a strongly negative thing. If someone a prospective future employer/grantmaker/"senior leader" starts flirting with me at EAG, even if they are being incredibly respectful and only have good intentions, I am under a lot of pressure to cooperate, even if that's not what I want at all. If at the start I do genuinely reciprocate that attraction, and we engage in some kind of romantic interaction, and I later change my mind, there is again a huge pressure on me not to leave the arrangement, even though that's what I want to do.

I'm not suggesting that EAs shouldn't date one another, but I am suggesting a much stronger acknowledgement of power dynamics at play, both on an individual community level. Due to the lack of community emphasis, I suspect many beneficiaries of power dynamics in these situations do not think of themselves that way, and so may inadvertently do harm (this isn't aimed at you personally - I don't know whether you are or aren't aware of this). It seems plausible to me that this would also help with 2a, as well as make the community feel more inclusive.

Punishments for people who make people uncomfortable at EAGs seem like a good idea

Transparent process with room for forgiveness but that considered harms to all parties (rather than underrating accused)

Scandal markets are a good idea

Gossip is good

How about an opt-in speed dating event in the evening?  That way the 40+% of women who desire flirts can obtain them, and there is no need or excuse to flirt with people during professional 1-on-1s.

If the conference organizers aren't comfortable organizing a speed dating event, maybe one of the women who wants to be flirted with could step up and organize it unofficially.  Could do lottery admission to keep the gender ratio even.

Edit: An EA matchmaking service is another idea

2nd edit: Amanda Askell says she likes ambiguity.  Maybe you women should put your heads together on this

Thank you! Glad it resonated. 

That's a true point - but I don't a good objective. EA should  strive to exist with the best, highly-aligned to doing good people and I think we need a  culture the prioritises people's lived experiences, feelings, and interactions for that to happen. 

I had sort of the same reaction. To me, "doing the most good" is something I live by. I don't identify as EA, but as altruistic.

I find it sort of interesting when people refer to the "EA community" and make efforts to change it. I mean, they're not wrong, but from another perspective, the "EA community" is almost an overgeneralization. Like for instance there are animal rights activists, longtermists, and climate change activists all getting to know each other through EA. There are going to be toxic people or cliques, and it's sort of weird to say "EA is ____" when plenty of people "within EA" have never met each other and have nothing to do with each other.

Just some thoughts. I don't disagree with the original post.

In a world where the EA culture is bad, but where no-one else is really doing any better, we may not be able to be replaced in this way, and it becomes even more important to ensure that we get the culture right here.

I genuinely find this fascinating. I don't think I've ever felt worried expressing empathy would be used as a push for concessions, and haven't wanted for it with this intent. I think your experience might be common though, perhaps among men in particular, and I think it we should talk about it more. Thanks for putting this out there.

Discussion can be compassionate. Disagreement can be compassionate. In fact, I'd argue that failing to have compassion and empathy for someone making a point is going to pretty seriously impair your ability to engage with the point, and even if you do you're going to have a hard time communicating about it in a way that will be heard. I think seeing these things as in tension is a mistake.

Re: “But I read this paragraph and it seems alien to me. What % of women+nb folks have this experience in EA?

‘I could tell you how tears streamed down my face as I read through accounts of women who have been harmed by people within the Effective Altruism community.’”

In the interest of reducing alienation, here’s some anecdata and context. Maya’s reaction wasn’t alien to me at all.

Among my female friends, having this type of reaction at some point was basically a developmental milestone. It wasn’t unique to EA. I expect such a survey would be more useful if you did some sort of national poll of women and compared it to women in EA.

Most (85%?) compassionate women I know reached a point in our teens or 20s where we got properly distressed and angry over gender-based* injustices that we and others had experienced. Most of us had experienced something bad or knew someone who did by then and it sucked.

If we happened to be involved in a specific “Good Community” that claimed some moral high ground (eg a church, an EA group, an “honorable family” etc), we hoped bad treatment happened less there and that we were safer there. Finding out, inevitably, that even in such a community, some of our peers and moral heroes also demean, harass, or rape each other is really awful. Our level of emotionality varied by personality type, but it sucked for all of us.

For Maya, this happened at its height about EA. For me, it happened about church. I’m no longer involved in religion. By the time I got to EA though, I expected some bad behavior even from “good people,” so I was just impressed the EA community health team existed to deal with it and didn’t have Maya’s intense reaction. I still do have a visceral reaction to others’ stories of harm though.

I don’t know if there base rate of problems is higher or lower in EA groups compared to other communities. I think the resources dedicated to good responses is higher than in other communities, which I feel good about.

I think we should try to track our base rates if we can, and plan to always dedicate resources to things like the Community Health team’s prevention and response efforts, because that is the price of admission for running healthy human groups.

I don’t mean to be callous or cynical, but I unfortunately now regard gender-based* violence as a gross and terrible part of being human that is present everywhere.

So, all communities and conscientious community members will need to contend with this unfortunate aspect of reality at some point and learn to talk about it in a healthy way, despite the pain. We’ll all need to have conversations like this sometimes, again and again, to address the pain involved, and it will bring up varying degrees of emotion and discomfort with that emotion, that are all pretty “normal”. It’s the price of admission for being alive and part of a social species.

Maybe, hopefully, the base rate of problems stays low within our microcultures and gets lower across the centuries as we keep learning how to human.

I hope saying this doesn’t belittle Maya’s concerns at all. They’re real and I’m glad she raised them so people could respond.

Fwiw, some of the discourse about these issues does seem more pointed, more naïve, more fearful, and less obviously compassionate in EA than eg in my church (maybe because of the gender and rationality skew in EA), so talking about it on the Forum felt worse than talking about it at church overall and has sometimes made me emotional. However, most EAs are less shame-laden than discourse in church, and more nuanced than discourse on eg. Twitter, so sometimes the Forum is preferable. I am more invested invested in EA communities so I’m willing to put more effort into these conversations than I would elsewhere.

To avoid intense frustrations though, I usually choose to talk about this stuff only with EA women or 1:1 with EA men rather then dealing with a Forum furor.

(*tbc, I see the same experiences happen for other characteristics that people realize they may unfairly targeted for, like race, sexuality, neurodivergence, etc).

Agreed that it would be very helpful to have a widely distributed survey about this, ideally with in-depth conversations. Quantitative and qualitative data seem to be lacking, while there seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence. Wondering if CEA or RP could lead such work, or whether an independent organization should do it.

If it's worth anything I would expect that figure to be between 28-43%. (I'm anchoring on your estimate, I would probably have guessed somewhere around 40-55% if I hadn't read your comment )

See this post: The community health team’s work on interpersonal harm in the community

I actually think people should be complaining to, or even complaining about, the community health team significantly more than they are. People on that team are paid to address problems like misconduct/harassment/assault. Complaints like Maya's should be a key performance metric for them.

In my view, there should be a stronger default of people like Maya contacting the community health team to say "hey, I heard about women getting ranked in a way that made me uncomfortable". And the community health team privately contacting the rankers to say "hey, you aren't helping our goal of a warm professional community that welcomes a wide variety of people and incentivizes them to care about doing good over being hot". Some might find this draconian -- to clarify, I don't think disciplinary action is justified here. I just think these conversations would be positive expected utility if done well.

These are both very important questions - for (1), I think it depends on the circumstance in all honesty. For example, the same way that volunteers are often trained before EAGs and EAGxs, I could see participants receiving something (as part of the behavior guidelines) outlining scenarios and describing why they were an example of inappropriate or appropriate behavior. However, I think it would be extremely difficult to "train" all members of the EA community as people are involved in many different capacities.  For (2), I think that, despite all situations involving interpersonal harm and conflict being unique and complex, it could be useful to have more transparency in some areas. I don't mean naming specific individuals and discussing all the details of each case, I more mean something like (X action is unaccpetable and will result in Y consequence if found to be true). Another note - my suggestions were aimed towards EA community members because I truly believe that, often, people simply do not understand how their actions/words make others feel. I hope that by raising awareness of this people will be motivated to change themselves without necessitating external conflict (although I understand that's not always the case).

If it had been a woman who said she'd arranged a one-on-one with a man cause he was handsome, nobody would feel upset.

Personally, I would be extremely upset, and report it to the community health team