Would be interested in disagreement, fwiw here are my misc. thoughts on the forum and my experience with it:
Since starting to work on AI safety full-time about 10 months ago, I feel extremely hyper-focussed on AI risk. Both because I am very worried about it, and also because to work well in the field, there is a lot of information to keep up with. I don't feel like I have much brain space for other stuff right now.
I would say the main AI risk conversations are not happening on the EA forum, I personally keep up with X, Substack. And more than anything, I gain a lot of information from just talking to researchers at my organization and seeing what articles people are sharing in Slack, also I learn a lot from in-person safety events in the Bay Area.
I could be wrong, but I kind of feel like this has led to almost a "brain drain" dynamic where AI safety people are mostly not keeping up with the EA Forum. That approximately leaves GH&W, animal welfare, other misc. EA-related topics (e.g. forecasting) and meta-EA conversation.
^ I don't feel like I have a sense of where the main GH&W and animal welfare conversations happen, so someone else would need to speak to that.
I do feel like the EA Forum is still the main place for meta-EA conversation. For "meta-EA" from a kind of underlying ideas/philosphy perspective, I don't think there's a ton happening right now, to my knowledge. From a community perspective, I also don't tend to come to the forum first. This may be down to my personal taste, but I feel like I get the most out of people being candid and speaking freely about the community & I think that is much easier and nicer to do on Substack or personal blogs.
Specifically with meta-EA conversation, I do also personally feel the forum is rehashing many of the same convos over and over. I've been involved 8 years now so personally I just can't read about PR anymore or people's thoughts on the brand or FTX.
I'm really sorry this happened to you, and I really commend you for standing by yourself and going to court. Taking legal action is stressful, time-consuming, and can be incredibly scary, but I'm glad you did it.
FWIW, the current CEO didn't join until Feb 2024 and the new growth strategy didn't come until maybe 6–12 months after. I think the effects of CEA's current approach wouldn't be captured in data until later. Although, this is still useful for showing that there isn't already a significant satisfaction trend that's been recorded.
I appreciate this and I think it's good to just be able to say "I find it hard to engage with your messages," so in that spirit I will try to keep this one short, I know I tend to write a lot:
first point: reasonable. I held that theory loosely. I wasn't under the impression that this belief was widespread, but I think it's very possible that more people think EA is worse than comparable communities than I expect. As a separate point, I also do think this piece has struck a nerve for some and I hear you on that point.
not sure about second point, I think the hypothesis that your methodology is not the main crux is reasonable
thanks for engaging more fully. It's your post and I don't want to make your comment section feel super overwhelming, so I'll just commit to not commenting on this post further.
Nathan, I genuinely think this is more emotional for you than it is for me. Yes, sexual harassment is a personal topic for me, but it's also one I've thought about a lot on an intellectual level. And further, I have no emotional commitment to the question of whether EA is better, the same, or worse. I've previously written that I guess it's probably about the same as comparable communities.
It is definitely true we have had several interpersonal interactions over the years and we don't get on, but the epistemic feedback that I wrote, I meant sincerely and without prejudice. It has several agree votes. I recommend you try reading it again and really consider it, if you'd like to. As a nudge, my feedback was not "you didn't respond to each one of my points." Of course, you also don't have to read it! I'm sure I am more glib and frustrated in my tone when I talk with you, so I don't mean to suggest that our personal frustrations don't come through at all on my end. And as others have pointed out, if the original post contained a better analysis and a more genuinely curious tone, I think this whole post would've gone over differently. I genuinely think I could write a post: "how do rates of sexual harassment in EA compare to other communities?" and it would be very well written and it would probably go over great, I'm sure I'd get some pushback but I wouldn't mind. But I mean it sincerely when I say, I don't find this question particularly important so this isn't something I would personally bother writing. I'm sure someone else could also do a great job, or CH could write this very well, but it's a matter of finding someone who can write these kinds of things well, has the motivation, and the time for it.
"My impression is that, if asked, many people would say that EA is significantly worse than other spaces."
I found this useful! It's good to know what others are seeing & hearing. FWIW, my personal experience with this is something vague, like:
I know I've seen tweets to this effect over the years. I think I remember someone prominent mentioning that they found EA (and EA conferences) to be somewhat worse than econ (on sexism or similar)
My in-person experience with this type of thing is much more nuanced. I.e. when I discuss this with community members or adjacent, I don't usually hear one claim about whether EA is better or worse, I tend to hear a more nuanced collection of ways in which EA might be particularly bad, and other ways in which it compares to past jobs, industries, communities, etc. I've definitely heard from women who were frustrated/tired of the sexism and left. This happens in comparable communities if you consider, e.g., tech comparable.
Several times, I've personally mentioned that I don't suspect EA is particularly worse, both online and in-person. In june, 2025, I wrote "I don’t think the EA community is particularly sexist. As it turns out, sexism is everywhere. I also don’t think it’s particularly not sexist, though that’s tricky for me to gauge as one person with one set of experiences. However, I do feel comfortable saying that EA has a unique flavour of sexism that I had to learn to navigate and defend against." I've personally never had any problems making this claim or faced visible social repercussions for it. FWIW I'm not actually sure I still think this, I basically just don't know what I think. If someone actually had good data on this or carefully reasoned thoughts, I'd definitely read it.
"Re "why do we even care about a baseline?" Ime, when harassment gets brought up (e.g. on the forum), people say that there were basic/common/cheap/expected mitigations that would have prevented the incident."
My hot take is that, a lot of the people who suggest this don't have a super developed understanding of sexual harassment, or they don't have much real-world experience, or they're quite young. I personally don't think there is some quick fix. Partly because EA has unique features that drive its gendered-issues. Unfortunately, this is actually a more doomy view than the idea that there are quick fixes, because it further supports that women who find the community difficult to tolerate/navigate should just leave.
Over the past couple months, I've intentionally began to try and distance myself from EA and been much happier for it (I don't do in-person meetup type stuff much anymore, am trying to do less "directly EA" online stuff, and I don't know if I'd ever consider doing meta-EA work again). I guess you could say that I'm implying EA is worse than comparable communities, but I don't mean it that way. It's just like, these days I do my job and hang out with my friends/family, and I only check the forum if I get an email notification that my post has been mentioned because I forgot to turn off email notifications for mentions :')
So I guess that's where I'm coming from when I say that I personally don't care much for this comparison. I feel like I have enough personal, direct, and specific data to conclude something is going wrong and something isn't meeting my standards. I'm realising that's a way in which I'm ill-placed for this discussion. If I didn't have a pretty thorough view formed over years, base rate might also be the first thing I want to understand. I guess I'm just personally well past that, but I've updated that this specific idea is worth discussing on the forum. I'm sceptical it will ever be done well, but alas.
I've noticed a pattern of a particular rhetorical move you tend to use, whereby you sidestep engaging meaningfully with people's points and instead continue to ask pointed questions. With these questions, it's relatively clear that you have one answer you agree with and expect back. If you don't get that answer, you tend to simply continue posing further questions, sidestepping other points, and pushing in the direction of a specific answer. If this method eventually produces an answer you're looking for, or something close, I then see: "great, now that we've established [narrow thing of x] to be true through my questioning, we can conclude [original claim I've been trying to prove all along]." Sometimes, I've noticed you'll do this even if the person hasn't exactly agreed with narrow thing of x. I think this is unproductive and poor epistemics.
Let me explain. The steel man of your point is: to understand a problem, you need to understand its magnitude. Yes, agree. Again, as per my edit, I was being glib. Let me be more precise.
I'll take my events example. I do want to understand base rates. I want all data, data is great! Let's pretend at most events, 10% of attendees are harassed. At my event, I find out it's 40%. Or, in a different example, it's 0.2%. Both of these are important and significant differences. Now, the base rate becomes quite important to understand and investigate.
Let's say, I find out that at my event, it's 8%. This is more comparable to the case presented in your post. My boss wants me to write an internal document about harassment at events. The first paragraph may include a base rate, for grounding. The internal document will not be titled "our events are not worse than baseline!" and the vast majority of the document will not focus on making this case. Because, what's the point? It would be a waste of my manager's time. I'll write about what problems I suspect are occurring at our events (hopefully I have a good model of this, or can investigate), and I'll talk about potential interventions we might be able to take, if any.
To the second point, you have indeed misunderstood. I've never seen a post that says, "The average donation per person within EA per year is so much higher than middle income donations generally! And yet, we still keep trying to encourage giving in the EA community. Are we understanding the scope of the giving problem? Are we somehow implying EAs aren't already way better than baseline?" And I've never seen a post that says, "woah, people are always debating about veganism and whatnot but, EAs are way lower than the base rate anyways, so why are we not explicitly acknowledging that when we try and suggest people should consider veganism? Or offsetting?" My point was never that these numbers can't be found. My point was that, we do not set our moral standards on baselines. We ask people in this community to care about suffering and to be morally ambitious. Why can't we ask that of sexual harassment, as well.
Would be interested in disagreement, fwiw here are my misc. thoughts on the forum and my experience with it:
I'm really sorry this happened to you, and I really commend you for standing by yourself and going to court. Taking legal action is stressful, time-consuming, and can be incredibly scary, but I'm glad you did it.
Now that I think about it, I've never seen Banksy and 80,000 Hours podcast host Zershaaneh Qureshi in the same room.....
FWIW, the current CEO didn't join until Feb 2024 and the new growth strategy didn't come until maybe 6–12 months after. I think the effects of CEA's current approach wouldn't be captured in data until later. Although, this is still useful for showing that there isn't already a significant satisfaction trend that's been recorded.
I appreciate this and I think it's good to just be able to say "I find it hard to engage with your messages," so in that spirit I will try to keep this one short, I know I tend to write a lot:
Nathan, I genuinely think this is more emotional for you than it is for me. Yes, sexual harassment is a personal topic for me, but it's also one I've thought about a lot on an intellectual level. And further, I have no emotional commitment to the question of whether EA is better, the same, or worse. I've previously written that I guess it's probably about the same as comparable communities.
It is definitely true we have had several interpersonal interactions over the years and we don't get on, but the epistemic feedback that I wrote, I meant sincerely and without prejudice. It has several agree votes. I recommend you try reading it again and really consider it, if you'd like to. As a nudge, my feedback was not "you didn't respond to each one of my points." Of course, you also don't have to read it! I'm sure I am more glib and frustrated in my tone when I talk with you, so I don't mean to suggest that our personal frustrations don't come through at all on my end. And as others have pointed out, if the original post contained a better analysis and a more genuinely curious tone, I think this whole post would've gone over differently. I genuinely think I could write a post: "how do rates of sexual harassment in EA compare to other communities?" and it would be very well written and it would probably go over great, I'm sure I'd get some pushback but I wouldn't mind. But I mean it sincerely when I say, I don't find this question particularly important so this isn't something I would personally bother writing. I'm sure someone else could also do a great job, or CH could write this very well, but it's a matter of finding someone who can write these kinds of things well, has the motivation, and the time for it.
Hi Caleb! :)
I found this useful! It's good to know what others are seeing & hearing. FWIW, my personal experience with this is something vague, like:
My hot take is that, a lot of the people who suggest this don't have a super developed understanding of sexual harassment, or they don't have much real-world experience, or they're quite young. I personally don't think there is some quick fix. Partly because EA has unique features that drive its gendered-issues. Unfortunately, this is actually a more doomy view than the idea that there are quick fixes, because it further supports that women who find the community difficult to tolerate/navigate should just leave.
Over the past couple months, I've intentionally began to try and distance myself from EA and been much happier for it (I don't do in-person meetup type stuff much anymore, am trying to do less "directly EA" online stuff, and I don't know if I'd ever consider doing meta-EA work again). I guess you could say that I'm implying EA is worse than comparable communities, but I don't mean it that way. It's just like, these days I do my job and hang out with my friends/family, and I only check the forum if I get an email notification that my post has been mentioned because I forgot to turn off email notifications for mentions :')
So I guess that's where I'm coming from when I say that I personally don't care much for this comparison. I feel like I have enough personal, direct, and specific data to conclude something is going wrong and something isn't meeting my standards. I'm realising that's a way in which I'm ill-placed for this discussion. If I didn't have a pretty thorough view formed over years, base rate might also be the first thing I want to understand. I guess I'm just personally well past that, but I've updated that this specific idea is worth discussing on the forum. I'm sceptical it will ever be done well, but alas.
I've noticed a pattern of a particular rhetorical move you tend to use, whereby you sidestep engaging meaningfully with people's points and instead continue to ask pointed questions. With these questions, it's relatively clear that you have one answer you agree with and expect back. If you don't get that answer, you tend to simply continue posing further questions, sidestepping other points, and pushing in the direction of a specific answer. If this method eventually produces an answer you're looking for, or something close, I then see: "great, now that we've established [narrow thing of x] to be true through my questioning, we can conclude [original claim I've been trying to prove all along]." Sometimes, I've noticed you'll do this even if the person hasn't exactly agreed with narrow thing of x. I think this is unproductive and poor epistemics.
You said, "The community response to that case was pretty unified," which was my jumping off point.
Let me explain. The steel man of your point is: to understand a problem, you need to understand its magnitude. Yes, agree. Again, as per my edit, I was being glib. Let me be more precise.
I'll take my events example. I do want to understand base rates. I want all data, data is great! Let's pretend at most events, 10% of attendees are harassed. At my event, I find out it's 40%. Or, in a different example, it's 0.2%. Both of these are important and significant differences. Now, the base rate becomes quite important to understand and investigate.
Let's say, I find out that at my event, it's 8%. This is more comparable to the case presented in your post. My boss wants me to write an internal document about harassment at events. The first paragraph may include a base rate, for grounding. The internal document will not be titled "our events are not worse than baseline!" and the vast majority of the document will not focus on making this case. Because, what's the point? It would be a waste of my manager's time. I'll write about what problems I suspect are occurring at our events (hopefully I have a good model of this, or can investigate), and I'll talk about potential interventions we might be able to take, if any.
To the second point, you have indeed misunderstood. I've never seen a post that says, "The average donation per person within EA per year is so much higher than middle income donations generally! And yet, we still keep trying to encourage giving in the EA community. Are we understanding the scope of the giving problem? Are we somehow implying EAs aren't already way better than baseline?" And I've never seen a post that says, "woah, people are always debating about veganism and whatnot but, EAs are way lower than the base rate anyways, so why are we not explicitly acknowledging that when we try and suggest people should consider veganism? Or offsetting?" My point was never that these numbers can't be found. My point was that, we do not set our moral standards on baselines. We ask people in this community to care about suffering and to be morally ambitious. Why can't we ask that of sexual harassment, as well.