I want to apologize to you for some of the things I said in the comments on this post 3 years ago. What you did was much closer to an innocent miscommunication than any of us were willing to admit during peak-woke. I stood up to the pressure to be overly #MeToo about your mistakes more than almost anyone else, but even I made statements that were overly critical of you that I should have known better than to make. 

I looked back on the things I said here in response to a current sexual misconduct controversy, and was so disappointed in myself that I have tried to make amends to the community by being braver in a discussion on the current controversy on another post. 

I want to especially apologize to you as an early career woman with autism. Communication is confusing, even for neurotypicals. When I make similar mistakes to the ones you made, people treat me with empathy, simply because of my gender and career stage. I should have used that privilege to be braver about standing up for you.

I was unclear here in a way I’d like to clarify. I think an even better solution than coaching would be not really worrying about this stuff at the organizational level. I didn’t mean to imply I think there is something is intrinsically wrong with gender imbalances in  fields. 

If coaching makes workers more productive enough to justify the costs it makes sense, but I don’t think it should be done in order to increase female representation. Women aren’t better professionals than the equivalent man. It frustrates me that women in STEM are essentially paid more for the same work because of all these to initiatives to increase our representation. I suspect some at my university are in blatant violation of anti-discrimination laws. 

Some professions have more female-typical communication norms; others have more male-typical communication norms. More typically male communication norms are not just preferred by many men but many women as well. The more male communication norms in the EA Berkeley community feel like a haven for me. Gendered communication norms within professions typically correlate with how gendered the interest in the profession is for other reasons. For example, fields like mine and other quantitative ones that make EA concepts particularly accessible are typically more attractive to men than women because men and women have different average interests. AI safety is one of these professions. 
 

I realize these are new arguments so I’m happy for people to respond to this if they think I’m wrong, but I probably won’t engage much further with the issue given my high workload at present. 

Thanks for sharing your counterarguments. I appreciate it. It sounds like we have fundamentally different views on the agency of women in my position. While I'm sure we could both learn a lot by going more in depth into this topic together, that's not something I have time to do with my current workload.

Before I leave it there I will say that I actually consider dating within one's profession to reduce instances of sexual misconduct, not increase them. In the Berkeley EA scene a man who treats his sexual/romantic partner poorly would risk not just his social reputation but generally his whole career. It is a powerful incentive to treat us well. I identify that as one of the main mechanisms that produces a much safer dating environment in the Berkeley EA scene than my alternatives. Happy for you to respond to this new argument if you would like.  
 

I re-read the Time article in response to your comment. I remember it as being misleading at the time, but re-reading it, it's even worse than I remembered. I feel impatient with myself for being so intimidated by pressure to be woke that I gave it as much respect as I did three years ago. I came away motivated to not let our culture slip back into that again. 

I don't have time to get into all the things that frustrated me about that article, but a central one was the expectation that we automatically side with the parties in the story who were women with sexual misconduct allegations. They rarely gave us enough information for us to make an informed decision about what actually happened for ourselves. I respect that some of this information has to be private, but less information means you have raise your uncertainty, not fill in the gaps with assumptions. They instead relied on the #MeToo frame, which society has moved on from for good reasons. We later found out that some of their descriptions were quite misleading. A woman doesn’t become infallible just because she makes a sexual misconduct allegation. She is only human like the rest of us. For example, we’re now learning that part of one of the current scandals was just an innocent miscommunication. She is also capable of lying. In 2014 Scott Alexander tried to figure out what percent of rape allegations were false. As a lower bound, the near-provably false proportion seems to be 2% to 10%, depending on the study. As an upper bound, studies find that police consider 20% to 40% of rape allegations they get to be unfounded. To me that is too high to justify the assumptions the author made. All information is valuable. Just one instance of sexual misconduct is far too many. But we were illogical to blindly trust such a clearly biased article the way we did. Instead we should have applied the same rigor to addressing sexual misconduct problems that we apply to research on EA cause areas. That is what produces the most useful results in any endeavor, including for the victims of sexual misconduct themselves. 

For context, I was myself a victim of sexual harassment by a senior member of my field (not in EA). He had poor English skills, and it was possible that a miscommunication from that was responsible for the worst thing he did. I felt that I could not report the harassment to the university because this possibility would not have been adequately considered due to the #MeToo mindset. With his visa on the line, it seemed like too great a risk.

Can you say more about the alarming reports of the last few weeks? It sounds like you might have more information about that than I do. 

I agree that we should be doing the best that we can to reduce sexual misconduct, not just settling for being as good as other communities. I mentioned that we don't seem to do worse than other communities because I thought you were arguing that we do. I'm glad I was mistaken.

I'm confused why this post got many downvotes. It seems completely inoffensive to me. Is it just the critique Tom Bry-Chevalier raised, or do people have other critiques? Would be curious to hear from anyone who downvoted it for other reasons. I'm not saying this with the goal of debating this (am very busy with school right now)—I'm just curious. So please don't hesitate because you don't have time for a big debate either. If someone replies to this comment and specifies that they don't have time for a big debate too, I encourage people who disagree with them to respect that, but feel free to go at it if you both want to.

I'm a woman in the Berkeley EA scene, and am puzzled by your perspective. 

My guess is that most of the trouble is that many women are shy, and find it stressful to say they are not interested in a topic of conversation or an event or when men politely proposition them etc. I remember having conversations on this topic on the EA forum 3 years ago. A lot of women argued that we should see ourselves as helpless in a way that deeply disturbed me. For example, they argued that, in general, if a man who is much more powerful in a woman's field than her flirts with her and she dislikes it, it is reasonable for her to flirt back instead of declining the advance, out of fear that he will retaliate against her professionally. But I am that woman! I'm an undergraduate, and I know exactly what happens when you critique leading men in your field in the Berkeley EA scene far more seriously than merely declining their polite advances. These men are so passionate about having good moral character that in all my 5 years in this scene I've never known one who I could picture retaliating against someone for declining their sexual or romantic advances. In fact, they are so clearly more respectful towards us than they are in the surrounding communities of similar demographics that dating outside this community is such a bigger relative risk that I no longer bother with it. It seems like there is a gargantuan gap between what many women think would happen if they spoke up about their preferences and what the world is really like, so I think Nathan's post was highly appropriate. 

As with any community, sexual misconduct occasionally occurs, but I know that Nathan takes these cases very seriously. So do I. It does not seem to me that this post is downplaying them. It also doesn't seem that EA has worse sexual misconduct rates than other communities. That post does not discuss the Berkeley scene specifically, but knowing that it is so much safer than my alternatives makes me skeptical the numbers would be worse if the sample was limited to us instead of just being disproportionately us. 

Men changing their behavior is not a solution if women being shy is the problem. If they are too shy to turn down sexual/romantic advances, sexual/romantic discomfort is likely the least of our worries—presumably it is also holding these women back from critiquing these men professionally, doing grave damage to their fields. This is something I'm aware of as a woman in a 90% male field. It is sometimes argued that one way of increasing female representation is speaking less intensely so that women who are intimidated can feel more comfortable speaking. But there is so much value in the intense way that we speak in male dominated fields. A more practical solution to me seems to be some sort of coaching for women who are shy so that they are able to speak up regardless of the intensity of the discussion and regardless of the power of who they are speaking to, like I am. This wasn't something that came naturally to me—I have very far below average self esteem. But I found that overcoming it enough to speak my mind anyway was beyond worth it. I'd rather have a world where other women like me go through such an empowering experience than corrupt our communication so they can remain trapped in insecurity. So far, the critiques I've seen of Berkeley EA sexual/romantic norms remind me a lot of the critiques of my field. 

But this is just my personal experience. I am very open to being wrong. Please tell me what has caused you to develop your perspective. I was a victim of many years of sexual abuse when I was younger—if sexual abuse is in fact the main problem, it is very important to me that we address it. 

I feel more confident about this than I did in July. 

The 2021 US real median household income numbers were released, and they showed a 1% decrease despite a similarly large stimulus package and real GDP growth improving by 7 percentage points, because inflation got so bad. Without a large stimulus package, and with worse inflation and real GDP growth, incomes could easily have decreased in 2022. US real median household income grew by 90% between 1979 and 2021, making a decrease a rare and important experience. 

Nate Silver also came out with an article making a similar argument, noting that real disposable personal income has stagnated during the Biden administration. While I dislike this source because it is not a median measurement in a time when incomes could well be growing faster for poorer Americans than richer ones, he notes that it has historically been one of the best predictors of election outcomes. 

Thanks for sharing your expertise. 

I will add that I found this type of analysis for why inflation was higher in the US persuasive. For example, this study from 2022 by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that likely 3 percentage points of the higher inflation (basically all of it at the time) in the US compared to other rich countries was due to the stimulus in the US. But yes, I agree that the history of low inflation (and I believe lower stimulus than was appropriate during The Great Recession) made this a reasonable mistake to make. 

I should note that the purpose of my post wasn't to make a point about the pros and cons of different policies. I just wanted to point out that the personal experiences of voters were probably pretty different than most of us were thinking. I feel like I should have put more thought into making that clearer. I've been enjoying our conversation though!

Thank you for sharing!

I’m glad experts are taking it more seriously than laypeople. However, I still feel like laypeople can have a lot of influence. Many of us are performing outreach in swing states, have significant online presences, and/or have friends or family members who are undecided.

I also think that these extremely unusual circumstances merit experts focusing on economic conditions outside the current presidential term more than would normally be the case.

I do feel that the inflation problems Biden has experienced are largely self-inflicted (to the extent that politicians can influence economic conditions, which I agree is generally overestimated under normal circumstances). His budget deficit in his first year wasn’t much smaller than Trump’s, which was another unprecedented circumstance and I believe also unnecessarily large. The deficit has still not come down to its normal levels for this part of the business cycle (even the levels before inflation was a problem). The Economist often argues that the deficits have played a big role in inflation, and my professors in my economics major have encouraged me to trust their analysis a lot. It’s still helpful to notice how little room for error he had given the context. I feel the role of deficits under Biden is more commonly understood in our community than the role of the deficit in 2020.

I've been thinking about your perspective lately, and wondered if there is a variable I hadn't considered enough. I was raised middle class American. For this post, I drew on my decade of experience as a lower class American after a disability left me unable to earn a good living for a long time. My field was heavily male dominated (construction). Since in my experience lower class American norms seem more gendered to me, I would expect the experience of someone who hasn't worked in a male-dominated lower class American field to be pretty different from mine. My friends were ones I made from work, so they already considered me one of the guys. Do you think your experience was different from mine because you didn't work in a male-dominated field? 

I also suspect I gave off a one-of-the-guys vibe (because that's the environment I prefer) that you don't that altered how people treated me. I found this Slate Star Codex post helpful in thinking about this.