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Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

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Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#371

Post by pk-protect-ai »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #61
jfengel wrote: post #12

The worst thing about being smart is how easy it is to talk yourself into believing just about anything. After all, you make really good arguments. EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things. Once that happens, it can easily spiral out from there. Peopl…

> EA appeals to exactly that kind of really-smart-person who is perfectly capable of convincing themselves that they're always right about everything. And from there, you can justify all kinds of terrible things. I came to the same conclusion after a group of my friends got involved with the local rationalist and EA community, though for a different reason: Their drug habits. They believed themselves to have a better…

This in particular does not look clever:

"They believed themselves to have a better grasp on human nature and behavior than the average person, and therefore believed they were better at controlling themselves."

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#372

Post by matthewdgreen »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #368
matthewdgreen wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the UK castle was funded by a directed donation from another EA organization that had close ties to CEA. As far as I know, Moscovitz did not direct that organization to buy a castle. Instead a group of tightly-connected colleagues/friends in two EA organizations made the determination, without any (public) cost/benefit analysis or buy-in from the community. This is the precisely the sort of t…

Dustin posts a lot on the ea meme Facebook group(no clue how he finds the time while being the ceo of asana) and admitted to being the buyer there. Could’ve been memeing, but he seemed serious. I think CEA has made some poor choices, and SBFs future fund even more so. But if it’s true that the money used for this property was specifically earmarked for purchase of a property by a single donor as the forum post claims…

I searched the link you provided for anything that claimed Dustin Moskovitz requested that purchase, but I didn't find it. I did however find this detailed explanation of the grant-making process [1] by Claire Zabel of Open Philanthropy, and it seems pretty clear that the request to purchase Wytham Abbey came from Owen (Cotton-Barratt, I think?) of CEA (now known as Effective Ventures.)

Claire provides her justification for granting the funds to purchase the property, and it is not particularly compelling. (She even concludes that she would not have made the grant if she had a chance to do it over today.) There certainly doesn't appear to have been anything approaching due diligence about the cost-effectiveness of this particular purchase, which is really surprising given that effective use of resources is the core premise of EA.

To make things worse, the commenters point out that Claire Zabel is also on the board of Effective Ventures (formerly CEA), which makes this a much worse conflict of interest. It's hard to look at these organizations as anything more than a tightly-knit group of friends passing donor money around between them.

PS If CEA and OP are just fronts for Dustin Moscovitz, it's totally fine for them to spend money on whatever they want: as long as he's cool with it. I had the impression these organizations were part of a broader community promoting the principles of Effective Altruism as a movement, and the community would hold them to those principles. It is extremely difficult to look at the details of this episode and believe that's happening.

[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/...

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#373

Post by EFreethought »

yosito wrote: post #187

> men at informal EA gatherings tried to convince her A lot of people are focusing on the polyamory. While that may have been something that offended people or made them uncomfortable, that is not the issue. The key issues here are around the words "informal" and "convince". I have non-traditional views about human sexuality. Even if I had traditional views, I spend a lot of time in different cultures where the tradi…

> If someone seems hesitant to talk about a topic, don't continue.

I wish more people followed this advice in general.

One game some people play (which I really hate) is when they say: "I am not asking you about $TOPIC, I am just trying to understand why you do not want to talk about $TOPIC".

Talking about why you do not want to talk about something is still talking about it.

And sometimes I am simply not interested in something or thinking about it any further.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#374

Post by xchip »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #84
xchip wrote: post #65

This is a free article, and for the same reason in Photography Books, on the cover there is usually a naked lady, in these free articles the story is also always about sex or something that appeals to your instincts. Chances are this story was exaggerated up to a point to make it call your attention so you subscribe. If something is free, you are the product.

I waded through many, many paragraphs to discover that some of the crimes included people making comments that made others feel uncomfortable. I was kind of expecting more. So, yes, it looks like I was the product here. It made me feel uncomfortable!

Stories, in order to be interesting have to cause emotions, any emotion will do. We even classify movies by the type of emotions they evoke: horror, love, drama, humour,gore,... and this is yet another genre. It is not a free article, it is a bait to get you subscribed.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#375

Post by LarryMullins »

skissane wrote: post #333
LarryMullins wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few microscopic fungal-like spore things could throw a wrench in that. Now the planet is a nature reserve.

Declaring Mars a “nature reserve” would be completely unenforceable. Suppose you convince US Congress to pass a law banning Americans from sending humans to Mars, due to the risk of contamination to native Martian microbes. What happens when China says “now is our chance to show the world we’ve eclipsed the US by sending humans to Mars when they won’t“? Even though such a Chinese mission isn’t feasible today (an Amer…

> Declaring Mars a “nature reserve” would be completely unenforceable.

Generally worked pretty well for Antarctica. A few research bases are permitted but colonization is internationally banned and not happening.

BTW, colonizing Antarctica would be a lot easier than colonizing Mars. Far fewer technical challenges to overcome, and much more practical experience overcoming those challenges.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#376

Post by HDThoreaun »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #372
HDThoreaun wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dustin posts a lot on the ea meme Facebook group(no clue how he finds the time while being the ceo of asana) and admitted to being the buyer there. Could’ve been memeing, but he seemed serious. I think CEA has made some poor choices, and SBFs future fund even more so. But if it’s true that the money used for this property was specifically earmarked for purchase of a property by a single donor as the forum post claims…

I searched the link you provided for anything that claimed Dustin Moskovitz requested that purchase, but I didn't find it. I did however find this detailed explanation of the grant-making process [1] by Claire Zabel of Open Philanthropy, and it seems pretty clear that the request to purchase Wytham Abbey came from Owen (Cotton-Barratt, I think?) of CEA (now known as Effective Ventures.) Claire provides her justificat…

Open Phil is literally just Dustin’s foundation. He’s also one of the main funders of givewell’s research work and I am not a fan of how incestuous a lot of the orgs are.

The point of the link was the explanation the guy at CEA who ran the project gave. I agree it’s not good enough and have come to conclusion that this is just something xx Dustin thought would be cool, which is not very EA, but I guess his prerogative.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#377

Post by bradlys »

broof wrote: post #149

For anyone that actually read the article, idk how much criticism there is for EA, but rather seemed more like a expose on how the Bay Area EA culture is heavily polyamorous with men abusing job connections to pressure women. Seems more like a Bay Area thing than an EA thing. I’m not sure though as I am not involved in any of these…

This read heavily like any of the polyamorous circles that I’ve been in. The poor handles around consent and the desire to maximize their reputation months after such incidents is… well, strikingly familiar to me.

I never have been poly and never will be. I wish I didn’t know anyone who was poly but they just find their ways into my circles due to poly being common with some hobbies I have.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#378

Post by deathclassic »

epylar wrote: post #351
deathclassic wrote: post #346

What? A bunch of autistic male nerds obsessed with how smart they are don't respect women? I'm so suprised. Anyway, I dismissed EA because I dismiss basically all forms of utilitarian ethics. When you try to use math and statistics to form your entire moral basis, you can kinda justify anything you want, and get to some weird contradictory judgements as well.

Is autism correlated with disrespect of women?

Not directly. But it is directly correlated with disregard for others feelings, and general lack of social awareness. Which in the case of male EA nerds certainly seems to lead to a lot of situations in which women were disrespected to say the least.

Re: Effective altruism has a sexual harassment problem, women say

#379

Post by matthewdgreen »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #376
matthewdgreen wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I searched the link you provided for anything that claimed Dustin Moskovitz requested that purchase, but I didn't find it. I did however find this detailed explanation of the grant-making process [1] by Claire Zabel of Open Philanthropy, and it seems pretty clear that the request to purchase Wytham Abbey came from Owen (Cotton-Barratt, I think?) of CEA (now known as Effective Ventures.) Claire provides her justificat…

Open Phil is literally just Dustin’s foundation. He’s also one of the main funders of givewell’s research work and I am not a fan of how incestuous a lot of the orgs are. The point of the link was the explanation the guy at CEA who ran the project gave. I agree it’s not good enough and have come to conclusion that this is just something xx Dustin thought would be cool, which is not very EA, but I guess his prerogativ…

The contention made (far!) up-thread was "When there is a lot of money moving around, it seems inevitable that power structures will form around it."

Then somebody else said that CEA's budget was only $6m, so how bad could things get? The Wytham Abbey example was brought up just to show how much more money CEA could tap into, through its connections with other EA orgs.

But from my perspective, the EA "castle adventure" is also an excellent illustration of those power structures. Here we see a small number of people (friends, colleagues, fellow board members) take control of core EA institutions (using enormous flows of donor cash) with very little pushback from the community. And worse, they are using this money for purposes that are completely at odds with the stated principles of the EA movement.

As an outsider, if a few people with access to cash are so easily able to capture the most prominent orgs in the EA movement and make them ineffective, then that's pretty terrible for EA as a brand. This doesn't mean I'm opposed to the broader concept of "giving money effectively", but I'm definitely going to feel an aversion to anything that carries the EA label.

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