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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34530 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Elevatorgate: Effective Altruism version?Effective Altruism Promises to Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse

Does anyone remember Elevatorgate? Long story short: the atheist "movement" had gotten going, many books were published and cons were attended. At one a figure in the community "Skepchick"- Rebecca Watson- was propositioned by a man who'd attended her talk in an elevator and made a video stating - in understated tones given the conflagration it started tbh - that she didn't like it and it made her feel unsafe.

Because this was pre-#MeToo and the Great Awokening and atheists at the time kind of prided themselves on being assholes truth-tellers , figures like Dawkins jumped in, criticizing or mocking her for complaining about such an anodyne event. Dawkins wrote a notorious letter titled "Dear Muslima", mockingly comparing the suffering of a hypothetical circumcised Muslim woman with Watson in the sort of move that wouldn't even begin to fly today.

Well...that led to an absolute shitstorm that split the atheist community with some using it to create "Atheism+": basically atheism that was sufficiently woke, after insisting atheism had a racism/sexism/whatever problem. As foreshadowing for a now pervasive social tendency, it then ate itself with circular firing squads and purity spirals.

At the time, there was enough pushback that Watson and her defenders didn't outright win but she probably won the moral victory. Years down the line most of the leftover "100% atheist" communities were pretty woke, see the banning of RationalityRules for arguing against trans-identified males in women's sports.

Now...

But as Gopalakrishnan got further into the movement, she realized that “the advertised reality of EA is very different from the actual reality of EA,” she says. She noticed that EA members in the Bay Area seemed to work together, live together, and sleep together, often in polyamorous sexual relationships with complex professional dynamics. Three times in one year, she says, men at informal EA gatherings tried to convince her to join these so-called “polycules.” When Gopalakrishnan said she wasn’t interested, she recalls, they would “shame” her or try to pressure her, casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach.

After a particularly troubling incident of sexual harassment, Gopalakrishnan wrote a post on an online forum for EAs in Nov. 2022. While she declined to publicly describe details of the incident, she argued that EA’s culture was hostile toward women. “It puts your safety at risk,” she wrote, adding that most of the access to funding and opportunities within the movement was controlled by men. Gopalakrishnan was alarmed at some of the responses. One commenter wrote that her post was “bigoted” against polyamorous people. Another said it would “pollute the epistemic environment,” and argued it was “net-negative for solving the problem.”

...

Gopalakrishnan is one of seven women connected to effective altruism who tell TIME they experienced misconduct ranging from harassment and coercion to sexual assault within the community. The women allege EA itself is partly to blame. They say that effective altruism’s overwhelming maleness, its professional incestuousness, its subculture of polyamory and its overlap with tech-bro dominated “rationalist” groups have combined to create an environment in which sexual misconduct can be tolerated, excused, or rationalized away. Several described EA as having a “cult-like” dynamic.

...

One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”

I'm torn.

On the one hand, I recognize the same tactics (and, tbh, it doesn't escape my notice that the first victim seems to have social competition with males for funding on her mind) that ripped the Atheist community apart. I also find most of the examples of harassment to be of the all-too-common nebulous and vague variety that allow people to claim victimhood. I honestly don't know if people are this fragile nowadays, or are exaggerating their fragility for points, but it is a bit absurd. If you're an adult, I don't want to hear about you being groomed. A "22f-44m" relationship is one where one party is twice as old but it'd be absurd to act like one party didn't have agency.

A lot of the complaints also seem to be that alleged rationalists and effective altruists - for some reason - don't just take people at their word.

On the other hand: some of these (e.g. the final one I quoted, the one about a male jumping into a woman's bed at night) are more egregious and the quokka point is well-applied here for those "good" EAs who still encouraged people not to go to the cops. It's exactly the sort of problematic math I can see some people doing. Hell, people did it all the time in churches, schools and so on. It's not a particular foible of EAs.

Also:

Several of the women who spoke to TIME said that the popularity of polyamory within EA fosters an environment in which men—often men who control career opportunities–feel empowered to recruit younger women into uncomfortable sexual relationships. Many EAs embrace nontraditional living arrangements and question established taboos, and plenty of people, including many women, enthusiastically consent to sharing partners with others.

I have to say I find this funny. People discovering that looser social and sexual norms allow bad actors - or merely "people with more status than me who don't want to treat me as I think I deserve" - to accrue sexual and social benefits and blur the lines. Quelle surprise.

This feels less like breaking social and sexual norms and more like the same old problem with mixed gender workplaces under a different name.

I don't think I have ever been in an adult work environment where there wasn't at least one couple. I met my wife at work, I had two other work romances before I met my wife.

If you put people together a bunch, and give them a common interest then they will at a minimum develop some friendships and social ties. It shouldn't be a surprise that some of the friends start taking it further if they share a sexual interest in each other.

I think people should be responsible and be adults. Which is a whole package of norms and expectations. And I'm guessing the EA crowd broke some of those rules.

However I sometimes feel like the metoo movement and some parts of feminist groups want a completely asexual workplace. I feel that such a thing is largely impossible, but would also be a travesty. Once an adult leaves college the workplace can become one of their best places for finding a compatible life partner. Apps and bars are a shitty replacement.

Maybe this is a result of working in a heavily gender-imbalanced field but I have never once seen a romantic relationship between coworkers. An asexual workplace would be great. In fact I would guess this is the norm actually. I doubt many kindergarden teachers or oil field workers even have many people of the right sex to pick from.

I've worked at a large tech company, with SWEs being roughly 80:20. Every woman on my team and partner teams ended up dating a coworker. One of them, a 24 year old new grad, ended up dating her 30-something TL. They got married last year.

I'm sure they would be frowned upon by the powers that be, but all of them were happy relationships, and the world would be worse off if those weren't allowed to happen.

Amen, brother. Workplace romances are cancer, though it doesn’t surprise me they would be so common in “tech.” The people who flock to that industry aren’t exactly known for their adaptability to adult social spaces, and the workplace gives them a captive audience with at least a shared interest in profession. It’s “easy mode” for nerds, to an extent.

I also innately detest the kinds of people who try to shit where they eat. It’s an annoyance for those of us just trying to do a job when Boy and Girl are going through a rough patch and can’t work together properly (though they love to insist they can keep it professional, that’s always a lie).

Is tech special? If anything I've seen much more workplace cheating and stuff outside of tech in the business world.

Romantic relationships happen in any human social setting, assuming it's because tech people are weird is unfounded.

Tech isn’t “special,” just contemptible. I observed it all too much in high school and college: the desperate, one-sided infatuation of a large group of nerdy, undersexed men toward their handful of female peers. I have no reason to believe this becomes less contemptible as these young nerds became old, working nerds, though the inflated salaries likely does a number to their egos and baseline confidence.

As I said, these men are typically very bad at cold socializing outside of work, so they become desperate and obnoxious to those around them who are just trying to do a job, since their priority is finding a willing fuck monkey while they’re young.

If this isn't pure trolling, it's an impressively antagonistic simulacrum. Don't post like this, please.

I worked in gender imbalanced tech industry when I met my wife. Ratio was probably 70:30 :: Male:Female.

My wife was also far more aware of relationships between coworkers than I was. I thought it was uncommon, but with her connection to the social grapevine at work she told me of dozens of couples.

Yeah, no. Workplace relationships are completely normal, and insisting on their impropriety feels absolutely inhumane to me. I'd call it a strictly American obsession, but of course neuroses seem to be one of USA's top exports, so I'm seeing it creep into where I live as well. Well, I'm married so I don't care, have fun on the dating apps, kids.

Americans act like sex is illegal under Federal law.

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