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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34531 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.

You know, I discovered something about myself a few weeks ago, just before Christmas, that I have since been working on. I was doing some mindless heavy lifting at work so I put on All Day by Girl Talk because it has a fast tempo and good bass, and my boss complained. But the way she did it was to say she didn't like it and it was too rap heavy and ha ha ha, I didn't really like that kind of thing did I? I mean really ha ha, this is the kind of... music you like? And I almost quit on the spot.

It was a pretty over the top reaction from me, but there was an enormous amount of pressure inside me to terminate the relationship when I felt her trying so hard to manipulate me. And I think what it is is that I have been burned so many times by manipulative actors (my brother and I used to have a gallows humour joke that our family get togethers were daes dae'mar there was so much manipulation going on) that now if I sense manipulation I have a visceral reaction.

And so this is obviously something I have to work on (because it makes me easy to manipulate), but in the meantime, I have to say this is excessively manipulative and I don't give a shit if they have a point, they need to be fired - from a cannon into the sun. Otherwise just give them EA already and save us all the extra drama, because that's where this is going to end up, yet another "smart" community 'to be fair'ing a sociopath into power.

Side note: Dawkins was right, elevatorgate - and this shit too - is pure first world problems and had we listened to him and taken that route - the route you describe as truth telling - the woke would be a lot less powerful. And yet you still act like he was in the wrong for being an asshole. It feels like you are being the kind of quokka who would advise against going to the cops, but instead of covering for creepy losers you are covering for manipulative cunts.

All Day by Girl Talk

Thanks for the rec; 5 minutes in and this sounds absolutely fire.

Sounds like you would have preferred straight up "turn that shit off, I'm not paying you to listen to music" from the boss. I've worked in jobs where we absolutely were not allowed to play music or listen to the radio because it was office work and "you won't hear the phone/doorbell/whatever". Current boss actually took away the speakers from the work computer so we can't turn on music at work. It's annoying because I never have music on loud enough not to hear the phone etc. and the place is generally quiet and boring that I would appreciate something in the background to help me concentrate, but all I can say is "yes sir no sir three bags full sir".

Like it or lump it, most workplaces will insist on "no distractions". Your boss, being a woman, was trying to manipulate you - but in a social manner, not the direct "turn that shit off because I'm the boss and I say so" that a man might do but the 'softer' way women do so as not to cause ruption in the relationship. Which didn't work, because you react badly to manipulation. But that's why she went the "you don't really like that kind of music, do you?" route instead of the "turn that shit off" route.

Damn it, I was hoping that the idea of playing music at work being the trigger would demonstrate how outsized and primal my reaction was. I'm definitely not complaining about my job or my boss - I love my work and my boss is great.

I mean, I am constantly amazed by all the SWE guys talking about how they just put on their headphones and block out the world. Not all of us have the kinds of jobs where we're allowed cut off all communication like that, we have to be constantly available. Some of it is petty micromanagement but when you can't simply say "fuck you" and walk straight into a new high-paying job, you have to go by the rules.

Though the current wave of tech layoffs might change that for people in such careers as well, who knows? The thing is that I do administrative/receptionist work, so I do have to be able to hear the phone ringing or people calling to the door and so on. But there's no reason that playing the classical music station at a low level would interfere with that, which is why I'm disgruntled. Ah, well. Work is not fun and not meant to be fun so all those going "make your job your passion" can stick it up their jumpers, I keep my passions for my time outside work.

This is why I loved the Covid lockdown because it engendered "working from home" for me, which I do most of the work week now for the past two (going on three) years. I want to play the radio station while I'm working? I can! I want to slob around in my pjs and slippers? I can! I want to take a break, put on a load of laundry or the mid-day meal or whatever? I can! Need to be home for a delivery or workmen calling or such? I can be! Bliss! 😁

Side note: Dawkins was right, elevatorgate - and this shit too - is pure first world problems and had we listened to him and taken that route - the route you describe as truth telling - the woke would be a lot less powerful. And yet you still act like he was in the wrong for being an asshole. It feels like you are being the kind of quokka who would advise against going to the cops, but instead of covering for creepy losers you are covering for manipulative cunts.

Nobody said Dawkins wasn't right. He's a smart guy, he's right often enough. He's just also an asshole, whose idea of disagreement with people is just turning the "be a dick" dial up to 11. IMO a Dawkins approach hurts more than it helps, because it makes people angry and double down rather than actually thinking about the topic. But whether or not that's correct, he was most definitely in the wrong for being an asshole. But that doesn't mean his claims weren't correct - the people he was mocking were also in the wrong.

He's just also an asshole, whose idea of disagreement with people is just turning the "be a dick" dial up to 11.

I think @Fruck is looking at this from today's perspective with "SJWs" having the whip hand and making more and more deranged claims. So the assholishness of people like Dawkins and Amazing Atheist seem less important.

But they were assholes at the time and it mattered. There's "good" assholes - i.e. anally nitpicking expert types who don't care to "read the room" which is good. But there's also the "asshole"' in the more colloquial sense. Atheism had both, sometimes in the same person.

I recall AmazingAtheist engaging with Anita Sarkeesian before she was (in)famous and, instead of just "destroying her with facts and logic", going on a tangent about how she was broken because she was fidgeting. Even then, it seemed a bit fucked to me.

It's also worth remembering that Watson was actually relatively toned down compared to the absurd SA claims being made today, and the reaction was OTT and mocking. Watch the video, it's actually a relatively offhand thing and there was context; she stated that she had spoken about not liking this sort of thing in the conference which adds a point in her favor.

... All of you except for the one man who didn't really grasp, I think, what I was saying on the panel, because, at the bar later that night — actually at four in the morning, we were at the hotel bar, four a.m. I said I've had enough guys, I'm exhausted, going to bed, so I walked to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me and said "Don't take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more, would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?" Um, just a word to the wise here, guys, don't do that. I don't really know how else to explain that this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at four a.m., in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and I, don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I've finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualise me in that manner.

This wasn't a general puritanical thing like today. Nor did she try to humiliate him by naming like the recent video of a woman getting mad at a gym "creep" for staring. She explicitly says she had made her preferences clear here.

Then people like Dawkins jumped on it in an assholish way and this led to the other side responding (I can see how this was seen as male nerd rage and entitlement) and it became way bigger than it ever should have been.

It may not have been a general puritanical thing, and my memory is fuzzy when it comes to the precise ordering of 201x socjus scandals, but it could well have been the accidental prototype that people picked up and ran with. Scott wrote his meditations on livejournal in ~2012, and the elevator incident became the type specimen of "If you ask her out, what's the worst that can happen? She says no?".

And despite being warned about the dangers of superweapon-builders, here we are. Confined to an obscure internet forum because it turns out that superweapons are pretty powerful.

but it could well have been the accidental prototype that people picked up and ran with

I've seen others making similar claims in this thread and I think it reverses cause and effect. That brand of atheism was pushed by mainly urban, educated, cosmopolitan, secular humanist types, i.e. already progressive. If it represents anything it's just that they were more likely to be subject to those ideas earlier than the rest of us, they didn't spawn it.

"If you ask her out, what's the worst that can happen? She says no?".

I think there is a clear difference here: Watson didn't publicly humiliate the man or claim she was abused and she had allegedly made it clear beforehand that she didn't like being approached that way. Basically, she did say no.

She did publicly humiliate him; she just didn't name him.

Sometimes you can't tell the truth nicely. Sometimes people won't hear the truth if you are nice about it, and I also think that there are times only an asshole can see the truth. A lie can circle the globe before the truth gets its pants on sometimes, and a forceful personality is required to shock people out of complacency.

I think you get a healthier society with smart and honest assholes than with smart and polite manipulators. This kind of Manipulative behaviour is almost always nicer than turning the be a dick dial up, but it is always worse for your community.

To put it another way, when you set the truth aside for propriety you give control to whoever defines propriety. That's how you get purity spirals and sociopaths. Maybe there was a way for Dawkins to make his point without being a dick. I would like to think that's true, even though it feels naive to me these days. But that isn't what happened, atheists had a choice between honest assholes and polite manipulation - they chose manipulation and reaped the rewards. I hope EA don't make the same mistake.

Edit: added the words "This kind of" in front of manipulative behaviour until I can think of the term I should have used in the first place to describe the behaviour I mean.

Maybe there was a way for Dawkins to make his point without being a dick.

Is it objectively worse to undergo FGM than to be groped? Yes. Does that mean being groped is okay? No. And that's where Dawkins was being a petty little bitch: "oh boo hoo worse things happen at sea". He was motivated by wanting to protect his in-group: atheists (men, mostly, because that's the majority). Nasty old religion has all the sex scandals, not clean shiny new atheism.

For him to go "Dear Muslima" was particularly hypocritical, because on another day he'd be attacking Islam, including burqas. Wearing a burqa is objectively less bad than undergoing FGM too, Richard.

Lol you are probably right about him wanting atheism to be clean, I bet that annoyed the shit out of him. But I think you missed the point of the Muslima letter - it was a dig at Islam as much as it was at Watson, maybe moreso. I think Dawkins genuinely does feel bad for women living under Islamic rule, patronising as it might be.

I think you get a healthier society with smart and honest assholes than with smart and polite manipulators. Manipulative behaviour is almost always nicer than turning the be a dick dial up, but it is always worse for your community.

I think the opposite actually. The fact that tighter packed societies (Japan, UK) tend to have much more indirect polite rules to avoid being direct might indicate that when people are in closer proximity fake politeness is an adaptive behavior for society. If truthful asshole behavior causes your society to fragment then polite manipulation is probably preferable.

In other words we can only put up with lots of other human beings when we are dishonest about how we feel about each other. I think that fits how people perceive truthful assholes in general.

I think that conflating politeness and manipulativeness is not reasonable. Also, are the UK and Japan distinguished from demographically comparable countries by greater dishonesty? I'd say they have excelled by being somewhat more capable of engaging object-level truth, while many others have fallen into forms of mysticism, self-delusion, indulgence, corruption and goodharting.

There is a subtle mechanism here: these societies have regimented culture, rigid protocols for polite interaction, yes, and for preventing and deescalating conflicts, but that allows to break the bad news without relying on extreme overpowering stimuli. Kind of what we have here.

(Alternatively, those are just societies with many survivors of a true aristocratic class).

But that's not necessarily the global optimum. The closest thing to a nation of truth-telling assholes that we have is probably Israel. And New York. Both are even denser than the UK and Japan, and even more successful.

Bonus: https://twitter.com/Ghostof_Atticus/status/1591559230695538688

I think that conflating politeness and manipulativeness is not reasonable.

I think I'd agree with Fruck above, polite standard of behaviours are essentially deceptions we all (more or less) agree to. I don't call Bob an annoying loud ass and he doesn't call me a sanctimonious pencil pusher. Those may allow us to more carefully engage with difficult subjects because we aren't pissed off at each others existence all the time, so our white lies and deceptions may also facilitate truth discussion, but not by being a truthful asshole as mentioned.

I think it's likely that the most successful classes in say New York are probably more likely to be more polite/deceptive in this way than the least. And looking at some of biggest drivers of violence in US cities currently, it seems to be driven by a very direct insult/response culture. Israel I am less familiar with but given their own specific circumstances may not be all that representative.

I think I'd agree with Fruck above, polite standard of behaviours are essentially deceptions we all (more or less) agree to. I don't call Bob an annoying loud ass and he doesn't call me a sanctimonious pencil pusher. Those may allow us to more carefully engage with difficult subjects because we aren't pissed off at each others existence all the time, so our white lies and deceptions may also facilitate truth discussion, but not by being a truthful asshole as mentioned.

I like how you started but I strongly disagree with how you ended that paragraph. Politeness may be better for harmony, and sometimes productivity, and sometimes capability, but it doesn't help truth telling, the only times I think it might are when the situation is so dire that lives are currently at stake, and I hope it isn't consensus building to say the stakes aren't that high in these situations.

The first thing that I feel like maybe has been forgotten in all this is that politeness is deceptive. It is not to be trusted. We rely on it as a society, but trusting it is madness, it is designed to betray. I think a lot of people know that instinctively, even if they don't think about it consciously - which is why they push so hard to add their values to it. Using pronouns is 'just being a decent person' and so on.

Furthermore, it is specifically politeness which is facilitating grifters around the world, in the exact way it is being used against the EA community here. Because there is no polite way to object to a sociopath currently bringing all of her knowledge about human behaviour and social mores to bear against you. There is only submission, because she knows exactly which buttons to push to get her way, she knows how to frame her story for maximum sympathy, she knows who to take it to for favourable coverage, and she knows that her targets may as well be drinking baby seal blood the way society currently looks at them.

What happens after you politely respond with something like "yeah look I understand your concerns, but our community is made up of weird scrupulosity afflicted autists trying to paperclip happiness, and we don't want our soul drained and dessicated until we are yet another bland cookie cutter corporate tax dodge"? If you aren't just ignored, you will be shamed into submission, because by being polite you have already admitted that you can be shamed into submission. Sorry folks, being an effective altruist is now asshole behaviour.

I think grifters can exploit any social norm. For example it may be politeness being exploited in the EA community, because the social norm is something like I know when I am politely deceptive it is for the greater good therefore when Sue does it she must also be doing the same thing. If Sue is a bad faith actor she can exploit this.

However in our direct and honest society, the typical minding will be, I know I tell the blunt truth therefore Sue must also be doing the same thing. In a society where everyone tells the truth a lying grifter will also be able to prosper in other words, because if everyone tells the truth, defenses against lying will be even worse.

You can't stop grifters exploiting social norms. They have done it in every society no matter how polite or how truthful. In every conceivable arrangement from communism to capitalism to evangelical churches to atheist movements and beyond. Barbarian tribes had grifters, the Roman Empire had grifters, Victorian England had grifters.

It's not deceptive politeness that enables that, it's people being willing to exploit social norms, whatever they might be. Removing politeness norms and replacing it with something else means grifters have to use different tactics but the result will be the same I think.

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Politeness allowing truthful discussions can only last so long as the rules of politeness are mutually agreed on.

And, somewhat tautologically, on the rules of politeness allowing truthful discussion. If there is a rule of politeness which says some true fact may not be mentioned or even recognizably hinted at, you can't have truthful discussions which involve that fact. That once the rule is broken the polite people will tell you "Oh, you can say that, you just have to say it in the right way" does not mean the polite people are telling the truth when they make that claim.

Ah damn, yeah you are right, I got carried away by the rhetoric there. Politeness is necessary for a functional society and it is also essentially deceptive manipulation everyone agrees to, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Not all manipulative behaviour is worse for a community than being an honest asshole. There is a term I should have used instead to refer to the manipulative behaviour I mean, but for the life of me I can't think of it right now. Shit, this is going to drive me mad.

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