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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
assholestruth-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...
...
...
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:
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.
While I'm not broadly sympathetic to the whole organised atheist movement of that time, I can empathise with Watson, even though she did exaggerate somewhat; it was very late at night, they'd been drinking in the hotel bar and talking and she just wanted to go to bed. This guy goes up in the lift with her and propositions her. I do understand why she'd feel at risk in a confined space with a possibly drunk guy where she has no idea how he'll react (and her being possibly drunk and tired as well didn't help with how she reacted or felt).
Mainly what I took away from it was confusion; first when I heard about "do you want to come back to my place/come up to mine for coffee?" I was young and stupid and thought it just meant that: an offer of coffee. "Ha ha, don't be silly, it's an offer of sex and if you accept then you are consenting to sex" was the explanation I got when wondering about why women complained men were asking for sex on such occasions. Then came Elevatorgate, and suddenly "Do you want to come to my room for coffee?" simply meant an offer of coffee and how could anyone imagine it was an offer of sex? You see my confusion?
I'm on the side of "of course it's an offer for sex, phrased in a way that someone can offer and be accepted or turned down in a socially acceptable way". The thing is, this seems like a pretty reasonable offer given the whole drinking in a hotel bar at a conference thing. Maybe he should have said it before getting on an elevator, I can empathize with her not feeling great about the interaction, but this really isn't a particularly weird thing to do at a conference where people are drinking in the hotel lobby.
Well, it was very late - something like 2 in the morning, if I can go by shaky memory, and it had been a bunch of people including Watson who stayed chatting after the formal conference ended. So as far as she was concerned, he was just Random Stranger.
Had it been the pair of them alone chatting in the bar, I agree he would have had steadier grounds for assuming she might be open to an approach, but it wasn't.
The offer of coffee that late/early in the morning increases my prior that it wasn't just coffee being offered.
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