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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.

Without doxxing myself too hard, my experience of EA has been a bit different to what's described above in relation to polyarmory at least. N=1, but my perspective might be of use for a few people who have not experienced the EA subculture themselves.

It's possibly due to the fact I was not in AI risk or anything Bay Area related/rationalist adjacent, but the majority of people I've interacted with in EA are not poly. In addition, while younger EA parties have fair amounts of poly people (which can be a bit jarring, you're discussing legal policy with someone and four people of various genders are making out in lingerie in the corner), the high ranking figures who control donations and jobs I've interacted with are either explictly monogamous or they show no sign of being poly. The higher ups tend to be older (poly tends to be a young persons' game), and those with standard academic careers, lots of papers and titles tend away from poly as well (one girl rising in the movement who I know fairly well made sure she was not seen to be poly when dating as it would undermine her respectability, and is now in a mono power couple with another senior EA).

However, it's certainly possible I've missed out on the pressure from polycules, being male, already established skill wise and not just out of college, not living in a EA house, and now married. I'm not sure if there are any published figures on how many EAs are poly, I would be very interested to see them, but my guess is its far less than people expect, and it tapers off as you go up the ranks/experience.

The feel of EA orgs and their culture also varies hugely, from things like assessing grants/admin, to interventions and direct giving today, planning for unlikely but still grounded scenarios, all the way to the very theoretical work on philosophy, AI and X risks, EA is far larger than the Bay Area and its culture. EA orgs tend to be pretty male (maybe 70:30 by my guess), but I think that's mostly due to the nature of what is being researched rather than hostility to women, and are pretty desperate to appeal to as diverse a group as possible.

There a few interesting dynamics however - one is that there is far more smart grads right out of college who want to be EAs than there is useful work for them to do, unless you have some rare skills, experience or papers under your belt it can be hard to get a position, and that can eat you up and generate unhealthy pressure. Secondly, the nature of the work can make it very seductive and high pressure - you're working on catastrophic scenarios and some potentially very interesting and serious things - and that has burnt out good people that I know. They felt that if the catastrophe happened tomorrow their guilt that they had not done more would consume them forever: they would literally have damned civilization. The pay is lower than for other equivalent positions and the work life balance can be odd, especially if you only live in EA houses.

younger EA parties have fair amounts of poly people (which can be a bit jarring, you're discussing legal policy with someone and four people of various genders are making out in lingerie in the corner)

I don't think that's a party, friend. I think there's a different word for that sort of occasion. But this is exactly the kind of 'blurring the lines' that the article complains of, so it's a good example.

It's true - that possibly needs a bit of context. Broadly:

It was an EA party in a big city hosted by an EA figure (who wasn't poly).

I went, talked to people and socialized. Some of that was interesting in the context of their work (that a solid part of the challenge of cultured meat is not the science, but the law, that was my legal policy comment, but it's not a work setting).

There were poly people at the party, making out in one corner of the room. They were maybe 5 out of 100 people. More were probably poly there but not so... in your face about it.

I can see how it's a bit offputting, it was to me, but it's more "those crazy kids" than pressure to be poly from my experience.

Have you considered that an attractive young woman in an environment that's 70% male is far more likely to experience any "pressure to be poly" than a man would be? Seems like a major confounding variable.

I'm not doubting your story that most EA figures are at least claiming to be monogamous.

I agree, it's a different point I'm trying to make. You may be asked if you want to be poly or join a polycule at an EA party, some may claim it's better, but not nothing will be gated from you if you say no in my experience, the seniors (other than Elizer? Who isn't a central EA example) aren't.