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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34541 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.

“My safety at risks” is just an institutionalized version of what the early seduction artists called a shit tests. Girls and feminists now claim this to scare unworthy men from pursuing them. Since the worthy ones will just ignore their claimed victim hood and realize they like male attention.

I’ll make it simple every women wants sexual attention to boost their ego even from unworthy men. It’s just our legalistic culture has now enabled a second game to play that they can sue you for it and then have a course case stating that men can’t help but show interest in them while getting paid.

Since the worthy ones will just ignore their claimed victim hood and realize they like male attention.

Ah, the good old "women mean 'yes' when they say 'no' so just keep on going" which never ever ended in assault or rape. I thought this one had gone the way of the dodo, but apparently there are still men out there who don't believe "no" does in fact mean "no" and not "overpower me you big manly caveman".

Like I said in another thread. Rationalists like to imagine themselves as being one step ahead, but the thing about recursive loops is that they are recursive. Being one step ahead is the same thing as being one step behind.

What's that saying, "everything old is new again"? You will always get drama where people are involved, where sex is involved, where the tangles of attraction and current rules and what is or is not permissible are involved. I think all parties in Elevatorgate were to blame to some extent - the guy should have the basic cop-on to recognise that was not the time or place to chance it (the next day when all parties were rested and he could make an attempt at getting to know her a little would have been better), Watson should not have blown it up to the extent she did.

"I am fucking sick and tired of going to conferences and getting hit on by guys who think atheist women are sex-mad because atheist spaces are majority male, men do want sex more than women, and their basic unevolved view is that atheist women will have dumped the attitudes to casual sex along with all the religious rules around sex" is probably the background to her reaction which explains why she took it so far, but this was part of a wider and longer problem than the "guy hit on me in the elevator way too late at night when all I wanted was some sleep" occasion.

Watson was entirely in the wrong. As long as it is the case that men, by and large, must initiate in sexual or romantic encounters for them to happen, it must not be ipso facto wrong for them to initiate such encounters (unless perhaps you are a Shaker). At the time Watson made her complaint, conferences were absolutely not places where such approaches were categorically off limits. And as long as men are not mind-readers nor even perfect body-language readers, approaches will happen when the woman is not receptive, and the man has not done anything morally wrong by making such an approach; his punishment should be limited to rejection. Not public shaming, not shaming of the entire community (as happened here), and certainly not ejection from a venue, firing, blacklisting, and all the rest of things that have come along since.

He did do something "wrong", in that the flirting game with strangers has guidelines and he skipped the first half. If he had approached her in a bar in public to start the interaction he is doing so with other people around. Then you can go through the flirting dance while your target has some safety. Its why first online dates should always take place in public places and the like. This is not new information. You escalate but allow easy safe outs. Some pressure yes, but with a safety valve. If at the bar after buying a drink, flirting, reading her body language and so on, he offers to walk her to her room, then in the lift asks her up for coffee he has built the social edifice his sexual request can lean on. At each step both parties are signalling interest.

He didn't do anything criminal but he did make a social faux pas and being shamed is an appropriate response. That's how social conventions become social conventions in the first place.

This is what the flirting game is for, to gauge and slowly escalate interest, you might be able to short circuit that and jump to the end, but you are taking a risk in doing so. Whether you are publicly shamed by having a drink thrown in your face or something else, it is a risk you take when trying to speed run.

Sure you might be in bed with her in 5 minutes flat, but you also might mistime the lift glitch exploit and doom your entire run.

It is also necessary to do things like this to encourage the others...

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