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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.
I find poly evangelicals just as annoying as the next guy and don't think it's a good lifestyle for most but what movement exactly do these people think they're joining? Yes, it's mostly weirdos, quite a bit of whom are on the spectrum who are interested in weird ideas. Where are these advertisements where it's pretending to be something else? All of the rest of society follows your moral beliefs. Yes, EA has control over some funding and useful roles, but they created them and it's theirs you have no right to it without putting up with the weird community that made it possible.
Which we know because at least by second- and third-hand accounts of the Bay Area bubble and the general community around EA and rationalism (I know a lot more than I wanted or needed to know about accusations of sexual abuse and harassment in the rationalist circles due to the trickling out of information via various blogs and references to the scandals on other blogs, all because of being on here and via SSC/ACX). But if you only learn about EA by things like this, when you go off to college, and you think "This sounds great, I want to make a positive contribution to changing the world", then you don't know about the poly and the non-conventional attitudes and all the rest of it.
So yeah, normie goes to conference and is shocked to be propositioned to join polycules and when refusing gets the lecture on compersion and the rather holier-than-thou attitude the poly evangelists within rationalism adopt about "we don't get jealous, we're so much better than you monogamous types" which I am, sorry to say, glad to see coming back to bite them in the backside even if it is in the context of a TIME article which isn't going to be the greatest in the world.
This reminds me. About ten years ago I asked a girlfriend who was an advertising exec if there was a cool edgy counterculture left that hasn't been co-opted by the mainstream and completely hollowed out yet. Without missing a beat she replied "polyamory". Adding "it's just too weird".
With that in mind, the obvious enlightenment of polyamory aside, I do wonder if it's kind of poison pill that's meant to keep out normies.
Everyone's on-board with being part of a smart do-gooder club until they're introduced to some metamours.
It wasn't meant to keep out normies; the poly stuff was there long before EA had to worry about the general public becoming aware of them. I wish it worked better at keeping the mainstream away, though. There are a lot of "effective altruists" these days who don't seem to care about effectiveness, just evaluate charities based on vibes, and don't even know what "on the margin" means. (REEE!)
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