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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32789 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Effective Altruism drama update:

You may remember a few weeks ago the article Effective Altruism Promises to Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse was published in TIME (Motte discussion here).

It's been a hectic two weeks on the EA forum. Meta community posts have been consistently getting more engagement than object-level posts about actual charity. There is a palpable tension on the site between the hardcore rationalists and the mainstream liberals. Vote counts swing on an hourly basis depending on who has the upper hand, but overall the discussion has remained civil (mostly). A few days ago, the (in)famous Aella posted "People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You", a devastating screed against prudes, anonymous allegations, and haters of eccentric Bay Area parties. Eliezer himself even shows up, taking a break from doomscrolling to deliver a supporting bombardment against the mainstream press.

There's nothing EAs care about more than cute poly girls and AI. Once Aella and Eliezer weigh in, case closed right? WRONG.

A statement and an apology

EV UK board statement on Owen's resignation

In a recent TIME Magazine article, a claim of misconduct was made about an “influential figure in EA”:

"A third [woman] 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.”"

Shortly after the article came out, Julia Wise (CEA’s community liaison) informed the EV UK board that this concerned behaviour of Owen Cotton-Barratt;[1] the incident occurred more than 5 years ago and was reported to her in 2021.[2] (Owen became a board member in 2020.)

One of the perpetrators from the article has been identified. So who wins?

Well, its too soon to say. This seems to be the first sexual misconduct allegation confirmed against an official EA leader, so you can't really call the TIME story which broke it to be a complete pile of journalistic garbage. It does seem like a pretty minor infraction though. After reading Owen's statement it seems like it could fall under the "weird nerds trying to date" umbrella, but maybe you can't use that excuse when you're a board member.

One aspect I haven't seen discussed is that this is the same guy who was behind the controversial decision to buy Wytham Abbey for 15 million pounds (see here). In light of current events, it sure looks to me like EA officials decided to blow millions on a luxury venue in Oxford in order to impress women.

Tangential, but Rachel Haywire was supposed to write some expose of Silicon Valley rationalist big deal types, as she had been to their parties and such, but never did. Curious what she would have revealed if anything...

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 can understand how hearing that may seem creepy in that context, given that she just found out she would be staying with him, but in general, masturbating in a situation like this is a great idea. I have long though that men should masturbate before doing something important that involves women, sex, etc., to prevent their brain being overpowered by their penis.

It doesn't "seem" creepy. It is creepy. How would you feel if you walked into an office for an interview and your potential boss (male) said "Just be a sec, I gotta go jerk off"? There may possibly be some jobs where "oh hey here it's we're all guys together", but I think you might come away from that going "Hm, that was odd".

How would you feel if you had a friend with whom you regularly discussed sexual stuff, they referred you for a job at a place they didn't work at, you visited the city and stayed in their house, and then they brought sexual stuff while you were visiting?

Fixed that for you.

This has happened to me, BTW, and it was totally unremarkable. A bro with whom I regularly discuss banging chicks referred me to a job. I visited him and he told me about how he's banging a cool rocker chick with big tits (or something like that, this was long back and I forget the details). The only difference here is that instead of being bros who bang hot chicks in a mainstream manner, it was weird nerds doing weird nerd stuff in a subculture that the establishment wants to attack.

But of course, I actually read the detailed statement and apology (linked in the OP) instead of just the hit piece: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QMee23Evryqzthcvn/a-statement-and-an-apology

He was not her potential boss or involved in the decisionmaking process.

I was employed as a researcher at that time

My role didn’t develop to connecting people with different positions until later, and this wasn’t part of my self-conception at the time

(However it makes sense to me that this was her perception)

I was not affiliated with the org she was interviewing at

I’d suggested her as a candidate earlier in the application process, but was not part of their decision-making process

The interaction did not happen in an office, and the implication that they only knew each other professionally is false. This was one interaction in a long personal relationship in which apparently many such interactions took place as part of a weird social experiment:

We had what I perceived as a preexisting friendship where we were experimenting with being unusually direct and honest (/“edgy”)

Including about sexual matters

There was what would commonly be regarded as oversharing from both sides (this wasn’t the first time I’d mentioned masturbation)

Our friendship continued in an active way for several months afterwards

They do seem to be different cases. This is classic "he said, she said": he's saying "we were pals", she's saying "he's the guy interviewing me for a job".

And your bro was telling you about chicks he was hitting on/fucking. He wasn't going "Bro, you are so hot, hang on a mo, gotta go jerk off because that's the effect you have on me".

They do seem to be different cases. This is classic "he said, she said": he's saying "we were pals", she's saying "he's the guy interviewing me for a job".

It isn't "he said, she said" because Time Magazine didn't say he was the interviewer or her prospective boss. Time Magazine did not say anything at all about the presence or absence of a preexisting relationship. They said:

"...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."

I can totally understand how you drew this (most likely false) conclusion, but technically Time Magazine did not lie.

They simply exploited the fact that you believe that they would have mentioned a preexisting weirdo rationalist relationship with odd social experiments if one existed, and that they would have mentioned the interview was with someone else entirely.

Also, I do not believe that the guy is lying about either a) being her interviewer or b) the preexisting relationship. These are both easy to prove one way or the other and if he were lying about such easily provable things, one would expect someone to call it out.

But I'm happy to be proven wrong: if the accuser claims he is lying and he doesn't dig up texts/FB messages/etc to prove they were friends before and after, I will consider her case to be proven. Similarly if the accuser claims he's lying and digs up an interview schedule listing him, I'll consider her case proven.

And your bro was telling you about chicks he was hitting on/fucking. He wasn't going "Bro, you are so hot, hang on a mo, gotta go jerk off because that's the effect you have on me".

Yes, he was following a pattern for which there is a mainstream "script" so you can easily pattern match it. Other similar things he has said include "damn bro back that fine ass up let me get it on camera". Entirely work inappropriate and inappropriate for some friendships, but totally reasonable for him to say to me at the gym after filming my first successful 4 plate deadlift.

Weirdo rationalists are weirdos and making up their own script that you are unfamiliar with. Is anything non-mainstream fundamentally illegitimate and evil? One must not do it even with the full consent of all involved?

Other similar things he has said include "damn bro back that fine ass up let me get it on camera". Entirely work inappropriate and inappropriate for some friendships, but totally reasonable for him to say to me at the gym after filming my first successful 4 plate deadlift.

Are you sure you didn't miss out on a blossoming love to last the ages by thinking he was admiring your muscular prowess instead of delicately courting you? 😁

Yeah, and they should not neglect to mention they did it. Loudly, and often. While making direct, and intense, eye contact.

It sounds completely retarded six years, a TIME article, and an external investigation later, but I can kind of see the bizarre horny logic. Letting her know that he just masturbated serves the function of letting her know that he’s interested, and that he’s perfectly safe to be around (since you know, he already took care of things).

he’s perfectly safe to be around

For very good reasons, women base their sense of safety around men using those men's apparent respect for boundaries and customs, rather than whether those men are in a state of post-orgasmic non-arousal.

Of course, you could still be right - he might actually be that socially inept.

and that he’s perfectly safe to be around

No. That makes him sound even more unsafe to be around, since he can't control the horny as soon as he sees her. That's not reassuring. I know women and men have very differing views on this, but knowing a guy that you are barely acquainted with is using you as a porn fantasy when he's jerking off is not flattering and is concerning, if it seems like he may not be able to maintain any boundaries at all. He's already blown through a few, what is to stop him hitting on you, harassing you if you turn him down, or even turning nasty?

He's already blown through a few, what is to stop him hitting on you, harassing you if you turn him down, or even turning nasty?

What's to stop him?

Err, the other social barriers?

Just because he steamrolled one doesn't reduce the resistance of the others to zero.

But it does tilt the balance in the direction of "the other barriers have been weakened".

I think this does reveal a genuine problem that the EA or Bay Areans need to deal with: the social attitudes of San Franciscan "flowers in your hair" liberality about sex and drugs and everything except meat-eating and being a square who harshes others' mellows, versus outsiders treating EA as a professional NGO do-gooding organisation. We're seeing these clash badly with damage on both sides.

Yes, informing people about it is probably not a good idea. It would be weird even if she wasn't staying with him, if they were just meeting in an office or something.

In his statement he said he and she were doing some weird full-disclosure-of-everything kinda social experiment, with both parties explicit consent. But now, retroactively, it's decided there's some power dynamic caused by him being involved in a community she's also involved in that makes this bad.

In his statement he said he and she were doing some weird full-disclosure-of-everything kinda social experiment, with both parties explicit consent.

I can believe it, because [insert rant about quokkas]. That does not mean that non-quokkas are playing along with your "but I thought you realised without me having to say it that we were conducting a radical honesty experiment?". I have opened my big dumb mouth and over-shared at times, but at least I've never mentioned about how I am dealing with my libidinal impulses, so to speak, to people. Any people, be they friends or not.

You seem to be making two entirely separate claims across your various comments here:

Claim 1: "Prominent EA types/the community as a statistical average have actually engaged in bad behavior in excess of base rates. This is harmful and morally wrong." (e.g. here: https://www.themotte.org/post/381/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/67827?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/381/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/67831?context=8#context )

Claim 2: "Prominent EA types have followed a strategy which is suboptimal in the presence of hostile adversaries who wish to mislead the public about them without technically lying." (What I'm replying to right now.)

I think most people here disagree with (1) and agree with (2). For example in my comment above I'm disputing claim 1 and in reply you're asserting the truth of claim 2. That's pretty confusing, and I think if you want the conversation to be productive you should make it explicit which claim you are discussing.

(1) Reading up on the intra-community accounts from a couple years back (you might recall them yourself being low-key linked on various rationalist blogs) about the kinds of things people in the community got away with, without anyone doing more than some hand-wringing, inclines me to "heck yes, EA and the Rationalists have a sex creep problem and a lot of it is down to their community norms".

(2) By the same token, given the community norms, the weird/kinky/awkward/shy are encouraged to not be afraid and to let it all out. That then causes problems such as guy thinking "okay, we're friends, right? so it's perfectly normal for me to talk about jerking off in front of her" in relation to a woman who is not part of that particular community and does not know the norms.

The two are not contradictory. The problem, as others have pointed out, is that EA is now getting big enough and mainstream enough that the community norms of the Bay Area are butting up hard with the usual social norms of people not from that community, and things like TIME articles are the result.

(1) Reading up on the intra-community accounts from a couple years back

I am aware of the occasional mentally unstable woman (e.g. Kathy Forth) making vague claims that plausibly mean very little. E.g. her only concrete claim is that someone touched her leg and her complaint about such resulted in his immediate expulsion. Keerthana Gopalakrishnan has similarly minor concrete claims (asked out 3x in a year) plus internal narratives ("felt unsafe").

I am not aware of anything that suggests rationalist communities have a problem worse than communities which are not considered problematic (e.g. cardiology, anti-moneylaundering, education, journalism). Perhaps if you want to make this claim you can provide evidence of it. The Time Magazine article and the various conclusions you drew (but which it did not actually say) are not such evidence.

By the same token, given the community norms, the weird/kinky/awkward/shy are encouraged to not be afraid and to let it all out. That then causes problems such as guy thinking "okay, we're friends, right? so it's perfectly normal for me to talk about jerking off in front of her" in relation to a woman who is not part of that particular community and does not know the norms.

No one claims this happened except you. Time Magazine does not. The guy who believes Time Magazine is referring to him says something entirely different happened. No one disputes him, and in the event of a dispute there is highly likely to be plenty of evidence.

I'll note you also claimed it happened during a job interview and he was her boss, which you seem to have retreated from. Why do you keep making claims such as these? Do you have some firsthand knowledge that the rest of us lack?

What did you mean when you said "I can believe it, because [insert rant about quokkas]"? I assumed it was referencing this which is entirely about my Claim 2 - that innocent rationalists will be harmed by evil and dangerous journalists/grifters/etc if they don't develop defense mechanisms. Did you mean something else?

Wow. If thats the context then I have to agree with Hanania here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/richardhanania/p/why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die

Any time I begin to think Hanania has half a point going on, then he goes and ruins it with shit like this:

Rationalism recognizes that most people’s intuitions about what others should or shouldn’t be allowed to do with their own bodies are almost always dumb, and a smart society should just push through until everyone gets used to practices that are currently disputed.

"Sure, maybe you have a dumb 'icky!' reaction to the idea that we routinely round up, at intervals of about every two months, people named 'Richard' and put on an entertainment show in the arena where members of the public who want to show off their torture skills get to use them as test subjects. But that's a dumb intuition, and society is just pushing on through until you and the other holdouts get used to such disputed practices".

This seems, to me at least, like incredibly important context that should be made extremely visible.

That completely changes things. Without it, very creepy and no borders. With it, sure, betrayal of honesty experiment.

Yeah, I dunno. I feel like I have no right to comment on any of this, since I'm nowhere near any of the physical places, I don't know any of the people involved save at second-hand by reading accounts written by others, and I'm not part of Less Wrong ("thank God" says them and me both).

But that Aella piece - I'm torn between "well yeah she probably does get a lot of hate for no apparent reason other than she's a big fish in their small pond" and "this is a group that makes a huge point out of being welcoming and non-judgemental to the unconventional and the neurodivergent, can she really be shocked at this hour of her life to learn sometimes unstable people are unstable and interpret things in a wildly different way to what happened?"

Well, welcome to the party, rationalists and EA movement. We Catholics had our own sex scandals, now it's your turn. I do think this may be the moment - not over sex scandals per se but because of a conflux of issues and tensions all coming to the boil at once - where the endeavour splits off into the "normie" version that goes mainstream (EA seems to be there already) and the remnants of the original 'true believers' who will wonder what happened and where it all went, leaving them behind.

EDIT: I am sardonically amused about the vegan commenting on that, and her story of all the horrible meat-eaters making up lies about pure innocent vegans. I have my own Vegan Big Traditional Meal story to tell, and that really was a vegan making a fuss and inconveniencing everyone. But then, I am a horrible meat-eater, maybe I'm just "[lying] so they'd have a dramatic story to tell about vegans and cement their own ingroup status or so they'd have a seeming-reason to dismiss animal welfare asks and play the victim themselves and cement their control for future interactions" 😐

Maybe this is asking too much, but why wouldn't Rationalist women adopt a different viewpoint of male sexual behavior, being Rationalists?

Instead of taking the same progressive approach of "toxic masculinity must be extirpated," it seems like the Rationalist view would be something like: "Male Sexual Behavior is how it is for reasons, and has been this way since the beginning. Even if we wanted to change it, it is unlikely to change. Therefore lets find a way to harness it for the greater good. One way that this has worked historically is for women to engage with male sexuality and control it as best as possible via marriage..." etc.

There's a good deal of path dependency going on here. Rationalists, especially the Bay-area variety, are overwhelmingly progressive. They are not going to endorse a traditionalist/conservative position if they can help it.

Hanania:

What does EA do with its women problem? Well, it starts by treating women as rational individuals, which means adopting polyamory. Why stick to an outdated practice like monogamy when one can develop multiple fulfilling relationships with all kinds of different people, as long as everyone is honest with themselves and others about their boundaries and what they want? I honestly couldn’t write that last sentence without laughing. Who could’ve foreseen that this would end up with an article in Time about how young women who entered into such relationships found them unfulfilling and are now plagued by regret? And such stories would be used to tar the whole movement as hostile to women?

https://open.substack.com/pub/richardhanania/p/why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die

The big problem here is that EA is becoming the victim of its own success. It wanted (especially now with concerns about existential risk and AI risk) to become more than just a little group of the like-minded in their own bubble, it wanted to go mainstream, and it looks like it has.

So this woman was not part of the whole Bay Area/Less Wrong/Rationalist/EA scene. She went to Oxford and signed up as a (to use the term) normie who bought into the rhetoric and did want to do good according to their principles.

Then she hit up against the existing culture, where cuddle piles (though I haven't heard much of them lately), minors and runaways, trans and all kinds of kink-friendly and sex-positive and poly and unconventional lifestyles are welcomed and tolerated, and where there's a good chance of pinning the weasel (if I may be forgiven the reference). But she's an outsider, so to her this kind of "Hey, I'm Georgiou, I'm EA, vegan, poly and kinky, wanna see my etchings?" approach like shaking hands when introduced to someone is normal and acceptable did not come across as 'this is how professionals work in the settings I know'.

As EA expands and normies start joining, this is only going to be more of a problem. I do think the split between 'the original band' and 'now we're big enough to do corporate venues, are we selling out?' is happening.

went to Oxford

I shouldn't have closed these tabs, but have you noticed that most of the attacks on EA are coming from people affiliated with Oxford"? Like https://twitter.com/oxhcai

And this David Thorstad guy is from the Global Priorities Institute at Oxord, "Using academic research to drive positive change within and outside of the effective altruism movement." : https://twitter.com/IneffectiveAlt4 https://ineffectivealtruismblog.com/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/david-thorstad

He's been heavily attacking people on the EA forum, after joining in 2021.

He protected his tweets and they weren't archived, but this is what he was saying to scott (dead twitter link):

@slatestarcodex Perhaps you would like to start? Repeat after me: "I unequivocally reject all forms of racist pseudoscience" and "people of color are not genetically inferior to anyone else". They are simple words. Say them.

The EA forum is finally beginning to denounce the worst offenders. LessWrong still has a long way to go. Delete, denounce, and do better next time

You know, honeyed words about "growth and change," followed by the standard bullying commissar stuff as soon as he thinks he has power over someone.

Smells like an entryist clique to me. Somebody on EA really ought to call him out about this.

(Edit: noticed by Ilforte last month)

Some of the Twitter stuff was archived

As for his demand to repeat a mantra about "racist pseudoscience", the best substantive answer is probably along the lines of:

"If the claims of 'racist pseudoscience' are true, I wish to believe they are true. If the claims of 'racist pseudoscience' are not true, I wish to believe they are not true. Labeling an idea 'racist pseudoscience' does not affect its truth value".

But most of EA will likely prefer to stick with the cool kids over everything else, and so will be utterly subsumed into the progressive leviathan.

Thanks! I searched .is for the tweet URLs, but nothing came up. Guess the archived one was the top tweet.

This strikes me as the opening blows in a conflict that EA will be unable to deal with. The activist community has seen a lot of money flowing to the Wrong kind of people, and now they are moving in to deal with a potential threat to their status and position. How exactly is the EA movement going to protect itself against an avalanche of bad-faith actors like the one you have identified, while also dealing with an equally withering barrage of negative stories from legacy media? They can't just attack the media without painting themselves as members of the Trump tribe, which would cause lots of people and donators to leave. Long-winded rationalist essays might be able to convince the core members of the group, but they are worse than useless when it comes to defending oneself against spurious accusations in the court of public opinion.

I really don't see how the movement survives if this continues - people like David Thorstad would (at least, in my reading of his statements and actions) prefer that the movement sink into irrelevancy and fail to have any noticeable positive impact on the world, instead becoming a den of comfortable sinecures that people like him and his friends can occupy without having to actually do any real work... and they have existing institutions (Oxford, the mainstream media, etc) putting a thumb on their end of the scale.

"this is a group that makes a huge point out of being welcoming and non-judgemental to the unconventional and the neurodivergent, can she really be shocked at this hour of her life to learn sometimes unstable people are unstable and interpret things in a wildly different way to what happened?"

Yeah, I'm not at all informed about Aella herself aside from what she herself posts and a information from some people who have met her personally.

But its one thing to say "people will make up lies about you, sometimes." and another to be shocked at how the behavior that you admit to and the other facets of your public persona might lead people to weird conclusions about you.

She's a professional escort who is incredibly open about her drug use and her hosting of orgies, who often makes ambiguous jokes about edgy topics.

How might people end up with the belief that she may have hosted drug-fueled orgies where edgy sorts of behavior occurred?

No, that doesn't justify the lies. But if you know how humans have a tendency to leap to incorrect conclusions from limited/bad evidence, then notice that your entire persona is custom built to shock normie sensibilities, one would not be particularly surprised that normies have been primed to believe shocking things.

Or maybe they aren't lies at all. Maybe "the prudes" are correct about how entertaining someone who's whole schtick is being a transaction-bot seeking to extract the maximum amount of utilitons (aka hedonism points) for herself really is ultimately stupid, dangerous, and socially corrosive.

There's always the outside possibility that she is manipulating every facet of her public persona to control the narrative around herself, and the stuff she admits to is just the tip of a large iceberg.

I have no special insight on that.

I don't even know if they're lies. Reading the (I think) original complainant, they came across in how they wrote as someone with a shaky grasp on reality and possible neurodivergence. So for them, it may be the real truth that all the bad stuff happened the way they described it, while for Aella it's "But I didn't organise that party, we weren't doing free-for-all drugs there, etc." fact-checking. People with problems can convince themselves of the truth of what they think they remember, and let's face it, the party was probably confusing enough even if you were sober and sane.

But its one thing to say "people will make up lies about you, sometimes." and another to be shocked at how the behavior that you admit to and the other facets of your public persona might lead people to weird conclusions about you.

That isn't what she's talking about, however.

Consider a concrete example of hers: "drug roulette". She is not talking about internet randos sneering at her "oh that silly drug roulette and sex party chick, can't wait for her next twitter poll about fucking gnomes". That would be a vaguely reasonable thing for people who don't know her and dislike her to say.

How might people end up with the belief that she may have hosted drug-fueled orgies where edgy sorts of behavior occurred?

According to her, it's because someone wrote on the internet that a) they attended parties she hosted b) drug roulette happened at more than one and c) one of the drugs is rohypnol.

That is not a "leap to incorrect conclusions" nor is it in any way based on her reputation or an edgy joke. It's based on an unambiguous and literal interpretation of a statement that someone made about her.

Yes, I'm agreeing that people tell baldfaced lies about her.

But it's not surprising that, given the persona she's cultivated, some people (irrationally) accept the bald-faced lie at nearly face value. She's living a life that shocks normies, so it's easier for normies to believe shocking things about her. I assume she finds this worth the tradeoffs!

Similar to how people believed many, many untrue things about Donald Trump, because his persona made it easy enough to believe. Even leaving aside their biased motivation to believe it.

Unfair? Sure. Unexpected? Not in my book.

this is a group that makes a huge point out of being welcoming and non-judgemental to the unconventional and the neurodivergent, can she really be shocked at this hour of her life to learn sometimes unstable people are unstable and interpret things in a wildly different way to what happened?"

Yes, people are genuinely shocked by this. Part of the whole non-judgmental thing with regard to the unconventional, neurodivergent, and downright mentally ill is learning to treat these as isolated facts about the individual that provide no predictive power with regard to their quality of character or decency of their behavior. I don't think people would state it that way, since it sounds deliberately ridiculous when phrased that way, but it sure seems like what I observe. Try on a couple test cases - how do you think most people that think of themselves as non-judgmental would respond to someone saying, "I would expect a trans furry with clinical depression and anxiety to be erratic, untrustworthy, and immoral"? How would they react to a statement that, "I would rather associate with high-income married couples because they tend to be higher quality people"?

Oh cool, this is the second time I've had interpersonal experience of a discussion topic. Last one was my Eskimo brother on two degrees of separation, and now I'm down to one degree of separation. I've never been on the EA forums or kept up with their membership, but I knew Owen IRL decades ago. We were in the same ieado club, lol.

Suffice to say, I'm a lot more convinced of the "Autistic nerd thinks he's being friendly and helpful by offering his guest room, proceeds to get lied about by clout-chasers" narrative than the "Sex-pest" narrative.

Again, I don't think this is a case of "lied about by clout-chasers". He seems to have admitted that things happened as the bare account of it had it, but interpreted it in a different way (i.e. 'we were friends and I was experimenting with radical truthfulness so things like saying I was going to jerk off did happen') and that's something that makes idiot normies like me go "Why the fuck did you think telling an acquaintance that you were going to jerk off after she walked in the door was a good idea????"

I do think that is "autistic nerd" but it's also "Man, you really did need lessons in social interaction as to what is Too Much Information".

Again, I don't think this is a case of "lied about by clout-chasers". He seems to have admitted that things happened as the bare account of it had it,

Perhaps a better way to describe it is "technically true statements written about by clout chasers in a manner that causes reasonable people to infer totally false conclusions".

For example, here's one totally false conclusion drawn by someone I think you would agree is a fairly intelligent person drawing reasonable inferences from the facts presented:

How would you feel if you walked into an office for an interview and your potential boss (male) said "Just be a sec, I gotta go jerk off"?

I doubt it costs that much in monetary terms. It seems mostly to be sapping attention and morale. I do wonder how the post-FTX funding crunch plays into all this. People might be more willing to backstab each other if they’re worried that staffing cuts are coming.

Well, its too soon to say. This seems to be the first sexual misconduct allegation confirmed against an official EA leader, so you can't really call the TIME story which broke it to be a complete pile of journalistic garbage.

I don't think that anyone claimed it was journalistic garbage in the sense that the specific incidents had not occurred. Rather, the claim was that most of the incidents are so vague that basically everything there might be completely innocuous. For example, the second paragraph merely describes Gopalakrishnan getting asked out. The 7'th paragraph describes one adult "grooming" another adult (I believe this means "asking out") as well as the incident with Owen Cotton-Barratt.

This is strung together in a manner designed to trick casual readers into believing EA is somehow more dangerous than other more socially accepted subcultures, such as journalism or ordinary philanthropy, even though no evidence of this has been presented.

The core question here is whether a social and ideological group is allowed to be weird and also if members can ask each other out, particularly if that subculture has money that some mainstream folks wish to capture. The EA-aligned folks (Yudkowsky, Aella) seem to think weirdness should be permitted. Gopalakrishnan and Time seem to think subcultures they dislike should change to accommodate them.

Iron Law of Institutions comes for us all.

No exceptions.

Who are you accusing of seeking power within EA? Or, within what other institution is power being sought?

One aspect I haven't seen discussed is that this is the same guy who was behind the controversial decision to buy Wytham Abbey for 15 million pounds (see here). In light of current events, it sure looks to me like EA officials decided to blow millions on a luxury venue in Oxford in order to impress women.

To make it clear, I'm referring to this part in particular.

I would assume Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, plus probably others with mainstream views/ordinary philanthropy grifters who are backing her. There's speculation it's a group of people out of Oxford.

Chronologically, the first thing that happened was her making a post on eaforums that ended with a bunch of demands that EA change to make her happy. She admitted that she knew it wasn't up to the normal epistemic standards of EA:

Also, the post is not optimized for analytical/argumentative quality. My only goal is to speak my mind

After a bit of entirely polite pushback she demanded the post be taken down and went to the media.

https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NacFjEJGoFFWRqsc8/women-and-effective-altruism

(Or maybe she had gone to the media prior and the reporter suggested a badly received post on the forums would look good in the story. Keerthana does seem to be struggling pretty hard to interpret the post as badly received in spite of half the responses being "you're so brave".)

Another question arises: why does she even want to be part of EA? She clearly does not align at all with EA epistemics or values:

For a community that is so alarmist for 5 or 1 or 0.1 percentage of X-risk from AI, giving a wide berth for sexual harassment is utterly hypocritical.

The most obvious answer is that she simply viewed EA as a place she could effectively grift, probably by subverting it with mainstream memes and turning the eye of Sauron on it.

Yeah, reading the essay (via Wayback Machine), it rings a lot of alarm bells, and the "oh no I feel unsafe now" rings more.

Yeah, taking a look at her and knowing the psyche of these types of people (I'm sort of one of them myself) I'm 90+% convinced that this woman doesn't care about EA at all, rather what she cares about is power.

In fact I'm 70+% convinced she doesn't even believe what she's saying in the allegations, but rather is using it as an effective tool to gain power and EA is just an available niche she found, it could as easily have been tennis or some nameless corporation had the dice rolled slightly differently.

And the reason this tool is effective is because white people have given it power, were it not effective she wouldn't be using it at all, so you can't really blame her for what's happening either - yes, you can blame her for being a manipulative bitch, but we all have a bit of a manipulative bitch inside of us and you can't blame her for using the most effective tools for the job and if you're going to blame someone for what the tools specifically are, then that blame falls squarely upon white people.

I chatted with her for a week or so on an OLD app, and, for what that level of interaction is worth, that doesn't align with my read on her, which is something on the "smart, somewhere on the spectrum, and a bit odd" side of things. Which seems a pretty solid fit with EA even ignoring formal ideological beliefs, TBH.

Fair, I don't know her personally so your impression is probably more accurate, it's just that there are a lot of South Asians who have this type of belief system, see how even though tons of East Asians are present at lower levels of high tech firms at the top there are a disproportionate number of South Asians and there are reasons why they rose so high (competence + the killer instinct).

the killer instinct)

..what does that mean exactly ? Being faster at stabbing your competition in the back to get ahead ?

I'd imagine it means more willing to (and therefore faster to), yes. You can wait to be uplifted and invited to the upper echelons or you can climb up a mountain of bodies to get there.

You might be shocked to discover that people seeking power often learn how to emulate the behaviors and values of those they wish to manipulate. You usually don't recognize it until after you've been burned. (Learned from experience.)

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