Comments
I’m Chana, a manager on the Community Health team. This comment is meant to address some of the things Ben says in the post above as well as things other commenters have mentioned, though very likely I won’t have answered all the questions or concerns.
High level
I agree with some of those commenters that our role is not always clear, and I’m sorry for the difficulties that this causes. Some of this ambiguity is intrinsic to our work, but some is not, and I would like people to have a better sense of what to expect from us, especially as our strategy develops. I'd like to give some thoughts here that hopefully give some clarity, and we might communicate more about how we see our role in the future.
For a high level description of our work: We aim to address problems that could prevent the effective altruism community from fulfilling its potential for impact. That looks like: taking seriously problems with the culture, and problems from individuals or organizations; hearing and addressing concerns about interpersonal or organizational issues (primarily done by our community liaisons); thinking about community-wide problems and gaps and occasionally trying to fill those; and advising various actors in the EA space based on the information and expertise we have. This work allows us to address specific problems, be aware of concerning actors, and give advice to help the community do its best work.
Context on our responses
Sometimes we have significant constraints on what we can do and say that result in us being unable to share our complete perspective (or any perspective at all). Sometimes that is because people have requested that we keep some or all information about them confidential, including what actions our team has taken. Sometimes it is because us weighing in will increase public discussion that could be harmful to some or all of the people involved. This information asymmetry can be particularly tricky when someone else in the community shares some information about a situation that we think is inaccurate or is only a small part of the picture, but we’re not in a position to correct it. I’m sorry for how frustrating this can be.
I imagine this might end up being relevant to responses to this comment (and which and how and when we respond to them), so I think it’s useful to highlight.
I’ll also flag that many of our staff are at events for the next two weeks, so it might be an especially slow time for Community Health responses.
About what to expect
- I think some of the disagreements here come from different understanding of what the Community Health team’s mission is or should be. We want to hear and (where possible) address problems in the community, at the interpersonal, organizational, and community levels. But we often won’t resolve a situation to the satisfaction of everyone involved, or do everything that would be helpful for individuals who were harmed. Ben mentions people “hoping that it [Community Health] will pursue justice for them.” I want to be totally upfront that we don’t see pursuing justice as our mission (and I don’t think we’ve claimed to). In the same vein, protecting people from bullies is sometimes a part of our work, and something we’d always like to be able to do, but it’s not our primary goal and sadly, we won’t always be able to do it.
- We don’t want people to have a false impression of what they can expect from talking to us.
- Sometimes people come to us with a picture of what they’d like to happen, but we won’t always take the steps they hope we’ll take, either because 1) we don’t agree that those steps are the right call, 2) we’re not willing to take the steps based on the information we have (for example if we don’t have their permission to ask for the other person’s side of the story), or 3) the costs (time, legal risk etc) are too great. We generally explain our considerations to the people involved, but could probably communicate better about this publicly, and as we continue thinking about strategic changes, we’ll want to give people an accurate picture of what to expect.
- (At other times people come to us without specific steps they’d like us to take. Sometimes they think something should be done, but don’t know what is feasible, other times they share information as “I don’t think this is very bad and don’t want much to be done, but I thought you should know and be able to look for patterns”, which can be quite helpful.)
- We talk about confidentiality and what actions we might be able to take by default in calls. Typically this results in people deciding to go forward with working with us, but some people might decide that what we’re likely to be able to provide isn’t a good match for their situation.
- I don't think the downside of a false sense of security people might get from our team's existence is strong enough to counteract the benefits.
- It’s true that we rarely write up our findings publicly. I don’t take that as damning since I don’t think that is or should be the default expectation. I think public writeups can be a valuable tool in some cases, but often there are good reasons to use other tools instead.
- One main reason is the large amount of time they take — Ben pointed out that he didn’t necessarily endorse how much time this project took him, but that it was really hard to do less.
- I agree with Ben that we aren’t the EA police. We have some levers we can pull related to advising on a number of decisions, and we do our best to use these to address problems and concerns. I think describing occasions that we use the information we have as “rare” is very much not reflective of the reality of our day-to-day work.
- I’m sad to read in some comments that we didn’t satisfy people’s needs or wants in those situations. I’m very open to receiving feedback, concerns or complaints in my capacity as a manager on the team - feel free to message me on the forum or email me (including anonymously). I recognize someone not wanting to talk to the Community Health team might not want to share feedback with that same team, but I want the offer available for anyone who might. You can also send feedback to CEA interim CEO Ben West here.
- I also think not feeling satisfied with our actions is plausibly a normal outcome even if everything is going well - sometimes the best available choice won’t make everyone (or anyone) happy. I definitely want people to come in expecting that they might not end up happy with our choices (though I think in many cases they are).
- Again, if people think we’re making wrong calls, I’m interested to hear about it. Under some circumstances we can also re-review cases.
Regarding trust
- We're aware that some people might feel hesitant to talk to us (and of course, it’s entirely up to them). There are many understandable reasons for this (even if our team was flawless). Our team isn’t flawless, though, which means there are likely additional cases where people don’t want to talk to us, which I’m sad about. I don’t know how much of a problem this is.
- In particular, we are worried to hear that some people didn’t feel that they’d be treated with respect (I can’t tell if they mean by our team or the general institutional network we’re a part of, or something else). In this case, it sounds like potentially they aren’t confident we’d handle their information well or treat them respectfully. If that is what they meant, that sounds like a bad (and potentially stressful) situation and I’m really sorry to hear about it. I could imagine there being a concerning pattern around this that we should prioritize learning about and working on. If at any point people wanted to share information on the reasons they wouldn’t talk to us, I’m interested (including anonymously - here for the community liaisons, here for me personally and here for Ben West, interim CEO of CEA).
- People might also worry that we’d negatively update our perception of them if they were implicated in something. (This is one of the reasons people might not want to speak to us that might be implied by this post, though I am not at all sure this is what was meant). I don’t currently think we should have a strict policy of amnesty for any concerning information people provide about themselves, though we in fact try hard to not make people regret talking to us. (Strict amnesty of that kind would probably result in less of us doing things about issues we hear about and make Ben’s concerns worse rather than better, though I haven’t gone and researched this question.)
- In general, we care a lot about not making people regret speaking to us and not pressuring people to do or share more than they're comfortable with. These are big elements of why we sometimes do less than we’d like, since we don’t want to take actions they’re not comfortable with, or push them to stay involved in a situation they’d like to be done with, or to do anything that would cause them to be worried we might inadvertently deanonymize them.
- My general sense (though of course there are selection effects here) is that people who talk to our team in person or on calls about our decision making often end up happier and finding us largely reasonable. I haven’t figured out how to do that at scale e.g. in public writing.
Thanks all for your thoughts and feedback.
The closing remarks about CH seem off to me.
So I don't expect disbanding CH to improve justice, particularly since you yourself have shown the job to be exhausting and ambiguous at best.
You have, though, rightly received gratitude and praise - which they don't often, maybe just because we don't often praise people for doing their jobs. I hope the net effect of your work is to inspire people to speak up.
Yeah, I think it is actually incredibly easy to undervalue CH, particularly if people don't regularly interact with it or make use of them rather than just having a single anecdata to go off of. So much of what I do in the community (everything from therapy to mediation to teaching at the camps) is made easier by Community Health, and no one knows about any of it because why would they? I guess I should make a post to highlight this.
Some brief reactions:
Fwiw, seems like the positive performance is more censored in expectation than the negative performance: while a case that CH handled poorly could either be widely discussed or never heard about again, I'm struggling to think of how we'd all hear about a case that they handled well, since part of handling it well likely involves the thing not escalating into a big deal and respecting people's requests for anonymity and privacy.
It does seem like a big drawback that the accused don't know the details of the accusations, but it also seems like there are obvious tradeoffs here, and it would make sense for this to be very different from the criminal justice system given the difference in punishments (loss of professional and financial opportunities and social status vs. actual prison time).
Agreed that a survey seems really good.
With regards to 2: There is some information CH has made public about how many cases they handle and what actions they take. In a 12 month period around 2021, they handled 19 cases of interpersonal harm. Anonymized summaries of the cases and actions taken are available in the appendix of this post. They ranged from serious:
to out of scope:
Oh great, thanks. I would guess that these discrete cases form a minority of their work, but hopefully someone with actual knowledge can confirm.
I did some more research and 20 complaints a year of varying severity is typical, according to what Julia Wise told TIME magazine for their article: