Brainstorming ways to make EA safer and more inclusive

Hey Richard, thanks for starting the discussion! I'd suggest making it easier to submit answers to these questions anonymously e.g. via an anonymous Google Form. I think that will help with opening up the discussion and making the brainstorming more fruitful.

I can't shake the feeling this is a misidentification of the problem. I feel like people have been writing for years about how to make communities more diverse, inclusive, and safer for the people in them. The problem is not a lack of ideas that needs to be rectified by brainstorming - we have the information already. The problem seems to be that no one wants to act on this information. 

I don't know what kind of norm has yet to be stated that would convince people it's bad to have an expert panel that's just 5 white guys. I don't know what kind of "norm" I need to explicitly articulate to make it clear that it's not okay to come to a discussion of gender relations in EA and, as a man, open the discussion by asking how to hit on girls without it being creepy. 

I get the feeling everyone wants to pay lip service to these values without actually addressing the problem (thus the great karma on this post with no comments actually replying to the content of it [although I also agree, in line with Vaidehi and a great Cards Against Humanity card, that Hell will freeze over before we have a sane and respectful discussion of gender and race on the internet]). But the problem is behavior. The behavior simply needs to change. We are past brainstorming. Stop doing the things that make EA spaces hard to be in. 

I think this topic is very important and your question prompts are great, and agree that wider community could maybe do more. I'm skeptical that much progress can be made via online community discussion.

This topic involves are sensitive, complicated and often there won't be a obviously right answer (especially around norms).

My guess is that a dedicated person or small team would be needed to collect experiences (whether via surveys, interviews etc), consult with experts on best practices and then get buy in from relevant stakeholders (e.g ea orgs or groups) and work with them (possibly in a pretty hands on way) to test and implement norm changes.

We can't take on everyone who applies so we are not the whole answer but I as an individual am always happy to chat with people from underrepresented groups Magnify Mentoring the organization continues to take on hundreds of people (currently women, non-binary and trans people of all genders) for mentoring per 6-months which we will continue doing as long as the average results continue to support such an initiative (which thus far they do). We welcome support and as an individual and possibly as an organization, I welcome the opportunity to support efforts and further productive attention in this space.  Thanks :)

Here's a concrete suggestion: less emphasis on a person's impact in "interpersonal harm" cases.

2 of the 7 rows in the table on the community health team post on this topic are about making sure that we can still get the value of perpetrator's work.

This seems to me to be the sort of naive consequentialist reasoning that people find so offputting about EA. It seems to me that when a perpetrator commits a wrongdoing, the question to ask isn't "do they do work that we value and want more of". The questions are "did they commit a wrong? what sort of wrong? what is the appropriate response to that wrongdoing?".

(And note that my link is to an official statement from the team explicitly dedicated to helping protect the community. Imagine how much more prevalent the attitude of "focus on impact" is in some less cautious corners of the community.)

Thanks for starting this discussion!

Some previous efforts here:

The community health team has done some more in-depth work, for example interviews about women's experiences in a couple of workspaces. Unfortunately, the in-depth work didn't yield that many useful next steps. (I’m sure this varies, and in some cases in-depth study of what’s going on with the culture in a space would yield useful action points.)

And more general thoughts:

• EA is multifaceted, made of thousands of people in different online spaces, workplaces, cities, and countries. Even understanding the culture(s), let alone shaping the whole thing, is a huge task. 
• All of us bring pre-existing expectations from our universities, friend groups, workplaces, etc, so there’s no static EA culture - there’s constant inflow from other cultures.
• The work of shaping culture is usually best done by people who understand their space well (their workplace, local group, etc) rather than an outside entity. The staff at CEA can provide advice and support, but we certainly can’t single-handedly change the culture of all these EA spaces.

I’ve been involved with EA since 2015. I think there’s a lot of room for EA to do better when it comes to inclusivity, especially regarding gender (but also race/class/other identity aspects). 

The gender skew in EA exacerbates a lot of the issues related to gender. The gender ratio varies a ton across different geographies and cause areas, but in my experience it ranges from roughly 50/50 to overwhelmingly male (70/30 male/female per 2020 EA survey). When I walk into a meetup and I’m the only woman there, that affects my experience. This was particularly the case when I was first getting involved with EA as a teenager: part of deciding whether you stay involved with a community is your answer to “am I welcome here? Is this community for people like me?,” and repeatedly having experiences where I was one of the only women present gave me the sense that this community wasn’t for people like me. That led me to engage less with EA, though I eventually returned; I suspect it’s more common for women and people from underrepresented groups to “bounce off” of EA like this. It is genuinely surprising in many ways that EA doesn’t have more women, as women tend to be way more involved in the non-profit sector more broadly. It doesn’t have to be this way. 

But the gender skew also affects things when there are issues. If someone makes some comment that makes you uncomfortable and the rest of your male conversational partners laugh it off, that’s not super helpful. I think that, as a community, we should work to reduce the gender skew—through making EA spaces more welcoming to women, investing in mentorship programs, etc.—and actively take efforts to mitigate issues created by the gender skew. On a macro level, fewer women in the room when decision-making is occurring means that issues that affect women are less likely to receive their appropriate attention. That necessitates that institutions make a more active effort to pay attention to issues that effect women, collect women’s opinions on issues that affect things, and yes, have more women in the room when decisions are happening. On a micro level, note when you’re at a get-together and it’s overwhelmingly monolithic (in terms of race, gender, etc.). Pay attention to how that affects how you treat people in the non-dominant group. 

(splitting into a second comment b/c of length)

I think individuals and institutions in EA need to do a better job of mitigating risks created by unequal power dynamics. In a previous job, I conducted research related to institutional accountability and sexual assault. One common theme is that the way that institutions and communities respond to bad behavior by key figures is shaped by their norms and systems, with certain attributes making accountability more difficult to achieve. In my opinion, there are several aspects of the EA movement as it currently exists—including the blurrier work/life boundaries for many folks, the outsize power of certain community leaders, the frequent reliance on ad-hoc rather than formal systems, and the movement’s small size—that make accountability particularly difficult, and I don’t feel that we have done enough to create systems that respond to these risks. 

Let’s think through an example. (To be clear, this is entirely hypothetical.) Imagine that a woman is harassed by a prominent community leader. She works for a small EA org. Her boss is close friends with her harasser, and the org receives significant funding from his organization. She wants to say something, but she doesn’t want to threaten her job or their funding. Not only that, but most of her friends are in EA circles, and she knows speaking up would be divisive.

Some of the things that make this sort of situation more difficult in EA are based on parts of the community that would be difficult or undesirable to change. But some of them are worth changing, and the existence of all of them makes the creation of robust systems even more important. 

I think it’s useful for institutions to think through these sorts of exercises. What if a major donor was engaging in bad behavior? An organization’s leader? To what extent would victims feel able to come forward? How likely would it be that the victim would face negative consequences from speaking up, vs. that the perpetrator would face real consequences?

There are always going to be bad actors. It’s up to communities and institutions to set up systems so that when improper behavior occurs (whether harassment, assault, etc.), it is more likely that bad actors will face accountability for their actions. With rare exceptions, the deck is stacked against the victim and towards the perpetrator; good systems can help reduce how strongly the deck is stacked.

What do these good systems look like? 

• Well-publicized, accessible systems (within orgs, community spaces, and events) that allow people to report incidents of improper behavior
• Clear policies for how institutions will respond to reports, including how they will maintain confidentiality
• Thoughtful procedures for reducing the likelihood of retaliation
• Explicit conflict of interest policies for orgs and grantmakers
• Robust governance systems

This is just a start, but hopefully a helpful one! These are conversations worth having. 

Just to flag in some ways it would be good to be less inclusive. There is a lot of discussion right now about how/if/when we could have spotted the FTX/crypto fraud sooner and that is all about being quicker to exclude them.

To engage more productively with the prompt, I think the de-normalisation of Polygamy seems plausible. I've long been uncomfortable with (some) EA's embrace of this, as given the harmful effects of the institution on societies, like encouraging male violence and suppressing womens rights. Even though these issues didn't seem like huge issues for EAs, I don't think we should adopt norms that would be bad for society if everyone did them. But there seem to be also two significant more concrete inclusion reasons to oppose it.

Firstly, it enables predatory men and abuses of power. In a traditional environment, all the senior men will be married, and thus any proposition they make to vulnerable young women is clearly illicit. It can still happen - though probably with lower frequency - but the woman will clearly understand from the beginning that a norms violation is occurring, and there is more support for shutting it down sooner. Additionally, to the extent the leaders wives are involved in the community, there is a native constituency naturally opposed to this behavior.

Additionally, as people have pointed out, sexual relations in the workplace create clear conflicts of interest. There is a reason they are tightly regulated in many professional environments. This is not the first scandal we have had where key decision makers seem to have covered up for their romantic partners.
 

[ETA: Whoops, realized this is answering a different question than the one the poster actually asked -- they wanted to know what individual community members can do, which I don't address here.]

Some concrete suggestions:

-Mandatory trainings for community organizers. This idea is lifted directly from academia, which often mandates trainings of this sort. The professional versions are often quite dumb and involve really annoying unskippable videos; I think a non-dumb EA version would encourage the community organizer to read the content of the community health guide linked in the above post and then require them to pass a quiz about its contents (but if they can pass the quiz without reading the guide that's fine, the point is to check they understand the contents of the guide, not to make them read it). I imagine that better but higher-effort/more costly versions of this test would involve short answer questions ("How would you respond to X situation?"); less useful but lower-effort versions would involve multiple choice questions. To elaborate, the short answers version forces people to think more about their answer but also probably requires a team of people to read all these answers and check if they're appropriate or not, which is costly.

-some institution (the community health team? I dunno) should come up with and institute codes of conduct for EA events and make sure organizers know about them. There'd presumably need to be multiple codes of conduct for different types of events. This ties in to the previous bullet since it's the sort of thing you'd want to make sure organizers understand. This is a bit of a vague and uninformed proposal -- maybe something like this already exists, although if so I don't know about it, which at minimum implies that if it exists it ought to be more widely advertised.

-maybe a centralized page of resources for victims and allies, with advice, separate from the code of conduct? Don't know how useful this is

-every medium/large EA event/group should have a designated community health point person, preferably female though not necessarily, who makes a public announcement that if someone makes you uncomfortable you can talk to the point person and with your permission they'll do what's necessary to help, and then follows through if people do report issues to them. They should also remind/inform everyone of the role of Julia Wise, and, if someone comes to them with an issue and gives permission to pass it on to her and her team, do that. (You might ask, if this point person is probably just gonna pass things on to Julia Wise, why even have a point person? The answer is that reporting is scary and it can be easier to report to someone you know who has some context on the situation/group.)

Furthermore, making these things happen has to explicitly be someone's job, or the job of a group of someones. It's much likelier to actually happen in practice if it is someone's specific responsibility than if it's just an idea some people talk about on the Forum.

Something I don't think helps much is: trying to tell all EAs that they should improve their behavior and stop being terrible. This won't work because unfortunately, self-identifying EAs aren't all cooperative nice individuals who care about not harming others personally. They don't have incentives to change just because someone tells them to, and worse offenders on these sorts of issues are also very likely to not be the sorts of people who want to read posts like this one about how to do better. That said, I think that posts on this subject that are more helpful are posts that include lots of specific examples or advice, especially advice for bystanders.

Some suggested heurstics:

• If you wouldn't ask for an EAG meeting with someone if you didn't fancy them, don't ask for the meeting if you do
• If you are talking to someone, leave a break. If they don't ask a question consider whether they look like they are just enjoying the conversation or being polite.
• If you want to leave a conversation, say "I am going to do X", "I am going to head off now", or "[name] it's been a pleasure"
• Imagine you are going to be fined $100 if you make someone uncomfortable. Would you act differently?

Great post! I agree with a commenter above who says that "The problem is not a lack of ideas that needs to be rectified by brainstorming - we have the information already. The problem seems to be that no one wants to act on this information." That being said, I have a few thoughts: 

Regarding code of conduct at events, I'm hesitant to make hard and fast rules here. I think the reality around situations such as asking people out/hitting on people, etc, is that some people are better at reading situations than others. For example, I know couples who have started dating after meeting each others at  my local EA group's events, and I don't think anyone would see an issue with that. The issue comes in when someone asks someone out/hits on someone and makes the other person uncomfortable in the process. That being said, not asking people out during 1:1s seems like a good norm (I'm surprised I even need to say this, to be frank), as does not touching someone unless you have explicitly asked for their consent to do so (this can apply even to something like hugs), and not making comments on someone's appearance/facial features/body. 

In terms of power structures/conflicts of interest, I would love to see us borrow more from other organisations that have good guidelines around this. I can't think of any specific ones right now, but I know from my time working in government that there are specific processes to be followed around conflicts of interest, including consensual workplace relationships. I'm sure others can chime in with organisations that do this well. 

In terms of hiring, I like what Rethink Priorities is doing. They attempt to anonymise parts of applications where possible, and ask people not to submit photos alongside their CVs. I think more could be done to encourage partially blind hiring/funding processes. For example, an employer/funder could write their first impression of someone's application without seeing any identifying information (eg. name, age, gender, ethnicity, etc), then do a second impression after. I'm conscious that names are quite important in EA and that this could add more work to already busy grant-making organisations, but maybe there is a way to do this that would minimise additional work while also helping reduce unconscious bias. 

I would also love to see more writing/information/opinions come from the top-down. For example, people who have a big voice in effective altruism could write about this more often and make suggestions for what organisations and local groups can do. We already see this a bit from CEA, but it would be great to see it from other EA orgs and thought leaders. Sometimes I get a sense that people who are higher-up in the movement don't care about this that much, and I would love to be proven wrong.

Lastly, when it comes to engaging with posts on the forum about this topic, I was disappointed to recently see a post of someone writing about their experiences in the EA NYC community be met with a lot of people who commented disagreeing with how the post was written/how polyamorous men were generally characterised in the post. I think we should establish a norm around validating people when they have bad experiences, pointing them to the community health team, and taking steps to do better. There is no "perfect victim" - we need to acknowledge that sometimes people will have bad experiences with the community and will also hold opinions we disagree with. When they bring up their bad experience, it's not the time to say, "not all men are like this" or "I disagree with how you went about bringing this up." 

Thank you for writing this, I think it's very important.

I am unsure where the line is, but past some point, making someone uncomfortable at an work EA event (I think parties have a different bar) should result in significant actions. I have heard 4? stories of attendees, some powerful making people uncomfortable in ways that seem very easy to avoid and ought to have been heavily punished so that those doing it thought twice before they did. 

"interpersonal harm" link broken

I think we could think about ways of listening to the community without the community specifically creating choices - even a regular poll or regular posts from key decisionmakers about their strategies would allow a focus point for the community to respond.

I think EA's obsession with maximization is an issue and impacts inclusivity of our the community (similar thinking, similar life experiences, similar socio-economic status, similar gender/sex/etc).

Holden Karnofsky summarises this really well in a blog (EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous):

If you’re maximizing X, you’re asking for trouble by default. You risk breaking/downplaying/shortchanging lots of things that aren’t X, which may be important in ways you’re not seeing. Maximizing X conceptually means putting everything else aside for X — a terrible idea unless you’re really sure you have the right X.

EA is about maximizing how much good we do. What does that mean? None of us really knows. EA is about maximizing a property of the world that we’re conceptually confused about, can’t reliably define or measure, and have massive disagreements about even within EA. By default, that seems like a recipe for trouble.

I think the FTX scandal raises some serious questions about just how well the community is positioned to forecast the future and hence direct large amounts of money that can actually have a net negative impact and how the EA community can essentially be a big echo chamber.

While the EA community claims to favour wild ideas, I think the community is still relatively narrowly focused on a few select cause areas even those these are highly uncertain and we may be completely unaware of other issues. I know the known unknowns have been covered by Toby Ord and others but I think we need to make sure we continue to seek diverse experiences, skills, thinking, and disciplines.

6. Just written about possible solution in new post whistleblowing tiny wrongdoings before they escalate