EA's weirdness makes it unusually susceptible to bad behavior

Be marginally less accepting of weirdness overall.

I agree that a low-weirdness EA would have fewer weird scandals. I'm not sure whether these would just be replaced by more normal scandals.  It probably depends a lot on exactly what changes you make? A surprisingly large fraction of the "normal" communities I've observed are perpetually riven by political infighting, personal conflicts, allegations of bad behavior, etc., to a far greater degree than is true for EA.

Choosing the right target depends on understanding what EA is doing right in addition to understanding what it's doing wrong, and protecting and cultivating the former at the same time we combat the latter.

I'm skeptical that optimizing against marginal weirdness is a good way to reduce rates of sexual misconduct, mostly for two reasons:

• The proposal is basically to regress EA to the mean, but I haven't seen evidence that EA is worse than the mean of the populations we'd realistically move toward. This actually matters; it would be PlayPump levels of tragicomic if EA put a ton of effort into Becoming More Normal for the sake of making sex and gender minorities safer in EA, only to find out that the normal demographic we've merged with has worse rates of sexual assault, harassment, etc.
• There's an inherent tension between "make EA normal and inoffensive" and "make EA honest and high-integrity". Optimizing for normality also means optimizing for faking normality. Optimizing for a scandal-free EA also means optimizing for covering up information that makes EA look bad. An EA that's less honest, less open, less able to have "real" and frank EA-to-EA conversations, and less willing to take PR hits for the sake of Doing The Right Thing, is not particularly one that I'd expect to be overall safer for its members.

In the long run, I think the best way to make the EA community a healthy place is to optimize somewhat for weirdness as a secondary consideration, but mostly just optimize for a community that's honest, high-integrity, brave, compassionate, smart, skillful, thoughtful, self-aware, etc.  Like, try to make EA actually virtuous, and actively push against incentives to merely seem virtuous in various regards.

I also think that optimizing against weirdness would be really bad for EAs' ability to make the world a better place, because I think EA is currently mostly bottlenecked on "vastly insufficient quantities of weird ideas, uncorrelated research directions, low-confidence exploratory attempts to try new things, etc."

The ITN framework also points in this direction: "importance, tractability, and neglectedness" is not that far off from "importance, tractability, and weirdness". You can ditch the weirder and more counter-intuitive ideas, but then you'll be competing with all the other people in the world who want to do important and tractable things that aren't socially risky or weird.

EA already has a massive surplus of people generating weird new ideas

A surplus relative to what? I think that AI alignment is desperately in need of many weird new ideas, and also in serious need of a lot more honest, substantive public debate of weird and counter-intuitive strategy and governance issues.

This might just be an object-level disagreement about where EA's main positive impact is likely to come from, on our respective models of the world. E.g., if you think EA mainly has a positive impact via increasing donations to GiveDirectly, then I buy that EA's current idea pipeline might be a lot weirder than optimal for that.

This post presents as the only counterargument to expelling weirdness from our community that we might have less good ideas about how to make the world better. Obviously a big and serious concern! Seems important to include it. But I didn't hear two other important reasons (in my view) to tolerate weirdness:

• Dialling down weirdness is often difficult and stressful, and in some cases effectively amounts to excluding people entirely (whether intentionally or not),
• Cultural designation of harmless lifestyles, or beliefs, or neurodivergence, as weird or inappropriate is immoral, and we should not tolerate it lightly.

I agree you shouldn't do weird bad things, but you shouldn't do ordinary bad things either. A general campaign against weirdness will hurt people who do not deserve to be hurt, and that's wrong regardless of whether it will overall be better or worse for the prospects of the movement as a whole.

When the culture you live in is (e.g.) homophobic, or transphobic, or stigmatizes autism, being counter-cultural is a moral obligation.

I think we have a bunch of unusual norms, but I'd prefer to:

A. Focus on the norms that are causing the most harm (like maybe the professional/personal overlap has some interesting potential interventions that take seriously how enmeshed things are and how costly it is not to be able to date in your community, this is just one potential intervention point, I don't have a strong take yet on what the highest leverage thing is). I will say that romance within organizations I think it's already taken pretty seriously in my experience, and then the question is the network/all the social overlap, which is much more complicated and has a whole spectrum of how intense the overlap is (grantmakers are in a different position, some people are independent researchers and more/less reliant on organizational leadership goodwill, the list goes on)

B. Treat intervening there as an experiment, and pull back if we think it's not worth it

Overall pushing back on weirdness seems to me trying to address too broad of a thing without focusing on the highest leverage parts, and might take away from things that feel important, plus could end up instantiated cruelly, though that's not my crux. Also seems subject to getting to be used as a weapon, that will change as social mores change.

I also notice in myself a people pleaser streak, that wants the world at large to like me and my community, and I think that makes me more likely on the margin to want to make changes that people on the outside want me to make, and I want to be tracking that and not let it run the show, relative to things I think are actually good ideas (including incorporating my outside view! And including things I think are good for being upstanding allies/trading partners who might give something up that we value for that alliance.) I suspect I am not alone in having this trait, so might be helpful to track in general.

You're focusing on the wrong thing here. The problem for bad behavior isn't "weirdness" itself, it's that people are using "weirdness" as an excuse for unprofessional and toxic behavior, and that other people are going along with it. Whether people are weirdly into trains, or in a polyamorous relationship at home, has nothing to do with it. 

The norms for an organisation where you are responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars should be different from those of some rationalist hobby group, but it looks like far too many people are jumping from one to the other with no change. 

I strongly agree with a lot of your points here. To pick up on one strand you highlight, I think the fact that EA is very nerdy, and lacking 'street smarts' has been at the root of some (but not all) of the problems we've been seeing. I think it might be this rather than an intellectual commitment to assume good faith and tolerate weirdness that is the main issue, though maybe the first causes the second. Specifically, EAs seem to have been pretty naive in dealing with bad actors over the last few years and that persists to this day. 

If the problem is lack of street smarts, then we don't need to get into debates about being less weird because it's kind of unclear what it means, and hard to judge what margin of weirdness you want to move, which makes general debates about weirdness difficult. But it's pretty clear that we need to be more street smart. 

It's hard to have a firm opinion without knowing what the post would say. But in general, I think critiques of specific organizations and practices are necessary to move this conversation forward, and you have special experience and knowledge to do that. You also have some structural advantages on the topic -- you're an identifiable person (cf. the distrust in many circles of anonymous "burner" accounts), and you're not financially or otherwise dependent on EA. So if the CH process isn't working as it should, I suspect you are uniquely the best person to write about that.

You might consider giving CH an advance opportunity to comment on at least any factual assertions you plan to make in the post. For the reader, it's hard to know what to think when a poster makes factual assertions, the other party denies them, and the nature of the situation is such that neither party can offer verifiable specifics to back up their claim. So to the extent that common ground on the facts is helpful, I think it would be a more helpful conversation. For instance, I think it would be helpful for CH to broadly explain, to the extent this is possible while maintaining confidentiality, what actions were taken on the 36 reports you made (and why). That might, for instance, reveal that CH has a narrower definition of who is in the EA community than you do -- which would enable a discussion about what the scope of CH's work should be. 

Given that you've been involved in a number of matters, I think your insight on what CH should be doing differently would also be helpful. (Or if you think, as I do, that certain functions need to be handled outside of CH.) . I feel the discussion engendered by the Time article has been rather light on who needs to be doing what specifically -- funders, CEA, employers, local/university EA groups, EAs, etc.

Of course, I recognize that you don't have funding for any of this, and don't want to make you feel an obligation to write a post. I've tried to float the idea that "ordinary" EAs should establish mechanics to fund certain types of work independently of the major funding pathways, and I think the type of work you're doing would be a prime candidate. Haven't gotten much interest in that take so far. (I'm sure there are many ways to be an ally here, but as someone whose role in EA is presently only posting on the Forum and writing modest checks, I tend to gravitate a bit toward what is legible to / achievable by me.)

There's a lot I disagree with in this post, but there's one part I super agree with:

Be much, much less accepting of any intersection between romance and office/network

Traditionally dating happens with your 2nd and 3rd order connections, not your first. Also, dating in a professional (or related) setting is very likely to lead to bad outcomes. We know this.

I realize people want to date like-minded people. There are lots of them out there who aren't in EA! You just have to look for them.

This is cribbing a bit from Sam[]zdat's summary of Hoffer's "The True Believer", but in brief: I'm skeptical of pushes to make EA more normal because normal people don't join social movements or intentional communities. Alternative lifestyles like polyamory, atheism and veganism are already largely drawing from people who are alienated from mainstream society enough to start doing things differently. High tolerance for weirdness + a desire to sacrifice in favor of the cause enables abuse in EA, sure. It also enables abuse and grift in your local anarchist co-op, your local BLM circle, probably even your local fusion dance scene. 

Joining a demanding community or cause is something that is most appealing to people who are already having trouble fitting into society. That fact creates a lot of problems in any kind of intentional community or cause--I will always be the first to admit this. But not tolerating weirdness probably means paying the price of not really having a movement at all.

This is repeating some of what's already been said, but I worry that this is targeting the wrong thing. 

I do believe that lots of the abusers or boundary-pushers in EA probably justified their behaviour by just saying they were 'weird' or 'high-openness' or 'high decoupling' or whatever. But I think behaving like this involves not just weirdness, but also other traits - at the less serious end, lack of social skills and empathy (and just good-old fashioned lack of feminist consciousness), and at the more serious end, manipulativeness and being an asshole. Like, I'm weird but I know that you probably shouldn't invite your coworkers to sex parties, because I've managed to absorb the general world knowledge that 'lots of people are weird about sex and consider it private and stuff so you probably should be a bit circumspect about the contexts and ways in which you mention it'. 

Potentially relevant posts: On "fringe" ideas and https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/

I think we should slightly narrow the Overton Window of what ideas and behaviours are acceptable to express in EA spaces, to help exclude more harassment, assault and discrimination.

I also think EA at its best would primarily be more of a professional and intellectual community and less of a social circle, which would help limit harmful power dynamics, help limit groupthink and help promote intellectual diversity.

This article seems to presuppose that EA has a worse time with bad behavior than other "less weird" groups. But is that actually true? For example Scott Alexander's evidence (very limited though it is) seems to point the other way.

Strong upvote.

Three additional arguments in favor of (marginally!!!!) greater social norm enforcement:

(1)

A movement can only optimize for one thing at a time.  EA should be optimizing for doing the most good.

That means sometimes, EA will need to acquiesce to social norms against behaviors that - even if fine in isolation - pose too great a risk of damaging EA's reputation and through it, EA's ability to do the most good.

This is trivially true; I think people just disagree about where the line should be drawn.  But I'm honestly not sure we're drawing any lines right now, which seems suboptimal.

(2)

Punishing norm violations can be more efficient than litigating every issue in full (this is in part why humans evolved punishment norms in the first place).

And sometimes, enforcing social norms may not just more efficient; it may be more likely to reach a good outcome.   For example, when the benefits of a norm are diffuse across many people and gradual, but the costs are concentrated and immediate, a collective action problem arises:  the beneficiaries have little incentive to litigate the issue, while those hurt have a large incentive.  Note how this interacts with point (1): reputation damages to EA at large are highly diffuse.

To strengthen this point, social norms often pass down knowledge that benefits adherents without their ever realizing it.  Humans aren't good at getting the best outcomes from our individual reasoning; we're good at collective learning.

(3)

 There are a lot more people in the world interested in norm violation than in doing the most good.  Therefore, we should expect that a movement too tolerant of weirdness will create too high a ratio of norm-violators to helpful EAs (this is the witch hunt point made in the OP).

I would look again at your opening sentence for a more fundamental clue as to why the EA community is susceptible to bad behaviour.

I'm not sure that your ideas regarding the romance and professional relationships separation would work in practice.

1. As EA is international, I'm worried about European Vs American cultural norms. Attitudes concerning sexuality vary greatly and it is not clear that enforcing the more conservative US norms is optimal. Looking at military regulations concerning this there are huge differences in how organizations from those different cultural spheres handle this. In the US Military relationships are heavily restricted, in the German Federal Army for example, only relationships between directly superior commanding officers and enlisted soldiers are considered problematic. In theory those should result in transfering the enlist into another unit, but not in disciplinary measures. The reality is even more lax.

2. If there is a norm against it, what is the base rate of sexual happenings in those organisations where it is considered unprofessional? Speaking from my experiences in the military, it is high. While the skewed gender ratio might be a factor (it's unlikely to be a strong one as the behaviour is also common in units heavy on females), the rule is that sexual relationships pretty much always happen if people are single. As militaries tend to pride themselves on their professionalism and discipline and select for more conservative people, I'm fairly certain that what I'm observing is actually less than what I would observe in a civilian organisation. I'd speculate that most of those norms against romance in the workplace just exist for their signaling value. After all, even in the US 11% of couples get to know each other at work. (This is down from 19% in the nineties.)

3. If this is true, the main value of such norms would be signaling. Signaling on itself can be valuable, but we should not pretend to be doing anything but signaling with those measures.

4. My model of what stronger norms against such things do is this: they slightly reduce the approach attempts, they push most of those interactions into the shadows, they incentive using power to obscure such relationships and approach attempts, and they make talking and managing the issue harder as noone is officially doing it. This is without getting into the issue of EA also being a community, which means that other categories of how people meet their partners also contribute.

5. My suggestions:

• stronger norms on consent and rejecting advances This would pair well with the existing openness on this subject. It is especially not acceptable to let someone suffer professional costs for rejecting advances.

• increase transparency in decisions regarding money and opportunities This seems like a good idea in general and it is quite frankly puzzling why the current processes are so intransparent. Maybe it should be standard practice to lay open the personal relationships between those people involved in such decisions. However, I'm not sure if this is legally sound or easy.

• excluding systematic violators of thise rules by ostracism It was said in the discussion on this subject that most sexual assaults cases (90%)are perpetrated by repeat offenders. I think it is reasonable to think that other inappropriate behaviour could cluster on certain individuals as well. An actual mechanism for something like this should be divised by people with legal backgrounds, as I'm fairly certain something like this could easily run into defamation laws.

Hi J_J, thanks for everything you are doing. I'm curious what your thoughts are on people having stronger professional boundaries in EA (there being stronger norms around dating people you work with, and/or not talking about sex with co-workers). Do you think this would make sexual assault less likely, or is this unrelated? 

 

Be more willing to call out inappropriate, weird and/or off-putting behavior, and more willing to simply shut down certain types of people without needing to endlessly discuss or justify it. Be more willing to call obvious red flags as red flags.

I think the right approach is something like a legal trial: have a context devoted to figuring out if there was wrongdoing, then determine any punishment, then mete it out.

Concretely, this could look something like: "I propose we set a timer and discuss for X minutes. When it rings, we make a list of possible punishments, with 'no punishment' one item on the list, and use anonymized approval voting to determine which punishment is best." (Note that in our legal system, the severity of punishment is often adjusted based on the amount of remorse displayed by the offender, and that seems good here too.)

Endless discussion seems bad, but assuming guilt or copy/pasting prevailing mainstream social norms also seems bad -- prevailing mainstream social norms have often been wrong throughout history, and I doubt the present is an exception. (But Chesterton's Fence applies -- it's good to try and understand the best arguments available for a mainstream social norm before disregarding it.)

Overall, I wish there would have been less focus on trying to portray polyamory negatively - both in the article and in all the discussions about the article on the forum. Both because it was unnecessary and unhealthy to pass judgemental of people's personal dating preferences and because  it has detracted from the conversations about sexual harassment/assault. IMO, the behavior described in the article can be considered unacceptable irrespective of people personal views about mono/poly.

The first few comments on this post are also understandably hung up on the mention of being invited to a 'polycule' and the sex party involving 'BDSM' sex toys. But these comments (very possibly unintentionally) end up dismissing an alternate and important interpretation of these incident - If you substitute polycule with "mono relationship" and "BDSM sex toys" with "sex toys", the incidents sound just as horrifying. I do not think you need to be anti-poly or anti-kink to think that a workplace culture that makes it acceptable to make sexual advances to your colleagues (both inside and outside of the workplace because bumping into your boss at the gym does not change the power dynamics of your relationship) is likely to lead to sexual harassment and discrimination issues.

I do not agree with a general statement about reducing "weirdness" in the community as this can be misused to discriminate against certain groups. (As long as "being accepting of bad behavior" or "having less strict policies on workplace romance and /or sexual harassment than is usual practice in non EA orgs" is not passed of as a weird quirk we should get used to).

I agree that the high intersection between romance and office/network likely leads to unhealthy professional spaces.

There should be guidelines about dating in the workplace at EA orgs. There should be regular sexual harassment prevention trainings at EA orgs, and they should be highly recommended for people engaging in EA projects together outside of the orgs, for people working as grant makers, etc. I would consider expanding mini trainings to EA Global or any other EA professional spaces.

That makes sense re the power dynamics. Thank you for your thoughtful response. I’m not sure how to answer the question regarding effectiveness because I don’t think it matters either way. One thing I know for sure is that these allegations will push women away from EA. I appreciate the time and energy you are spending on this.

I struggle to believe this article would have as many upvotes if it was about almost any other immutable characteristic than weirdness. 

Weird people have relatively little control over how weird they are.

I think that many upvoting this probably understand what it is to feel judged or unsafe. I am confused how this doesn't apply to "Be marginally less accepting of weirdness overall". Say that sentence in your head with any other word than [weirdness].