Is it wrong to ask someone out on Facebook Messenger?
Is that what happened? It's never been made public, and the accusations against him in college were much more serious.
Separate from the harassment accusations, Jacy (and ACE while he was there, where I expect he had influence but far from unilateral control) had a bunch of criticisms of their work I would also want addressed before I gave money to an org founded and run by Jacy and his spouse.
I don't see anything to suggest OP has told people they know personally this opinion, can you share what you're basing that on?
I don't want to yell at someone for something they didn't mean, but this question hasn't been answered and I can't come up with an explanation for "avoiding personal drama" that feels noble. I guess it's good OP was truthful that it was drama aka people reacting to their opinions, rather than unfair retribution.
This post is anonymised to avoid interpersonal drama, not because I’m worried about any career blowback.
Can you clarify what you mean by "interpersonal drama" here?
I went in expecting to be able to find mid-career people to hire, but there weren't any there. Attendees were either senior people looking to hire (broadly defined), or too junior for all but charitable internships (charitable meaning you don't expect them to be positive EV for your own company, ever, and offer it strictly as a service to the intern). I like mentoring and would very plausibly have signed up for a mentor mixer type thing, but was much worse at it because I was in a hiring mindset.
As I said, I ended up having good conversations with both ultra-junior and senior people, and if offered the chance to redo I'd still go to the days at the first venue. But I know at least two people who had also come to hire mid-career people and felt bait and switched, and one of those... I forget if they literally used the word "exploited", but it was at least something close to that.
I think you're conflating Lightcone Office (in WeWork, does have applications but I think did pause at one point because of space issues, run by LessWrong/Lightcone team, houses mostly lesser known orgs and independents) with Constellation (a few blocks away, run by Redwood Research, houses several major orgs)
data point: I attended, and while I'm glad I did I felt misled by the promotional material. I know of at least two other people who felt the same, and attributed some of the blame to EA as a whole rather than the organizers.
I absolutely believe my above comment, but am unhappy that it is my only response to this post.
I have a lot of disagreements with this post, both factually and in principle, and I wish it had been written very differently. But my guess is that many people who read this will walk away with a more accurate picture of the world. Not a pareto improvement, they'll have less accurate impressions of some parts, but it overall represents an improvement, and that's good. And people can correct the false parts, so the net improvement might be even higher.
First, I want to broadly agree that distant information is less valuable, and no one should be judged by their college behavior forever. I learned about the Brown accusation (with some additional information, that I lack permission to pass on, and also don't know the source well enough to pass it on) in 2016 and did nothing beyond talking to the person and passing it on to Julia*, specifically because I didn't want a few bad choices while young to haunt someone forever.
[*It's been a while, I can't remember whether I told Julia or encouraged the other person to do so, but she got told one way or another]
The reason I think the college accusations are relevant is that, while I tentatively agree he shouldn't face more consequences for the college accusations, they definitely speak to Ariel's claim there's been no recidivism, and in general they shift my probability distribution over what he was apologizing for.
I don't necessarily think these concerns should have prevented the grant, or that SFF has an obligation to explain to me why they gave the grant. I wouldn't have made that grant, for lots of reasons, but that's fine, and I generally think the EA community acts too entitled around private grantmakers.
But I do think that confidently asserting that the only thing Jacy did was "ask some people out over FB messenger" is likely inaccurate, and it is important to track that. It might be accurate to say "the only thing he has been publicly accused of is asking people out" or "the only thing he has admitted to is asking people out" or "No one has provided any proof he did anything beyond ask people out", but none of those are the same as "the only thing he did is ask people out".
Or there could have been new information I missed, which is why I phrased it as a question.
I'm leaving a lot of your comment unresponded to because I think you're refuting the claim that the college accusations mean Jacy shouldn't have gotten the SFF grant, and I agree with that and never meant to imply otherwise. I just want to separately track what Jacy actually did, and what has been publicly acknowledged. Rereading the thread now I see why it didn't come across that way; I'm pretty sure I read Ariel's comment in the front page feed without realizing it was a response to something else.