All of Ivy Mazzola's Comments + Replies

Thanks!

Fair, that is a mock incident, but I don’t see that aspect as being dramatized or anything. Fwiw I have known multiple people whose experiences basically matched Steve’s.

I just think if we are going to talk about doxxing Alice and Chloe we might want to think what it might look like if they had gone elsewhere, or what it might look like in the future if they unduly report others. And as a community I think it must be reckoned with why some people feel upset right now at the protection that reporters face when accused get so few protections, not even the pr... (read more)

Hm I guess that’s true. I guess I thought it went without saying that it would be when people want anonymity, I didn’t imagine there could be an alternative where CH removes names even if the complainant doesn’t request it. That would indeed be worse and a true “default” and I hope no one took that as what I meant.

But I think CH asks complainants what degree of anonymity and detail-sharing they are comfortable with by default. And I think a lot of people ask them to not give details, and by default CH does defer to that preference to what might be an abnor... (read more)

Sorry, but I have (re)read that link and I don’t see how anything we said was in conflict with each other. Perhaps I didn’t word it well. Or am I misunderstanding you? If you could give some hard numbers like, only X% of complaints end up being handled anonymously, and of those, in Z% the complaints end up being unactionable and we just give a listening ear, and only in Y% do anonymous complaints end up being held against the person and meaningfully effecting their lives, then maybe I can agree I made the extent of the dilemma sound overblown. I’m also awa... (read more)

Just wondering if you can acknowledge that EA is not for everyone? I guess I feel a lot "safer" about these types of critiques to change the culture and overt focus when people acknowledge that. There are ways I would tweak EA culture in some places to lead to a bigger and broader community. There also ways I would not, and there are people who I think would never be happy with EA's values unless it already described what they are already interested in and already believe, which is very far from and conflicts with EA. And those people will never like EA un... (read more)

I agree with all this, and I also think the OP might be speaking to some experiences in EA you might not have had which could result in you talking past each other.

Thanks for your kind comment :)

Short answer: I think Ben should defer to the community health team as to whether to reveal identities to them or not (I'm guessing they know). And probably the community health team should take their names and add it to their list where orgs can ask CH about any potential hires and learn of red flags in their past. I think Alice should def be included on that list, and Chloe should maybe be included (that's the part I'd let the CH team decide if it is was bad enough). It's possible Alice should be revealed publicly, or maybe just revealed to community org... (read more)

You and I don't disagree. Which is why I ended my prior two comments with calls for patience and links to a survey so we can get better data. I feel like I touched on that throughout but my point wasn't to make an active claim about the community, it was to get someone else to stop making active claims backed up with tripe. 

Honestly, I am frustrated by this comment. It reveals to me that I'm not sure what I can say to keep from being misunderstood. I added in that edit you quote as a way of trying to say something very similar to what you have just sa... (read more)

I'd say Vassar was a primary source for the salaciousness of the wording of the whole situation. Which is what matters if you are going to say it is damning. Because, surely you don't think a 17yo who consented and is still in the community 10 years later who has shown no apparent problem looking back on it, is that big of a deal?

Did you know that in every European country and 38/50 US states the legal age of sexual consent is 17 or below? 

Don't you think this makes 18 more of a legal quirk than a boundary on which to park your moral disgust reactor? ... (read more)

I have read all that before. I really have to wonder if you actually read the Facebook threads, because that isn't damning at all. Especially not against Yudkowsky.. it's actually overtly vindicating of him. And it is intellectually dishonest that you even link the archived miricult website when even the medium piece and the Facebook posts malign it as essentially a highly inaccurate hit-piece. So, your second link contradicts the first. (The first is so nutty it's not believable anyway it's very pizzagate-ish).

And tbh, the facebook threads themselves disc... (read more)

Kathy Forth was NOT right. How can you say that when she falsely accused someone of sexual assault, and tried to smear their character in her own way when proven wrong? She was demonstrably wrong. Please just let the dead rest. No one will like it, including Kathy's family and friends, if this gets brought up again. Honestly it is not appropriate that you posted her suicide letter which has falsehoods within, and we know how drama hungry the EA community is. I personally witnessed the pain and chaos her delusions prompted her to cause and it does not ... (read more)

I'd like to see IHOP, Denny's, and other breakfast-heavy chains adopt:
-cage-free eggs. 
-vegan pancake batter as default (their customers never have to know, and it would be cheaper for them if they can replace eggs with, say, part protein powder, corn starch, and a touch of extra rise agent)
- eggless scramble option, like with Just Egg or tofu.

Okay but, before I say, I'd like to clarify that I don't think I'd be perfect at this, which is one reason I'm not leading weird things. But I think if you are gonna make requests like that of employees you live or travel with, you basically have to be. (because it gets so much harder then, and this type of communication that makes weirdness safe is the leader's responsibility not the employee's).

Okay, at risk of sounding cringe, it's things like:

• Hi Chloe, some of us were talking about going to St. Barths for the day, would you like to come? As a separate

This was written after reading Chloe's update

Note: I'm trying to focus on "What are good practices for people trying weird things?" rather then "Should NL/Kat/Emerson be disbanded/reprimanded" until NL posts their rebuttal.

I notice I'm feeling confused that I'm not reading the type of dialogue I tend to hear in EA/rationalist spaces. Weird arrangements def cut out normy safeguards, but I feel this community does actually have tools to mitigate harm that can come with trying those weird arrangements. I mean this separate from org operational norms like comp... (read more)

Wow. Sincere apologies you went through that. Even if Kat and Emerson thought they were being reasonable (no comment), and/or even if bad instances were few and far between (no comment), such instances would affect me and most people I know very deeply. Probably including the multi-month hangover and residual pain today. And that matters, and is something we need managers/bosses/colleagues to consider. Even if it was only painful at the time, that would matter. Really sorry. 

P.S. I previously put a "changed my mind" react to this comment, but I really meant "brought new things to mind". Put them in other comments

This was written after reading Chloe's update

Note: I'm trying to focus on "What are good practices for EAs who want to try weird things?" rather then "Should NL/Kat/Emerson be disbanded/reprimanded" until NL posts their rebuttal.

I'm feeling concerned about some specific stuff I'd put in the "working in unusual vistas" bucket. I feel weird because Nonlinear has listed "travel" as a perk on job listings, when it can easily be more of a burden, and looks like it is for certain members of their team (while others have more of the benefits and less of the costs... (read more)

(Take my strong upvote, I think people downvoting you don't realize you are the author of the post haha)

[Edit: I now realize that this is what Spencer discussed below and other people have been discussing too. But maybe the community norms roadmap makes it seem less pie-in-the-sky]

I first had this idea about that Toby Ord post a few months back, and regret not writing it up then.

Idea: I think people who write something that could be considered a "criticism" (or worse, a "hitpiece") should send a heads-up message to the person in question, with their finished post attached.

Example: "Hey, I have written [this post] about things I am concerned about regarding ... (read more)

Very excited about this! FYI, this also makes EA promo a lot simpler for the local groups! 

At risk of saying a lot.. Especially in non-hubs, I sort of think the default funnel should be to help local EAs engage in online EA spaces more and more. It's a lot easier to find your niche and collaborators once you engage with way more people in international community, and the changeup in flow of ideas that you see being involved in more than your local group is good too. But it's been hard as an organizer to know which virtual communities to promote (EA ne... (read more)

I like both these suggestions a lot. I just wonder if anyone can chime in if the CH Team might struggle to get NGO status without being part of CEA. I wonder what their altruistic mission statement would be summarized as?

Perhaps this is a silly question and NGO status is easier to get than I think.

Same, I have never heard any of these. Perhaps some people are saying these things, but I'd be very surprised to, say, hear anything like this being shared in the EA leaders Slack (not that I'm in it but as someone who has spoken to many EA leaders, they are all chill)

EAs tend to speak in really nuanced ways, so the furthest I've heard someone go is saying things like "I've found Bayesian reasoning to be an irreplaceable tool and want us to help new EAs learn it and be aware of the value themselves" or "Eating vegan has been shown to increase compassi... (read more)

Sorry it took me so long to come back.

Okay thanks for clarifying that you only mean that some private reception by CEA was unkind. Some others have attempted to paint EA forum response with a negative brush and if it isn't true. People here might not be the most warm but they try pretty hard to avoid unkindness.

Tbh I think I understand your frustration a bit from experiences in my own life, like feeling like I've done someone's dirty work or grunt work and then being pushed aside. That said, feelings being what they are (unreliable, even if if they are som... (read more)

I insinuated that you were trying to do something outside of the law? Where? I honestly didn't mean to [Edit: Oh I think I know what line you noticed... no I wasn't meaning to insinuate that in a negative way. If I insinuated that as going against the law I'd be insinuating negative toward all people who do external justice processes. I more mean "that's a difference of opinion that boggles my mind" I know why people avoid it, as you say victims find it retraumatizing to go through judicial process. But it still boggles my mind that you and others are comi... (read more)

But I know you expected kindness back when you posted that old aggressive post you've now deleted/rewritten though?

Also, everyone had been quite kind to you in forum discussion before that point [I remember from other discussion and actually liking what you wrote and you got a lot of upvotes] So it's a little odd to say that you helped "until [EA] was unkind to you". Maybe its more accurate to say "helped until people pushed back against your unkindness, [which you did start with that highly unusual post]"

That said I don't think my response here was even u... (read more)

A couple more personal thoughts:
(these ended up long, I hope the algorithm collapses them. Interested parties can choose to read and the rest ignore)

1. I'm having trouble trusting the terminology being used is accurate because of the author's liberal use of terminology in the past that did not make sense to me then. Eg, would the victim describe their experiences as they are described here? And again, teminology around calling people EAs? It's possible the author is trying to do better this time, but I'm very unsure of that as they might just be sticking t... (read more)

I apologize for possibly embarrassing, but I think I see a couple problems with this forum post (I'm intentionally saying little of the original piece in this list, but I do say a couple thoughts at the end)

1. It's extremely important to note that the author says: "The broad community I speak of here are insular, interconnected subgroups of tech, EA (Effective Altruists), rationalists, cybersecurity/hackers, crypto/blockchain, Burning Man camps, secret parties, and coliving houses."

This is stated early in the original piece, and I believe this should be qu... (read more)

Seems like there is

Should a job listing/do-good opportunity be tagged community? It puts it in a different section which will be seen by less people

Nice job, I was super happy to notice that :) :thumb:

As someone who read the whole piece, I think you could just read the bolded lines and read the explanatory bits below for those lines you find interesting/key. It's also already an outline, so you could just read the bullets further to the left, and read the further-right bits as your curiosity and ethical compass direct you. Reading the left-ward bits can always be assumed to function as a summary of an outline (and author's fault if it doesn't). 

[EDIT: This is what Angelina Li did above, nice :) Hopefully if anyone finds any bit intriguing, the... (read more)

This is an add-on to this comment I wrote and sort of to all the SBF-EA-related stuff I've written recently. I write this add-on mostly for personal reasons. 

I've argued that we should have patience when assigning blame for EA leadership and not assume leaders deserve blame or ever were necessarily incompetent in a way that counterfactual leaders would not have been. But this point is distinct from thinking there was nothing we could do or no signs to pay attention to. I don't want to be seen as arguing there was nothing that EAs in general could do, ... (read more)

(Sorry I took so long to come back) Thanks for clarifying. Hm I'm surprised then that it really seems like the journalist didn't turn up such quotes about fraud. I do think you are right that many of them expected a crash-and-burn... of some sort. I feel like I should have written something more precise like "crash and burn 3 years later, after making 15B on paper" which comes with so many signals over the years that if I were such a person I'd end up discounting my early suspicions. If I were in their or CEA's shoes I'd probably have expected something li... (read more)

I've read this comment a few times, and my brain goes "???" whenever I get to your last clause: "I also had quite a strong reaction that nobody seemed to be acting on all of these warning flags"

I just don't get it in a way that connects to my reading of the article. What are "all these warning flags" and what counts as "inaction"? I don't want to say your take is wrong because you are sort of sharing feelings, but like.... according to the article, ex-Alameda employees don't seem to think that those flags were warning flags for the massive fraud and crash-... (read more)

I vouch for Monica as a kind, intelligent person who has indeed focused much of her career around helping people with autism :) I haven't worked with her myself, but we are in the same local EA community. 

If you have autism, (with or without formal diagnosis), there's nothing to lose by reaching out, and a lot you might gain :)

Big improvement on the left sidebar. Good job all 👍

That makes sense. It is really shocking. I agree on blaming regulators [although I don't give others a pass].

[I think a section on regulations def belongs from the POV of improving world models too. Before I added my long thinking-out-loud footnote, I didn't realize just how much it all points at regulators as the original permissiveness break.]

Yeah my thoughts exactly. Or, it doesn't send a big signal to non-finance people. But like, I think it should send a signal to people in finance, eg the auditors. That FTX should have been able to afford a different service and yet didn't. Or maybe, idk, should have revealed their internals for different certification (better than GAAP cert idk, I know nothing). I just think it should have raised flags for the auditor. If someone is enlisting you for purposes of increasing trust but they are clearly not doing their damnedest, according to their abilities, to ensure that trust is accurate. The US consumers can't be expected to know the difference, but the auditor should. I think.

Yeah, turns out there was not only sloppiness here though. Like Enron, things were labelled to look much better than they really were. Like, stocks of coins held in such volumes and accounted as their current exchange price such that it looked like billions in net worth, IIRC, but of course if they would have sold the coins, the value of the coins would have plummeted far before they got through their sale order, so there is no way they could have expected to gather that much USD for the coins they held. This might be normal for stocks valuation? But my im... (read more)

Glad you liked it. Perhaps I wasn't clear in purpose though. My point was not to talk about payouts, but to explain how things like this can happen. Because it "violates model of how the world works". [Edit: I cut stuff from here and expanded on it in footnote above]

I'm just saying there are systemic reasons why the fiasco got as far as it did.

[Edit: Ah this is one of those times I might be being dramatic, but I may as well say] I'm a bit sad to hear "fishing expedition" to this. But [so many EAs didn't feel similarly] about EA leaders taking some of the b... (read more)

Eh, I still agree with Ben here. He said they are the worst financial documents he has ever seen, including Enron. And given he's the guy who steered Enron after bankruptcy, that's a concrete claim. And as the documents will surely all be submitted, he'd be putting his neck on the line to say such things if it weren't clearly like the most egregious thing you could imagine. shrugs :/

Somehow they were doing this while having audited financials, passing due diligence from major investors, etc.? And Sam was supposedly a great fundraiser but was circulating a balance sheet with a $8B line item for “hidden poorly labeled account”? I would find it pretty helpful for someone to explain what actually happened here because this violates my models of how the world works.

Mine too, so I went digging. All in all, one can argue (and lawyers are) that there were a lot of enablers. Certainly, people trying to actively dodge being noticed as they... (read more)

I think that most of your comment is reasonable, so I'm only going to respond to the second-to-last paragraph. Because that is the bit that critiques my comment, my response is going to sound defensive. But I agree with everything else, and I also think what went on with my original comment leads back into what I see as the actual crux, so it's worth me saying what's on my mind:

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

Hm I wouldn't have thought of your second paragraph. I'm not sure I agree that was an intention, but interesting.

IDK, CEA did do an investigation in 2019 into CEA/Alameda relations, according to the news article, so I'm not sure (yet!) they behaved unreasonably here given the nature of the complaints made. (I'm also not sure they behaved reasonably). Somebody tried a bit to actually figure things out at least. And I prefer that than just saying "Hey, SBF, check out these rumors. Rather than try to figure out which side is right, we will do some sort of ave... (read more)

That's fair but next time I strongly recommend you include context and thoughts so lurkers don't latch onto what you say as proof that leaders or anyone else did anything unreasonable. Lilly's comment is:

"I am also eager to see what the investigation concludes, but I'm pretty convinced at this point that EA leaders made big mistakes....

...I cannot wrap my head around why—knowing what it appears they knew then—anyone thought it was a good idea to put this guy on a pedestal; to elevate him as a moral paragon and someone to emulate; to tie EA's reputation so

When I see agreevotes [racking up quickly on contextless statements] like above, I always feel weird. Do people agree that that counts as pedestalling by leaders? Or they agree that all that happened? IDK, but I feel weird because I actually think I disagree (with all those people I guess) that these are fair for the point being made:

At EAG London 2022, they distributed hundreds of flyers and stickers depicting Sam on a bean bag with the text "what would SBF do?".

I was at EAGL 22, but I never saw this, so it was not a universal handout. However I remember ... (read more)

Hm you say "EA didn't listen to anyone who warned them about obvious scams", but the article says: 

None of the early Alameda employees who witnessed Bankman-Fried’s behavior years earlier say they anticipated this level of alleged criminal fraud. There was no “smoking gun,” as one put it, that revealed specific examples of lawbreaking. Even if they knew Bankman-Fried was dishonest and unethical, they say, none of them could have foreseen a fraud of this scope.

And

No one has alleged criminal behavior on the part of top EA figures. None of the people who

I realized I missed the bit where you talk about how we might not need such intense data to respond now. Yes, I agree with that. I personally expect that most community builders/leaders are already brainstorming ideas, and even implementing them, to make their spaces better for women. I also expect that most EA men will be much more careful moving forward to avoid saying or doing things which can cause discomfort for women. We will see what comes of it. Actually I'm working on a piece about actions individuals can take now... maybe I will DM it to ya with no pressure at all o.o

I agree with you're first half. I wonder if a startup or even a non-EA non-profit would be so self-flagellating for taking his money, even given they had heard some troubling reports. If not, I think EAs should chill out on thinking we could have been expected to do a deep investigation [Edit: apparently CEA did one on CEA/Alameda relations in 2019 but no comment yet on how it went] or hold-off on taking money. I mean everyone else had his expected net worth wrong too (Billionaire lists for example, and FTX's own investors who should have been much more in... (read more)