All of Julia_Wise's Comments + Replies

Really glad to have you joining!

I think there's not much room between feeling "these people are more established / more put together / more employed than me" and feeling "oh no, people have so many expectations of me, don't screw up!" from the people who are more established/funded etc. I'm sure there are people who are in some happy medium position, but I'm having trouble thinking of any off the top of my head!

Thanks for the info - wishing you the best! Minor question - how do you say the name?

It seems very plausible to me that EA should have more capacity on risk management. That question is one of the things this taskforce might dig into.

Exciting!
When I'm pointing people to career advising, is your one-on-one advising aimed mostly at early career people? At this point do you expect to take advisees who are mid- or late-career?

You note that it's not recommended for children. Seems worth noting there's some (but not good-quality) evidence that fasting isn't a good idea during pregnancy. Review of health outcomes from Ramadan fasting during pregnancy 

Hi Luke, thanks for the suggestions! I've changed the form to reflect that it's fine to list yourself, and added a place to put more info about the person's bio / skills.

The intention is very much to get in touch with expertise outside the community - I've added a bit to make that clearer.

I'm happy to have a default plan of announcing who's on the task force after that's finalized, unless someone actively doesn't want to be identified.

It implies that Will and Toby believe that preventing the creation of a happy person is as bad as killing them. I think that's pretty unlikely, because most people who value future lives think murdering an existing person is a lot worse than not creating a life.

>I'm not sure supporters of non-person-affecting views would endorse this exact claim

I'd put it more strongly - I think the original comment puts words in people's mouths that I don't think they mean at all. 

In 2021, the woman and I discussed who she wanted to know about the situation. Our focus was on his colleagues at that time and people he might have a mentorship relationship with. I’ve clarified here that this did include one person who was a board member of EV UK (then called CEA UK) at the time.

When the TIME piece publicly described the situation but not either of the people’s identities, Nicole and I decided that the board should know that the account was about Owen (but not the identity of the woman). 

There's an old "Effective Zakat" group with some EAs on Facebook - you've likely posted it there already, but would be good to share there if not!

In the first case, I initially heard about the situation from a third party, but nearly all the information I knew came from Owen. (I asked the woman if she had concerns about the situation that she wanted to discuss, and I didn’t hear back.)

I should add something that I forgot to include.

I’ve talked about February 3rd as the date I told the boards of EV US and EV UK, because that’s when I told everyone who’s on the current boards.

As I said, I had previously discussed some but not all of the situation with Nicole Ross, who was my manager and who is on the EV US board. And one of the staff at FHI I informed in 2021 about the situation described in TIME was Toby Ord, who at that time was on the EV UK (then called CEA UK) board. He was no longer on the board by the time I informed both boards abo... (read more)

The TIME article is what prompted me to realize I hadn’t properly dealt with everything here.

Can you clarify the extent to which not informing the EV UK board was a result of the victim explicitly requesting something along these lines

She did not request that I not tell the board - I don't think we discussed that possibility.

What actions did you take to reduce the risks associated with these events

• I had conversations with several of his colleagues alerting them to the situation so they could intervene if they thought something like this might be h

On Feb 3 I heard from Owen, I discussed the situation with Nicole, I informed Owen I'd be telling the boards, and I told the boards. I told Chana the following morning.

I hope I would have eventually recognized there was more to do here, including telling the board, but it’s possible I wouldn’t have recognized this.

I want to explain my role in this situation, and to apologize for not handling it better. The role I played was in the context of my work as a community liaison at CEA.

(All parts that mention specific people were run past those people.)

In 2021, the woman who described traveling to a job interview in the TIME piece told me about her interactions with Owen Cotton-Barratt several years before. She said she found many aspects of his interactions with her to be inappropriate. 

We talked about what steps she wanted taken. Based on her requests, I had convers... (read more)

There are some important misunderstandings here. [Username redacted], I’ll reach out privately to clarify.

Community health request, different from the moderation decision on whether this is allowed:
The person whose Twitter thread has indicated elsewhere that she doesn't think the accused should be identified, because that could reveal information about other women in the piece. The community health team is requesting that people not link to her Twitter thread.

I was talking with someone about survey design recently, and remembering how useful it was to have a workshop with a Faunalytics staff member on survey design. I think that particular person no longer does office hours, but they still do free office hours on several other topics and have a library of research and survey design advice. 

Less importantly, I love the Faunalytics logo.

To give a little more detail about what I think gave wrong impressions - 

Last year as part of a longer piece about how the community health team approaches problems, I wrote a list of factors that need to be balanced against each other. One that’s caused confusion is “Give people a second or third chance; adjust when people have changed and improved.” I meant situations like “someone has made some inappropriate comments and gotten feedback about it,” not something like assault. I’m adding a note to the original piece clarifying.

I don't think that appendix has enough information to give people the ability to comment on what would have made people be more or less comfortable coming to us with a concern in those situations. I want there to be room for broader discussion (though if people do have specific ideas, I’m interested to hear them). Our team will be continuing to work on improving our practices here, and we welcome suggestions for what we could be doing better.

I want to clarify — you did give me info about some concerns, and I really appreciate that. That allowed me to take action to keep the accused people out of CEA spaces.

I agree there’s room for improvement. Thank you for the services you provide here — I’ll be in touch.

The woman did bring this concern to us. I don't want to share details that would break her privacy, but I did my best to follow her wishes as far as how the matter was handled.  My post on power dynamics was informed by that situation.

Looking back at the situation, I’m not sure about some aspects of how I handled it. We’re taking a renewed look at possible steps to take here.

I’m responding on behalf of the community health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism. We work to prevent and address problems in the community, including sexual misconduct.

I find the piece doesn’t accurately convey how my team, or the EA community more broadly, reacts to this sort of behavior.

We work to address harmful behavior, including sexual misconduct, because we think it’s so important that this community has a good culture where people can do their best work without harassment or other mistreatment. Ignoring problems or sweeping them... (read more)

I am interested in your thoughts whether data collection at EAGs have been effective or useful for capturing these kinds of incidents, how the community health team has responded, whether any of this is share-able in a deanonymised way?

Learning about what kind of problems people have experienced has led us to changes like asking attendees not to use Swapcard for dating purposes.

does the community health team expect to continue sharing summaries similar to what you published in this appendix going forwards? I found this quite useful personally in

Likewise I wasn't sure if this one was meant to be specific to EA spaces or to every social space I've ever been in: "Have you ever experienced retaliation for rejected romantic or sexual advances in your social sphere?"

Hey, I'd like to look into this but I'm having a hard time figuring out who might have given this kind of feedback to the documentary maker, or what part of CEA might have been advising on the project. DMing you.

I'm going to interpret this to include "hiring outreach beyond ads" for fields where hiring isn't done mostly through ads.

Best wishes with your work!

When I used to work with homeless clients, one said that the $500 her parents gave her was "enough rope to hang myself with" - enough for a lot of drugs but not enough for a security deposit on an apartment. So given your wish to give to this population, I'd probably go with smaller amounts to more people.

+1 on saying something directly to GiveWell. info@givewellorg

Sometimes there's a problem in EA where people have a concern and write it up publicly, but don't flag it to the specific org or person they want to read it, and the org or person doesn't see it for a while or at all. 

If the facts are unclear, I think it's good practice to fact-check with the organization before writing publicly. But if the author doesn't think that's necessary or finds that too restrictive, I think they should at least ping the organization with "Here's a link to something I wrote about your practices."

I agree that this is really important. When I started working at CEA in 2015, one of the main things my predecessor had been working on was developing anti-harassment practices for CEA’s conferences, and I continued her work. The conference materials from Geek Feminism were helpful to us in developing our practices. 

The place where all EAG and EAGx attendees agree to the standards is the code of conduct, which must be acknowledged when registering for an event. The text on the registration form for the upcoming EAG Bay Area is:

At EA Global and so... (read more)

[edited to add: I'm second-guessing myself and have edited a bit because I don't remember ever actually doing this. I think I should develop a clearer policy here.]

I'd like to provide a picture of how this might play out. (To be clear, I'm making up pretend examples, not referring to Linda specifically.)

If you share specifics with me and want me to keep them specific, I will. So if you tell me in confidence that you're struggling with addiction or  have messed up your job or whatever, I won't share those facts with anyone.

But if a funder asked for my ... (read more)

Thanks, this helps me understand your views better.

Yes, perhaps linking to this outline in the post would help address confusion.

I feel confused about how you're balancing different aims against each other. Several times in the comments someone points out that your proposed interventions sometimes oppose your stated goal of "voluntary abortion reduction" (by increasing abortions or by not being voluntary.) Then you say there's some other consideration. This makes me feel the goals are constantly shifting, and I can't tell how much you really value each of them.

I'm no expert on cause prioritization, but I'd think a useful step would be to think about how you value each of the differe... (read more)

I hadn’t realized the original apologies from Will and me are no longer visible since Alexey took down the post. Here’s what Will and I wrote in November 2018:

(Alexey and others then replied with more thoughts, but I haven't sought permission to repost those comments.)

Maya, I’m so sorry that things have made you feel this way. I know you’re not alone in this. As Catherine said earlier, either of us (and the rest of the community health team) are here to talk and try to support.

I agree it’s very important that no one should get away with mistreating others because of their status, money, etc. One of the concerns you raise related to this is an accusation that Kathy Forth made. When Kathy raised concerns related to EA, I investigated all the cases where she gave me enough information to do so. In one case, her information... (read more)

The community health team does have an anonymous form. Thanks for the observation that it wasn't that easy to find - we'll be working on this.

The modal thing that gets reported to community health is something like “This person did a thing that made me / my friend kind of uncomfortable, and I’d like you to notice if other people report more problems from them.”

Thanks for raising this, I think I wasn’t clear enough in the post cited.

To clarify - that line in the table is referring specifically to sharing research, not all kinds of participation in the community. I meant it about things like “should people still be able to post their research on the EA Forum, or receive a grant to do research, if they’ve treated other people badly?” I find that a genuinely hard question. I don’t want to ignore the past or enable more harm. But I also don’t want to suppress content that would be useful to other EAs (and to the worl... (read more)

I don't know anything about this area, but it sounds like something that I'd expect people have looked at before if it's so technically simple. Do you have a sense of whether this has been trialed, or why it isn't already being done at scale?

I'm happy to see this! Best wishes with your work.

Thanks to people who are leaving ideas here!

A note on the comment that asked why the community health team isn’t visibly “pulling these guys aside and privately warning them that they are making people uncomfortable.” We have definitely done that when someone lets us know about a problem and are ok with us doing something. In other cases, the person reporting the problem doesn’t want us to take action (often because they don’t want the other person to guess that they spoke up.) 

If you’ve experienced a problem and want us to talk to someone, we’re very... (read more)

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 understan

The community health team at CEA is available to talk about concerns like this. You can reach us here.

Additional thoughts as Catherine's colleague:

Larger events or groups are more likely to have a code of conduct — for example the code of conduct at CEA events makes clear that unwanted sexual attention does not belong at these events. Our conferences also have at least one community contact person available on site to help with any personal or interpersonal problems that come up. We encourage anyone experiencing uncomfortable treatment at one of these conferences to let us know so we can address it.

Smaller EA events and groups are less likely to have ... (read more)

A related post from Damon that I like: For the mental health of those affected by the FTX crisis