Huh, I hadn't ever thought about it that way -- I've never been a consultant or similar, so haven't seen these types of dynamics play out in those settings, but your claims here make sense to me + sound reasonable.
Some of the examples in my previous comment, again while trying to keep this non-identifiable, come from a setting where firing people is very hard (or, employees have the ability to make it close to impossible if they try). And in those cases more confidence etc. wouldn't help. But basically that is just a bad situation we should try to avoid getting into.
I'm not sure, but I think maybe Brenton (or rather his Claude!) was being quite restrained here, because it's hard to be blunt when you're in a position of substantial power (he's in the leadership team at 80k, which some on this Forum will look up to).
I wonder if it'd be helpful for an anon account to make a related point slightly more bluntly:
Having somebody on your team who is below the bar you were hoping for is usually not something like "Oh well, they didn't do all of the work I wanted the person in this role to do, or not quite to standard, or took some time and coaching to skill up so that they could do it... not ideal, but better than the alternative of nothing getting done, so I'm glad we made the hire!"
Sometimes it is like that (I can think of one case that I've been involved with)
But IME usually it's more like: "Agh, this person is (for example): making lots of specific demands of my time, causing stress and upset for others on the team (e.g. by telling them they think the team is failing and/or they're being treated badly by the org), feeling sad / stressed at work (which I want to help with because I'm a human, but also because it's my responsibility as their manager!), asking to do different work than we hired them for or than we think they'd be able to do well, disagreeing about what the reasonable standards are for [thing the org is doing], asking me to spend a lot of time justifying why their responsibilities or projects are valuable, giving a lot of constructive feedback to me or others that I don't agree with + I spend time and energy to engage with their points and saying why I'm not acting in line with their feedback even though I do value their input in general, wanting a different type or standard of management or engagement with their work than comes naturally to me so I have to spend time understanding their view and skilling up and staying consistent, or they're actively trying to prevent my team from executing on the strategy I think is best (and they might be right to do so, but they might not, and the debate itself takes time and stress -- or even worse, they are doing this covertly in a way you only work out later), releasing products, content, or research into the world that have problems with them that we then have to spend time cleaning up + negatively affect our org's reputation or relationship with the customers / audience / funders etc..."
Not all of these are examples from my personal experience, and maybe they're a bit exaggerated because I feel a bit touchy here or something. But I don't think they're wildly off the mark, or like, they're pretty much real things. I could also list examples that are worse but they get too close to being potentially-identifiable individuals so let's leave it there.
(I made an anon account to post this; I'm a longtime EA and Forum user).
The discussion in the comments so far focuses on two claims:
We can't easily tell from this data whether EA is better or worse than baseline
I agree, though I do think it's some evidence we're not much worse.
Why does it even matter whether EA is better or worse than baseline? Community members are welcome to hold EA to a much higher-than-baseline standard, if they want to.
I want to discuss this second point from my perspective, as a woman who's been in EA for some years.
Here's an analogy:
Often, I hear the criticism of EA: 'man, they have bad epistemics and huge problems with groupthink.'
I sort of agree. I can list many instances where I think EAs are driven by groupthink and social incentives in our beliefs, rather than rigorous epistemic standards.
But, I sort of disagree.
That's because I can't think of any community [1] that does better on epistemics and groupthink than EA. Everywhere else I am vaguely involved, the groupthink is way worse, and they have very narrow standards for "acceptable" beliefs. In fact, in most communities, you can't even discuss epistemic standards at all without getting yelled at or dunked on!
I feel like it would be very reasonable for someone to approach EA like:
Ooh, I should be looking out for places where there's potential groupthink, and views driven by status rather than evidence.
But I think it'd be unreasonable for someone to approach EA like:
Damn, EA is a community where there's rampant groupthink — I should be suspicious of views I hear from EAs, moreso than views I find elsewhere.
Partly, that's cause the views you find elsewhere will also have those problems — and are actually likely to be even worse on the very metric of groupthink!
... So to bring it back to sexual harassment:
The reason it matters to me whether EAs believe that EA is above or below baseline on the rate of sexual harassment is that if EA is above baseline, then it'd be very reasonable for people to approach this community like:
Damn, EA is a community where there's rampant problems with sexual harassment — I should be suspicious of whether there are sexual harassment issues at play here & how they're being dealt with, moreso than in everyday interactions.
But if EA is in fact below baseline, then that's an importantly unreasonable response. That is, everyday interactions would have a higher likelihood of sexual harassment and poor responses to it.
I think it's good for people to be cautious about the risks of sexual harassment. But [2] I don't think it's good for people to feel like EA is a place where there are very high risks.
I do think there are unacceptably high risks — in the sense that I do not think any harm is "acceptable", and we should strive to create a world free from suffering — but it doesn't follow that an appropriate response is suspicion of EAs in particular.
[This comment is already really long, so I'm loath to add length, but the main response I anticipate is 'people aren't saying they're suspicious of EAs moreso than others, they're saying they're suspicious of EAs simpliciter.' I agree, but I think the net effect of these comments and discourse and the meme that EA has a sexual harassment problem is to make people suspicious of EAs moreso than others on this metric, and to make women in this community very afraid of sexual harassment, and to make men in this community very afraid of being a sexual harasser. I just think that's unreasonable if they don't also have that attitude everywhere else in their life — which I think is what's happening, based on anecdote / personal experience hanging out with EAs]
[1] Any community of a vaguely comparable size — obv a community of a dozen, or even a hundred or so could do much better. Also maybe rats are better but TBH I'm not totally sure.
[2] And now I show my hand... I do in fact guess that EA is better than baseline, based mostly on my personal experience dealing with sexual harassment inside and outside of EA :)
Huh, I hadn't ever thought about it that way -- I've never been a consultant or similar, so haven't seen these types of dynamics play out in those settings, but your claims here make sense to me + sound reasonable.
Some of the examples in my previous comment, again while trying to keep this non-identifiable, come from a setting where firing people is very hard (or, employees have the ability to make it close to impossible if they try). And in those cases more confidence etc. wouldn't help. But basically that is just a bad situation we should try to avoid getting into.
I'm not sure, but I think maybe Brenton (or rather his Claude!) was being quite restrained here, because it's hard to be blunt when you're in a position of substantial power (he's in the leadership team at 80k, which some on this Forum will look up to).
I wonder if it'd be helpful for an anon account to make a related point slightly more bluntly:
Having somebody on your team who is below the bar you were hoping for is usually not something like "Oh well, they didn't do all of the work I wanted the person in this role to do, or not quite to standard, or took some time and coaching to skill up so that they could do it... not ideal, but better than the alternative of nothing getting done, so I'm glad we made the hire!"
Sometimes it is like that (I can think of one case that I've been involved with)
But IME usually it's more like: "Agh, this person is (for example): making lots of specific demands of my time, causing stress and upset for others on the team (e.g. by telling them they think the team is failing and/or they're being treated badly by the org), feeling sad / stressed at work (which I want to help with because I'm a human, but also because it's my responsibility as their manager!), asking to do different work than we hired them for or than we think they'd be able to do well, disagreeing about what the reasonable standards are for [thing the org is doing], asking me to spend a lot of time justifying why their responsibilities or projects are valuable, giving a lot of constructive feedback to me or others that I don't agree with + I spend time and energy to engage with their points and saying why I'm not acting in line with their feedback even though I do value their input in general, wanting a different type or standard of management or engagement with their work than comes naturally to me so I have to spend time understanding their view and skilling up and staying consistent, or they're actively trying to prevent my team from executing on the strategy I think is best (and they might be right to do so, but they might not, and the debate itself takes time and stress -- or even worse, they are doing this covertly in a way you only work out later), releasing products, content, or research into the world that have problems with them that we then have to spend time cleaning up + negatively affect our org's reputation or relationship with the customers / audience / funders etc..."
Not all of these are examples from my personal experience, and maybe they're a bit exaggerated because I feel a bit touchy here or something. But I don't think they're wildly off the mark, or like, they're pretty much real things. I could also list examples that are worse but they get too close to being potentially-identifiable individuals so let's leave it there.
(I made an anon account to post this; I'm a longtime EA and Forum user).
The discussion in the comments so far focuses on two claims:
I want to discuss this second point from my perspective, as a woman who's been in EA for some years.
Here's an analogy:
Often, I hear the criticism of EA: 'man, they have bad epistemics and huge problems with groupthink.'
I sort of agree. I can list many instances where I think EAs are driven by groupthink and social incentives in our beliefs, rather than rigorous epistemic standards.
But, I sort of disagree.
That's because I can't think of any community [1] that does better on epistemics and groupthink than EA. Everywhere else I am vaguely involved, the groupthink is way worse, and they have very narrow standards for "acceptable" beliefs. In fact, in most communities, you can't even discuss epistemic standards at all without getting yelled at or dunked on!
I feel like it would be very reasonable for someone to approach EA like:
But I think it'd be unreasonable for someone to approach EA like:
Partly, that's cause the views you find elsewhere will also have those problems — and are actually likely to be even worse on the very metric of groupthink!
... So to bring it back to sexual harassment:
The reason it matters to me whether EAs believe that EA is above or below baseline on the rate of sexual harassment is that if EA is above baseline, then it'd be very reasonable for people to approach this community like:
But if EA is in fact below baseline, then that's an importantly unreasonable response. That is, everyday interactions would have a higher likelihood of sexual harassment and poor responses to it.
I think it's good for people to be cautious about the risks of sexual harassment. But [2] I don't think it's good for people to feel like EA is a place where there are very high risks.
I do think there are unacceptably high risks — in the sense that I do not think any harm is "acceptable", and we should strive to create a world free from suffering — but it doesn't follow that an appropriate response is suspicion of EAs in particular.
[This comment is already really long, so I'm loath to add length, but the main response I anticipate is 'people aren't saying they're suspicious of EAs moreso than others, they're saying they're suspicious of EAs simpliciter.' I agree, but I think the net effect of these comments and discourse and the meme that EA has a sexual harassment problem is to make people suspicious of EAs moreso than others on this metric, and to make women in this community very afraid of sexual harassment, and to make men in this community very afraid of being a sexual harasser. I just think that's unreasonable if they don't also have that attitude everywhere else in their life — which I think is what's happening, based on anecdote / personal experience hanging out with EAs]
[1] Any community of a vaguely comparable size — obv a community of a dozen, or even a hundred or so could do much better. Also maybe rats are better but TBH I'm not totally sure.
[2] And now I show my hand... I do in fact guess that EA is better than baseline, based mostly on my personal experience dealing with sexual harassment inside and outside of EA :)