What do you think about Joseph’s thoughts on those types of questions here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4towuFeBfbGn8hJGs/amber-dawn-s-shortform?commentId=2N7JqCYzyt7FHCti2

Why seven years ago specifically?

I could imagine that you get more people interested in providing funding if you pre-commit to doing things like bug bounties conditional on getting a certain amount of funding. Does this seem likely to you?

What happened at early CEA?

Intuitively that doesn’t seem like the right base rate to me, even if the reference class is the whole of society? If the average woman considering getting involved in EA is in her early to mid twenties (e.g. the average female EAG attendee was 28 I believe), I would guess that the average age of the men she interacts with would be much lower than the population average? Especially if she is a student.

In terms of the reference class I had in mind, it was something like, ‘for a given cluster of EAs that are attached to another subculture, EAs would have on average less sexism and abuse than that subculture within. So e.g. EAs within the tech scene, EAs within the Burning Man scene, within various academic scenes, etc. Interested in your thoughts on that.

I’m sorry that had to be subject to those inappropriate comments

This is mostly a rehash of things already said by others, but my read is still that the version of that statement that has ‘SFBA’ instead of ‘EA’ in it is the only thing resembling a first approximation, and EA would only appear from a 2nd approximation onwards. E.g. to my knowledge I don’t know anyone who lives in a hacker house, and I’d never heard of the phenomenon before the TIME article.

In general I’m in favour of warning people about (even potentially) bad actors/groups and toxic cultish behaviour, and have done so previously. I just don’t see how it isn’t counterproductive to tell women that a movement is “plagued” by something appears to centre on a city where <7% of people who identify with the movement live (based on the 2020 EA survey). [I take your point that this toxic group of people has branched beyond SF, but it still seems very much centred there].

What broad communities do you have in mind as being better re sexual assault?

I don’t think it’s true that EA is plagued by sexism, racism and abuse, or that women need to be more vigilant about protecting themselves from sexual abuse in EA than in the wider community. And I don’t think the info in the post indicates this is true.

My main takeaway from the post and from Lucretia’s experience is that male EAs, especially researcher-types in SF who lack worldly experience, should get training around sexual assault in order to better identify bad actors when they do appear, and prevent them from causing harm (rather than accidentally supporting them (!)), and to just generally be halfway-decent allies.

But this is very different from the picture you paint, a picture that I worry could result in a greater gender imbalance in EA, by inaccurately putting off women who are considering getting involved.

Personally I find myself worrying much less about sexism, abuse or physical aggression from male EAs than I do from men more broadly.

I don’t think the issue is that they have an opinion, rather that they have the same opinion - like, ‘all the researchers have the same p(doom), even the non-researchers too’ is exactly the sort of thing I’d imagine hearing about a cultish org