I want to urge people to not dismiss this without a thought. And it’s not just about children.
There are already a few sexual predators hanging around with the rationalist community. I can’t say names, because it is typically a “they said, they said” situation, and these types usually have a lot of practice at threatening legal consequences for “slander”. (But if you know someone who used to be around and suddenly lost all interest at coming to your meetups, it might make sense to ask them discreetly whether they had a bad experience with someone specifically.)
I personally often don’t care much about the statistics for general population, because we are obviously not average. Problem is, “not average” doesn’t in itself show the direction. For general intelligence, we are obviously smarter, and that generally correlates with lower (detected?) crime. On the other hand, we also seem to score quite high for unusual sexual behavior in general.
As long as each family has a door they can close (and everything necessary to survive the day is inside), living in a community doesn’t seem worse than simply living with neighbors. But there are good reasons why neurotypical people require long time before they start trusting someone; so “they are a member of the same community” should never be used as a replacement for “I have a lot of personal experience from gradually deepening interaction with this specific person”. In other words, just because someone says “hi, I also like Less Wrong”, doesn’t mean I would invite them to my home and leave them alone with my child. Some nerdy people may need to be explicitly reminded of this.
But there are good reasons why neurotypical people require long time before they start trusting someone; so “they are a member of the same community” should never be used as a replacement for “I have a lot of personal experience from gradually deepening interaction with this specific person”.
Given that most abuse happens from people who aren’t strangers and successfully passed the filters of neurotypical people that are required to build trust, I don’t think trusting a person because you spent a lot of time with them is generally a good heuristic.
Now sure how much can I generalize from the few data points of women who trusted me personally enough to tell me about their bad experiences, but within that set, it was neither the archetypal “stranger hiding in a bush”, nor the archetypal “lecherous uncle”. I remember these three patterns:
a) Girl’s mother has a new boyfriend. In mother’s absence, the boyfriend starts making sexually suggestive remarks to the girl. Girl complains to her mother. Mother confronts the boyfriend, he dismisses it with laughing, telling the mother that her daughter is simply jealous of him, wanting to keep the mother only for herself. Mother gets angry, scolds the daughter for “lying”, and categorically refuses to listen to her arguments anymore. Girl stops reporting to her mother, and their relationship goes from already quite bad to completely ignoring each other. The boyfriend keeps pushing further. (Luckily, in the cases I heard, the predictable bad end didn’t actually happened, because something totally unrelated disrupted the setting.)
b) A girl is at a party with her friends. There is also a guy, stranger to her, but friendly with her friends. The party either happens at the guy’s place, or at a large place with many rooms. Girl remains talking with the guy, while other people gradually leave. When they are left alone in the room, the guy suddenly becomes physical and rapes her. (In one case, when the girl afterwards starts inconspicuously asking their friends what is exactly is their relationship with the guy, she is surprised to hear almost all of them telling her “actually, I don’t like that guy, he seems like an asshole, but he is a friend of my friends, so I just try to ignore him when he comes to a party” or “I noticed him, but didn’t pay any attention”.)
c) A girl’s boyfriend constantly refuses to take “no” for an answer; starting with relatively small things, gradually increasing the requests, until one day he rapes her. The girl keeps dating him, until later something else ends their relationship.
Again, not sure how typical these stories are, but… assuming they are relatively frequent, then the dichotomy between a stranger and a non-stranger doesn’t properly fit the territory.
Technically, all three cases are “non-strangers”. I believe that in many surveys, “mom’s boyfriend” would even be classified as a family; the friend-of-friends is a part of the social circle; and the boyfriend is obviously not a stranger, if they already spent some weeks or months dating.
Yet, in the first two cases, the rapist was a stranger to the girl, which makes him quite a non-central example of a “non-stranger”. In the first case, she was unable to avoid him; he didn’t really “pass her filters”. In the second case, that was the kind of error in judgement that I warn against—believing that the other person was already filtered by someone else, when actually the other people similarly believed that someone else did the filtering, or were just being polite towards a person that didn’t pass their personal filter but didn’t seem bad enough to initiate a conflict. The third case, yeah, that was a direct failure at filtering.
So, I object connotationally against the suggestion that it is useless to use “spending a lot of time with someone, without seeing something bad” as a heuristics against abuse, because most abusers pass the filters of the neurotypical people anyway. First, we don’t know how many abusers didn’t pass the filters; maybe without them, there would be much more abuse. Second, in these three examples, the filter (a) couldn’t be used by the victim, (b) was used improperly, and (c) wasn’t used at all. I am not saying the filters are flawless, just that not using them at all is a fallacy of grey.
For a rationalist community living together, I suspect the first two scenarios could be relevant. A parent, for whom living with other rationalists has high value, might turn a blind eye to the red flags reported by their children or a spouse, and rationalize them away. A person no one actually personally vouches for could be invited, simply because they participated at a LW meetup, said hello to many people, and friended them on facebook.
I think it would be reasonable for the wannabe neighbors to spend some time together before buying the new house. For example, spend a vacation together, preferably at a place where you are expected to cook for yourselves. And maybe, collect some feedback on personal feelings towards each other, in a way that would prevent transitive reporting of “I feel X, but I guess most people are going to say Y, therefore I am saying Y too”. Be honest; not having an opinion either way is a valid option. Generally, have an intermediate step between “met each other at a meetup” and “living in a baugruppe”.
I think ⓐ is an example where trust is given because they mother knows the guy and has a relationship with a guy but the trust isn’t warranted.
In situations like this our system I is trained to trust and it takes hard system II thinking to acknowledge the problem and respond well to the incident.
The problem is further exacerbated because people treat their stereotypical idea’s of how an unsafe person looks as if it would be real knowledge.
This overall conversation is a good example. The guidelines around risk of abuse suggest that having a good support network reduces risk. At the same time you have a person who is afraid of strangers and who thinks minimizing the amount of trusted adult relationships helps to reduce the risk of abuse and they argue their opinion.
An intelligent psychopath doesn’t give up the kind of red flags that result in most neurotypical people distrusting them.
I am not saying the filters are flawless, just that not using them at all is a fallacy of grey.
Having a way to filter people is useful for many reasons but at least in our Berlin community we don’t lack processes to do that. Both our weekly Dojo and our new biweekly Circling event isn’t simply open to everybody and participating at one of the open meetups doesn’t automatically qualify a person.
Alicorn also wrote in the OP about having resident- and guest-vetting plans.
More centrally I don’t think you should plan in a way that assumes that your filtering process actually keeps out every problematic person. Open sharing of information is important.
The way the girl in ⓒ would have been helped is when she shared her issues with friends who talked her through it.
I agree that evaluation of other people needs to be an ongoing process. Sometimes people change. Or some people behave differently to different kinds of people, so it’s possible that the original evaluator just happened to be one of those towards whom this person feels no hostility.
But I’d still say that new people are a much higher risk, simply because when crappy people are expelled from one community, they are looking for another one, so they are statistically overrepresented among the newcomers. (A similar effect to how software companies, when doing job interviews, mostly find crappy programmers. Because the good ones already have a good job somewhere, but the crappy ones remain endlessly in circulation. If there are 10 competent programmes in the city and 1 crappy one, and 10 software companies, it’s possible that each of those companies will interview the crappy guy, and reject him, and then one of the competent guys, and keep him; so even if the crappy guy is only 9% of the population, for each software company he makes 50% of the interviewees.)
I agree that evaluation of other people needs to be an ongoing process. Sometimes people change. Or some people behave differently to different kinds of people, so it’s possible that the original evaluator just happened to be one of those towards whom this person feels no hostility.
Quite a lot of psychopaths do manage to make a good first impression and have charisma they aren’t simply crappy people. Still they might misbehave when they believe that it doesn’t have negative consequences for them.
I want to urge people to not dismiss this without a thought. And it’s not just about children.
There are already a few sexual predators hanging around with the rationalist community. I can’t say names, because it is typically a “they said, they said” situation, and these types usually have a lot of practice at threatening legal consequences for “slander”. (But if you know someone who used to be around and suddenly lost all interest at coming to your meetups, it might make sense to ask them discreetly whether they had a bad experience with someone specifically.)
I personally often don’t care much about the statistics for general population, because we are obviously not average. Problem is, “not average” doesn’t in itself show the direction. For general intelligence, we are obviously smarter, and that generally correlates with lower (detected?) crime. On the other hand, we also seem to score quite high for unusual sexual behavior in general.
As long as each family has a door they can close (and everything necessary to survive the day is inside), living in a community doesn’t seem worse than simply living with neighbors. But there are good reasons why neurotypical people require long time before they start trusting someone; so “they are a member of the same community” should never be used as a replacement for “I have a lot of personal experience from gradually deepening interaction with this specific person”. In other words, just because someone says “hi, I also like Less Wrong”, doesn’t mean I would invite them to my home and leave them alone with my child. Some nerdy people may need to be explicitly reminded of this.
Given that most abuse happens from people who aren’t strangers and successfully passed the filters of neurotypical people that are required to build trust, I don’t think trusting a person because you spent a lot of time with them is generally a good heuristic.
trigger warning: discussing rape, in near mode
Now sure how much can I generalize from the few data points of women who trusted me personally enough to tell me about their bad experiences, but within that set, it was neither the archetypal “stranger hiding in a bush”, nor the archetypal “lecherous uncle”. I remember these three patterns:
a) Girl’s mother has a new boyfriend. In mother’s absence, the boyfriend starts making sexually suggestive remarks to the girl. Girl complains to her mother. Mother confronts the boyfriend, he dismisses it with laughing, telling the mother that her daughter is simply jealous of him, wanting to keep the mother only for herself. Mother gets angry, scolds the daughter for “lying”, and categorically refuses to listen to her arguments anymore. Girl stops reporting to her mother, and their relationship goes from already quite bad to completely ignoring each other. The boyfriend keeps pushing further. (Luckily, in the cases I heard, the predictable bad end didn’t actually happened, because something totally unrelated disrupted the setting.)
b) A girl is at a party with her friends. There is also a guy, stranger to her, but friendly with her friends. The party either happens at the guy’s place, or at a large place with many rooms. Girl remains talking with the guy, while other people gradually leave. When they are left alone in the room, the guy suddenly becomes physical and rapes her. (In one case, when the girl afterwards starts inconspicuously asking their friends what is exactly is their relationship with the guy, she is surprised to hear almost all of them telling her “actually, I don’t like that guy, he seems like an asshole, but he is a friend of my friends, so I just try to ignore him when he comes to a party” or “I noticed him, but didn’t pay any attention”.)
c) A girl’s boyfriend constantly refuses to take “no” for an answer; starting with relatively small things, gradually increasing the requests, until one day he rapes her. The girl keeps dating him, until later something else ends their relationship.
Again, not sure how typical these stories are, but… assuming they are relatively frequent, then the dichotomy between a stranger and a non-stranger doesn’t properly fit the territory.
Technically, all three cases are “non-strangers”. I believe that in many surveys, “mom’s boyfriend” would even be classified as a family; the friend-of-friends is a part of the social circle; and the boyfriend is obviously not a stranger, if they already spent some weeks or months dating.
Yet, in the first two cases, the rapist was a stranger to the girl, which makes him quite a non-central example of a “non-stranger”. In the first case, she was unable to avoid him; he didn’t really “pass her filters”. In the second case, that was the kind of error in judgement that I warn against—believing that the other person was already filtered by someone else, when actually the other people similarly believed that someone else did the filtering, or were just being polite towards a person that didn’t pass their personal filter but didn’t seem bad enough to initiate a conflict. The third case, yeah, that was a direct failure at filtering.
So, I object connotationally against the suggestion that it is useless to use “spending a lot of time with someone, without seeing something bad” as a heuristics against abuse, because most abusers pass the filters of the neurotypical people anyway. First, we don’t know how many abusers didn’t pass the filters; maybe without them, there would be much more abuse. Second, in these three examples, the filter (a) couldn’t be used by the victim, (b) was used improperly, and (c) wasn’t used at all. I am not saying the filters are flawless, just that not using them at all is a fallacy of grey.
For a rationalist community living together, I suspect the first two scenarios could be relevant. A parent, for whom living with other rationalists has high value, might turn a blind eye to the red flags reported by their children or a spouse, and rationalize them away. A person no one actually personally vouches for could be invited, simply because they participated at a LW meetup, said hello to many people, and friended them on facebook.
I think it would be reasonable for the wannabe neighbors to spend some time together before buying the new house. For example, spend a vacation together, preferably at a place where you are expected to cook for yourselves. And maybe, collect some feedback on personal feelings towards each other, in a way that would prevent transitive reporting of “I feel X, but I guess most people are going to say Y, therefore I am saying Y too”. Be honest; not having an opinion either way is a valid option. Generally, have an intermediate step between “met each other at a meetup” and “living in a baugruppe”.
I think ⓐ is an example where trust is given because they mother knows the guy and has a relationship with a guy but the trust isn’t warranted.
In situations like this our system I is trained to trust and it takes hard system II thinking to acknowledge the problem and respond well to the incident.
The problem is further exacerbated because people treat their stereotypical idea’s of how an unsafe person looks as if it would be real knowledge.
This overall conversation is a good example. The guidelines around risk of abuse suggest that having a good support network reduces risk. At the same time you have a person who is afraid of strangers and who thinks minimizing the amount of trusted adult relationships helps to reduce the risk of abuse and they argue their opinion.
An intelligent psychopath doesn’t give up the kind of red flags that result in most neurotypical people distrusting them.
Having a way to filter people is useful for many reasons but at least in our Berlin community we don’t lack processes to do that. Both our weekly Dojo and our new biweekly Circling event isn’t simply open to everybody and participating at one of the open meetups doesn’t automatically qualify a person.
Alicorn also wrote in the OP about having resident- and guest-vetting plans.
More centrally I don’t think you should plan in a way that assumes that your filtering process actually keeps out every problematic person. Open sharing of information is important. The way the girl in ⓒ would have been helped is when she shared her issues with friends who talked her through it.
I agree that evaluation of other people needs to be an ongoing process. Sometimes people change. Or some people behave differently to different kinds of people, so it’s possible that the original evaluator just happened to be one of those towards whom this person feels no hostility.
But I’d still say that new people are a much higher risk, simply because when crappy people are expelled from one community, they are looking for another one, so they are statistically overrepresented among the newcomers. (A similar effect to how software companies, when doing job interviews, mostly find crappy programmers. Because the good ones already have a good job somewhere, but the crappy ones remain endlessly in circulation. If there are 10 competent programmes in the city and 1 crappy one, and 10 software companies, it’s possible that each of those companies will interview the crappy guy, and reject him, and then one of the competent guys, and keep him; so even if the crappy guy is only 9% of the population, for each software company he makes 50% of the interviewees.)
Quite a lot of psychopaths do manage to make a good first impression and have charisma they aren’t simply crappy people. Still they might misbehave when they believe that it doesn’t have negative consequences for them.
Endorsed.