I kind of wish it were simple to just go “hm, can you identify these people to me so that I can make my own judgement?” But there are probably several reasons that’s impractical including (I expect) that you don’t know them by name.
It seems surprising to me that, in such a large crowd, there could be multiple people managing to make you uncomfortable (as opposed to, by contrast, managing to make someone somewhere uncomfortable, but not all the same someone, if that makes sense.) I am definitely wondering whether I didn’t encounter them, or encountered them and they didn’t have the same impact on me. I’m curious if you are able to describe the behaviors you saw, and also if you have a sense of broader context of like, do you think they were having this effect on lots of people? Do you feel like other rationalist events have similar issues or is this something unique to this one (maybe because it’s advertised more widely? Did you have a sense of where they came from?)
I don’t know their names or anything else about who they were. One of them just seemed really remarkably clueless (I’m honestly just confused, he looked 25 or something but talked like he was maybe 15?), but he had a friend who said he was party-hopping or something and hit on a woman I knew in a way that I expect creeped her out based on my read of her body language, but I didn’t actually check with her afterwards. Neither of them seemed like rationalists to me at all, and this isn’t an issue I’ve encountered at other rationalist events. I have no idea where they came from.
Yikes, ok. “Party-hopping” makes it sound like they didn’t actually buy tickets or know what the event was, but just came in off the street. Perhaps this is a case for ticket enforcement / bouncers? I’m reluctant to suggest a remedy based on a single example, since it sounds like the people you’re talking about arrived together, and so arguably constitute a single datapoint among them. But having someone designated to deal with “problem people” is arguably a good idea even from zero datapoints—usually this is the sort of thing a code of conduct might spell out, but I think the most basic step is having a person with extra cycles who knows it’s their responsibility to deal with this kind of thing (and who knows they have the full authority to eject people, with right of appeal if the organizers want to take those, but without having to involve a committee.)
I kind of wish it were simple to just go “hm, can you identify these people to me so that I can make my own judgement?” But there are probably several reasons that’s impractical including (I expect) that you don’t know them by name.
It seems surprising to me that, in such a large crowd, there could be multiple people managing to make you uncomfortable (as opposed to, by contrast, managing to make someone somewhere uncomfortable, but not all the same someone, if that makes sense.) I am definitely wondering whether I didn’t encounter them, or encountered them and they didn’t have the same impact on me. I’m curious if you are able to describe the behaviors you saw, and also if you have a sense of broader context of like, do you think they were having this effect on lots of people? Do you feel like other rationalist events have similar issues or is this something unique to this one (maybe because it’s advertised more widely? Did you have a sense of where they came from?)
I don’t know their names or anything else about who they were. One of them just seemed really remarkably clueless (I’m honestly just confused, he looked 25 or something but talked like he was maybe 15?), but he had a friend who said he was party-hopping or something and hit on a woman I knew in a way that I expect creeped her out based on my read of her body language, but I didn’t actually check with her afterwards. Neither of them seemed like rationalists to me at all, and this isn’t an issue I’ve encountered at other rationalist events. I have no idea where they came from.
Yikes, ok. “Party-hopping” makes it sound like they didn’t actually buy tickets or know what the event was, but just came in off the street. Perhaps this is a case for ticket enforcement / bouncers? I’m reluctant to suggest a remedy based on a single example, since it sounds like the people you’re talking about arrived together, and so arguably constitute a single datapoint among them. But having someone designated to deal with “problem people” is arguably a good idea even from zero datapoints—usually this is the sort of thing a code of conduct might spell out, but I think the most basic step is having a person with extra cycles who knows it’s their responsibility to deal with this kind of thing (and who knows they have the full authority to eject people, with right of appeal if the organizers want to take those, but without having to involve a committee.)
(We actually had ticket enforcement this time, though it’s definitely still plausible someone slipped through)