I want to provide an outside view that people might find helpful. This is based on my experience as a high school teacher (6 months total experience), a professor at an R1 university (eight years total experience), and someone who has mentored extraordinarily bright early-career scientists (15 years experience).
It’s very clear to me that the rationalist community is acting as a de facto school and system of interconnected mentorship opportunities. In some cases (CFAR, e.g.) this is explicit.
Academia also does this. It has ~1000 years of experience, dating from the founding of the University of Cambridge, and has learned a few things in that time.
An important discovery is that there are serious responsibilities that come with attending on “young” minds (young in quotes; generically the first quarter of life, depending on era, that’s <15 up to today around <30). These minds are considered inherently vulnerable, who need to be protected from manipulation, boundary violations, etc. It’s been discovered that making this a blanket and non-negotiable rule has significant positive epistemic and moral effects that haven’t been replicated with alternatives.
Even before academic institutions, this is seen: consider the extensive discussions in the Socratic dialogues. In later eras it is implicit in the phrase in loco parentis. Historically this has appeared as concern for the soul, or (in the post-religious era) psychological health. Importantly, the young minds are not allowed to waive this concern.
I see two places where the rationalist community has absolutely failed in implementing this responsible practice. The outcomes have been not sane.
Small: it’s clear that there is a repeat abuser associated with multiple breakdowns and drug abuse. However, even in a post that’s describing this, he’s described as charismatic, fun, enlightening by people with positions of status and influence.
Reading Scott Alexander’s comment above, the paragraph beginning with “I want to clarify that I don’t dislike Vassar”, my feeling is that I don’t care if powerful/influential people in the community are ok with the person, think it’s well-intentioned. Simply giving the high-status “he’s a friend” mostly cancels out the effect of formal disinvitations, but it’s clear that multiple vulnerable people, knowingly or not, are reporting harm.
Large: the health and well-being of young minds is continually subordinated to a higher goal (preventing AI apocalypse) that is allowed to trump basic principles of care. Whether or not the people with power say this is what’s happening, or even publicly disavow it, it’s clear it’s being allowed to happen. Vulnerable people are getting wrapped up in “accelerated timelines” (etc) that are leading them to make bad personal decisions and nobody is calling this out as a systematic problem.
I do not buy AI risk on this scale/urgency. But even if I did, I would consider the immediate duty of care to override these concerns. If I didn’t want to do that, I would not work with vulnerable young minds.
A final remark. When I was a high school teacher, it was a residential setting. A colleague decided to start a personality cult among the young men. It got extraordinarily messed up and abusive extraordinarily quickly (two weeks). The man was a sociopath; the young men were not, but they engaged in sexual abuse. This happened because of lax oversight from the principal who was in the process of retiring/handing over the reins.
I hope this helps. I wish potentially vulnerable young people (in this era, everyone under thirty) who see the rationalist community as a source of guidance and mentorship to take care of each other and demand more from influential people.
Please contact me privately if you have any concerns about what I’ve written above.
Edit: minor edits; miscounted years since my first faculty appointment.
Upvoted for thoughtful dissent and outside perspective.
I … have some complicated mixed feelings here. LW has a very substantial contingent of “gifted kids”, who spent a decent chunk of their (...I suppose I should say “our”) lives being frustrated that the world would not take them seriously due to age. Groups like that are never going to tolerate norms saying that young age is a reason to talk down to someone. And guidelines for protecting younger people from older people, to the extent that they involve disapproval or prevention of apparently-consensual choices by younger people, are going to be tricky that way. Any concern that “young minds are not allowed to waive” will be (rightly) seen as condescending, especially if you extend “young” to age 30. This does not really become less true if the concern is accurate.
This is extra-true here, because the “rationalist community” is not a single organization with a hierarchy, or indeed (I claim) even really a single community. So you can’t make enforceable global rules of conduct, and it’s very hard to kick someone out entirely (although I would say it’s effectively been done a couple of times.)
You might be relieved to learn that, at least from where I’m standing, a substantial fraction of the community is not in fact working towards (or necessarily even believing strongly in) the higher goal of preventing the AI apocalypse. (I am not personally working towards it; I would not say that I have a firm resolution either way on how much I believe in it, but I tend towards being skeptical of most specific forms that I have seen described.)
And, not to “tu quoque” exactly, I hope, but… my sense is that academia is not great along this axis? I have never been a grad student, but I would say at least half my grad student friends have had significant mental health problems directly related to their work. And a small but substantial number have had larger problems stemming directly from abusive or (more often) incompetent advisors. In most cases, the latter seemed to have very little recourse against their advisors, especially the truly abusive ones, which seems like exactly the sort of thing that you’re calling out here. There were always theoretically paths they could take to deal with the problem, but in practice the advisor has so much more power in the relationship that it would usually involve major bridge-burning to use them, and in some cases it’s not clear it would have helped even then.
This latter problem—of theoretical escalation paths around your manager existing, but being unusable in practice—seems pretty similar, to me, between academia and industry. But my impression is that academia has much worse “managers”, on average, because advisors are selected primarily for research skill, and often have poor management skills.
This is all to say—coming back around to the point—that I think academia has lots of people who behave in ways similar to how Michael Vassar is described here. (I have not met him personally, and cannot speak to that description myself.) Granted, academia has rules of conduct that would prevent some of the things seen here. I expect it would be very rare for an advisor to get their advisees into psychedelic drugs. But on the flip side, people in Vassar’s “orbit” who grow disillusioned with him are free to leave. Grad students generally cannot do that, without a significant risk of losing years of work, and their hopes of an academic career.
If anything, I think the ability to say “this person is a terrible influence, and also we can acknowledge the good they have done” may be protective from a failure mode that I have anecdotally heard of in academia multiple times: the PI who is abusive in some way, and the “grapevine” is somewhat aware of this, but whose work is too valuable (e.g. in terms of grant money) to do anything about.
I find this position rather disturbing, especially coming from someone working at a university. I have spent the last sixish years working mostly with high school students, occasionally with university students, as a tutor and classroom teacher. I can think of many high school students who are more ready to make adult decisions than many adults I know, whose vulnerability comes primarily from the inferior status our society assigns them, rather than any inherent characteristic of youth.
As a legal matter (and I believe the law is correct here), your implication that someone acts in loco parentis with respect to college students is simply not correct (with the possible exception of the rare genius kid who attends college at an unusually young age). College students are full adults, both legally and morally, and should be treated as such. College graduates even more so. You have no right to impose a special concern on adults just because they are 18-30.
I think one of the particular strengths of the rationalist/EA community is that we are generally pretty good at treating young adults as full adults, and taking them and their ideas seriously.
I want to more or less second what River said. Mostly I wouldn’t have bothered replying to this… but your line of “today around <30” struck me as particularly wrong.
So, first of all, as River already noted, your claim about “in loco parentis” isn’t accurate. People 18 or over are legally adults; yes, there used to be a notion of “in loco parentis” applied to college students, but that hasn’t been current law since about the 60s.
But also, under 30? Like, you’re talking about grad students? That is not my experience at all. Undergrads are still treated as kids to a substantial extent, yes, even if they’re legally adults and there’s no longer any such thing as “in loco parentis”. But in my experience grad students are, absolutely, treated as adults, nor have I heard of things being otherwise. Perhaps this varies by field (I’m in math) or location or something, I don’t know, but I at least have never heard of that before.
Thanks for the outside perspective. If you’re willing to go into more detail, I’m interested in a more detailed account from you on both what academia’s safeguards are and (per gwillen’s comment) where do you think academia’s safeguards fall short and how that can be fixed.
This is decision-relevant to me as I work in a research organization outside of academia (though not working on AI risk specifically), and I would like us to both be more productive than typical in academia and have better safeguards against abuse.
If it helps, we have about 15 researchers now, we’re entirely remote, and we hire typically from people who just finished their PhDs or have roughly equivalent research experience, although research interns/fellows are noticeably younger (maybe right after undergrad is the median).
Sure. I’m really glad to hear. This is not my community, but you did explicitly ask.
This is just off the top of my head, and I don’t mean it to be a final complete and correct list. It’s just to give you a sense of some things I’ve encountered, and to help you and your org think about how to empower people and help them flourish. Academia uses a lot of these to avoid the geek-MOP-sociopath cycle.
I’m assuming your institution wants to follow an academic model, including teaching, mentorship, hiearchical student-teacher relationships, etc.
An open question is when you have a duty of care. My rule of thumb is (1) when you or the org is explicitly saying “I’m your teacher”, “I’m your mentor”; (2) when you feel a power imbalance with someone because this relationship has arisen implicitly; (3) when someone is soliciting this role from you, whether you want it or not.
If you’re a business making money, that’s quite different, just say “we’re going to use your body and mind to make money” and you’ve probably gotten your informed consent. :)
* Detection
1. Abuse is non-Gaussian. A small number of people may experience a great deal, while the majority see nothing wrong. That means that occasional random sampling is not going to identify problems. There are a lot of comments here saying “XYZ org (etc) was great, I saw nothing bad” — this is not a good signal.
2. Women and people from marginalized groups are at much higher risk. They’re less able to trust a random stranger, and they’re also less able to appeal to social norms or law enforcement. They also are at higher risk if they do report.
Somebody in the comments said that many of the people reporting abuse are trans, and “trans people suffer from mental illness more”, so maybe they’re just crazy and everything was actually pretty OK.
Hopefully this reasoning looks as crazy to you as it does to me; in the 1970s people would have said the same about gay people, but now we realize that a lot of that was due to homophobia (etc), and a lot of it was due to the fact that gay people, being marginalized, made soft targets for manipulation, blackmail, etc.
3. Always take reports seriously, even if “the person seems weird”.
* Prevention
4. The most obvious thing is use common sense. If they didn’t need it at Solvay in 1927, you probably don’t need it now.
For example, avoid weird hyper-personal psychological interventions (circling, debugging, etc). Therapy is a regulated profession for good reasons, and the evidence-based therapies we know about have safeguards (e.g., asymmetric privacy, theraputic alliance, regulations about sexual activity and business relationships, boards that manage complaints, etc.)
5. Obey the law. Don’t allow underage drinking, illegal drug use, drunk driving, etc., and don’t allow others to allow it. Have a zero tolerance policy on this (if that feels like a buzzkill, you can say it has to do with liability).
The reason for this is (IMO) actually quite interesting. It’s not that the law is necessarily a good guide to morals. It’s more that abusers tend to be out of control (because they have a psychological disorder, because they think they’re above or beyond ordinary requirements, or because they’re abusing drugs themselves, etc), and violating the law is a sign of this.
The extreme example I know of is the high school personality cult I mentioned above. The colleague in question was (in retrospect) terrifying: he engaged in animal abuse and setting fires (two of the Macdonald triad), and the young men in his cult engaged in sexual abuse.
In the end, however, he was “busted” (fired) for statutory rape. The other stuff going on was too fuzzy, gradual, and excusable to hit people’s radar at first (think boiling frog). But SR is a bright line, and if someone’s crazy enough to cross that line, it’s a signal that other things are off as well.
6. Preserve personal-professional boundaries with students/mentees. A baseline assumption is that you shouldn’t really know much about anyone’s personal life—who they’re dating, what their mental problems are, what kind of sex they like. It’s not forbidden knowledge, but if you (or someone else in the org) does, you might ask: to what end? Is this helping them thrive?
Similarly, respect when someone wants those boundaries, or when they want to re-establish them.
Dating and sexual relationships across the student-teacher boundary should be completely out.
* Mitigation
7. When powerful people in your group say that an abusive person is an advsior, that sends a message to vulnerable people that they ought to, or need to, tolerate abuse by that person in other contexts. If you believe a person is abusing vulnerable people to whom you, or the org, owe a duty of care, you ought to cut communication with that person.
8. Don’t give charismatic or “high performing” people a pass. There’s no real correlation between excellence and being abusive—if anything, the positive correlation with drug and mental problems makes it a negative correlation. Meanwhile, the same thing that can enable abuse (dark triad traits) can also appear as high performance.
9. Done right, none of this requires drama. Among other things, if your org is aware of (1) through (6), abusers will go elsewhere. Having zero tolerance also makes it a lot easier to help good-faith people not abuse unintentionally—you can step in before things go off the rails, when the stakes are low, and save important relationships.
EDIT: since you asked where academia is falling short. I’d say it falls short in (1) and (2), is sort of OK in (3) in part because of Title IX and similar things, is good in (4) in part because there are long-standing traditions of common sense, and in (5) because lawyers, and falls short in (6), (7), and (8).
What’s being described here seems to be violating all eight rules at different levels. Most obvious to me from the outside is (1), (4), (5), (6) and (7).
EDIT2: since this came up. Good practice is that the vulnerable person can’t waive these concerns.
For example, the answer to “but I want to do [intense weird psychological thing] with my mentor” should be “not as long as you or this mentor remains with the org”, or at the very least “not as long as this mentor remains with the org with a duty of care towards you”.
Somebody in the comments said that many of the people reporting abuse are trans, and “trans people suffer from mental illness more”, so maybe they’re just crazy and everything was actually pretty OK.
Hopefully this reasoning looks as crazy to you as it does to me; in the 1970s people would have said the same about gay people, but now we realize that a lot of that was due to homophobia (etc), and a lot of it was due to the fact that gay people, being marginalized, made soft targets for manipulation, blackmail, etc.
So, I think this is not a fair reading of the comment in question. Not a million miles away from, but far enough that I wanted to point it out.
But also, you seem to be saying something like: “consider that maybe trans people’s rates of mental illness are downstream of them being trans and society being transphobic, not that their transness is downstream of mental illness”.
And, okay, but...
Consider a hypothetical trans support forum. If rationalistthrowaway is right, you’d expect the members of that forum to have higher than average rates of mental illness, possibly leading to high profile events like psychotic breaks and suicides. And it sounds like you don’t disagree with this?
(Like, it sounds like you might want to add “some of what gets diagnosed in mental illness in trans people is just the diagnostic machinery being transphobic, and that accounts for some of the increase”. Sure, stipulated. But it doesn’t sound like you’d say that accounts for all of the increase.)
Then someone sees these high profile events, and wonders what’s going on here? Is it something about the forum that’s triggering them? And someone else points out that trans people have a high baseline rate of mental illness, and that seems highly relevant.
It seems to me that your reply would be just as fitting there. Which is to say, I think it misunderstands the point being made; and also (through social punishment) makes it less likely that people will be able to figure out what’s going on and be able to make things better.
Thanks so much for the response! I really appreciate it.
I’m assuming your institution wants to follow an academic model, including teaching, mentorship, hierarchical student-teacher relationships, etc.
I think we have more of a standard manager-managee hierarchal relationship, with the normal corporate guardrails plus a few more. We also have explicit lines of reporting for abuse or other potential issues to people outside of the organization to minimize potential coverups.
Here are my general thoughts:
An open question is when you have a duty of care
I’m kind of confused. Surely organizations by default have a power dynamic over employees, and managers over reports, and abusing this is bad? Maybe I’m confused and you mean a stronger thing by “duty of care”
Seems straightforwardly true to me, though I think you’re maybe underestimating correlates of direct harm. (eg I expect in many of the cases cited, there’s things like megalomania, insufficient humility, insufficient willingness to listen to contrary evidence, caring more about charismatic personalities than object-level arguments, etc)
Speaking as someone in the subset of “women and minorities”, I’d be pretty concerned about any form of special treatments or affordances given because “women and minorities” are at higher risk, aside from really obvious ones like being moderately more careful about male supervisor/female supervisee.
In particular, this creates bad dynamics/incentive structures, like making it less likely to provide honest/critical feedback to “marginalized” groups, which is one of the things I was warned against in management training.
This seems correct. Also you want multiple trusted points of contact outside the organization, which I think both academia and rationality are failing at.
EA organizations often have Julia Wise, but she’s stretched too thin and thus have (arguably) made significant mistakes as a result, as pointed out in a different thread.
This seems right to me. I think “common sense” should be dereferenced a little for people coming from different cultures, but the company culture of the AngloAmerican elite seems not-crazy as a starting point.
I think it’s Very Bad to allow most forms of lawbreaking on “work time.” But I think you’re implying something much stronger than that, and (speaking as someone who think all recreational drugs are dumb and straightforwardly do not pass any cost-benefits analysis, and have consumed less than a bottle of wine in my entire life) I really don’t think it’s the job of a workplace to police employee’s time off, regardless of whether it’s doing recreational drugs or listening to pirated music.
maybe it’s different if jobs are in person?
But I once worked at a company which had in our code-of-contact that employees can’t drink in parties with other employees, and even though I had no inclination to drink, I still thought that was clearly too crazy/controlling
This seems right. Most companies have rules against managers dating subordinates, and I think for probably good reasons.
This sounds right, though “if you believe” is a probabilistic claim, and if I think the base rate is 5%, I’m not sure you think cutting communication should have at 15% (already ~3x elevated risk!) or 75% or 95%.
I think I agree? But I think your reasoning is shoddy here. “There’s no real correlation between excellence and being abusive” is a population claim, but obviously what people are evaluating is usually individuals.
“Among other things, if your org is aware of (1) through (6), abusers will go elsewhere” One thing I’m confused about is if an organization has credible Bayesian evidence (say 40% is the cutoff) that an employee abuses their reports, it may make sense for the organization to fire them, way before there’s enough evidence to convict in a court of law. But it’s unclear what you should do in the broader ecosystem.
In academia my impression is that professors often switch universities after charges of suspicion, which seems not ideal and not what I’d want to replicate.
This seems like the beginning of a very good discussion, but:
I want to be clear that I’m not a member of the LW community, and I don’t want to take up space here.
There are complex and interesting ideas in play on both sides that are hard to communicate in a back-and-forth, and are perhaps better saved for a structured long-form presentation.
To that end, I’ll suggest that if you like we chat offline. I’m in NYC, for example, and you’re welcome to get in touch via PM.
What I’m talking about is a system of moral duties and obligations connected to an explicitly academic mission. Academia is older than the corporation, and is a separate world. It’s very important not to confuse them, and I wish that corporations (and “research labs” associated with corporations) would state very clearly “we are in no way an academic institution”.
To be clear, my own organization is a nonprofit. We are not interested in making money, nor in doing other things of low moral value.
I currently think emulating the culture of normal companies is a better starting template than academia or other research nonprofits (many of whom have strong positions that they want to believe and research that oh-so-interestingly happen to justify their pre-existing beliefs), though of course different cultures have different poisons that are more or less salient to different people.
Women and people from marginalized groups are at much higher risk. They’re less able to trust a random stranger, and they’re also less able to appeal to social norms or law enforcement. They also are at higher risk if they do report.
That seems to me doubtful. Relative to viticization survey reported rape numbers women seem to be much more willing to report it if they get raped then men.
A woman who reports sexual harrassment from a male mentor has it radically easier then a man who reports sexual harrassment from a female mentor.
(this does not deminish the fact that it’s worth listening to reports from women, but the mental model behind believing that it’s easy to report for men is wrong)
I want to provide an outside view that people might find helpful. This is based on my experience as a high school teacher (6 months total experience), a professor at an R1 university (eight years total experience), and someone who has mentored extraordinarily bright early-career scientists (15 years experience).
It’s very clear to me that the rationalist community is acting as a de facto school and system of interconnected mentorship opportunities. In some cases (CFAR, e.g.) this is explicit.
Academia also does this. It has ~1000 years of experience, dating from the founding of the University of Cambridge, and has learned a few things in that time.
An important discovery is that there are serious responsibilities that come with attending on “young” minds (young in quotes; generically the first quarter of life, depending on era, that’s <15 up to today around <30). These minds are considered inherently vulnerable, who need to be protected from manipulation, boundary violations, etc. It’s been discovered that making this a blanket and non-negotiable rule has significant positive epistemic and moral effects that haven’t been replicated with alternatives.
Even before academic institutions, this is seen: consider the extensive discussions in the Socratic dialogues. In later eras it is implicit in the phrase in loco parentis. Historically this has appeared as concern for the soul, or (in the post-religious era) psychological health. Importantly, the young minds are not allowed to waive this concern.
I see two places where the rationalist community has absolutely failed in implementing this responsible practice. The outcomes have been not sane.
Small: it’s clear that there is a repeat abuser associated with multiple breakdowns and drug abuse. However, even in a post that’s describing this, he’s described as charismatic, fun, enlightening by people with positions of status and influence.
Reading Scott Alexander’s comment above, the paragraph beginning with “I want to clarify that I don’t dislike Vassar”, my feeling is that I don’t care if powerful/influential people in the community are ok with the person, think it’s well-intentioned. Simply giving the high-status “he’s a friend” mostly cancels out the effect of formal disinvitations, but it’s clear that multiple vulnerable people, knowingly or not, are reporting harm.
Large: the health and well-being of young minds is continually subordinated to a higher goal (preventing AI apocalypse) that is allowed to trump basic principles of care. Whether or not the people with power say this is what’s happening, or even publicly disavow it, it’s clear it’s being allowed to happen. Vulnerable people are getting wrapped up in “accelerated timelines” (etc) that are leading them to make bad personal decisions and nobody is calling this out as a systematic problem.
I do not buy AI risk on this scale/urgency. But even if I did, I would consider the immediate duty of care to override these concerns. If I didn’t want to do that, I would not work with vulnerable young minds.
A final remark. When I was a high school teacher, it was a residential setting. A colleague decided to start a personality cult among the young men. It got extraordinarily messed up and abusive extraordinarily quickly (two weeks). The man was a sociopath; the young men were not, but they engaged in sexual abuse. This happened because of lax oversight from the principal who was in the process of retiring/handing over the reins.
I hope this helps. I wish potentially vulnerable young people (in this era, everyone under thirty) who see the rationalist community as a source of guidance and mentorship to take care of each other and demand more from influential people.
Please contact me privately if you have any concerns about what I’ve written above.
Edit: minor edits; miscounted years since my first faculty appointment.
Upvoted for thoughtful dissent and outside perspective.
I … have some complicated mixed feelings here. LW has a very substantial contingent of “gifted kids”, who spent a decent chunk of their (...I suppose I should say “our”) lives being frustrated that the world would not take them seriously due to age. Groups like that are never going to tolerate norms saying that young age is a reason to talk down to someone. And guidelines for protecting younger people from older people, to the extent that they involve disapproval or prevention of apparently-consensual choices by younger people, are going to be tricky that way. Any concern that “young minds are not allowed to waive” will be (rightly) seen as condescending, especially if you extend “young” to age 30. This does not really become less true if the concern is accurate.
This is extra-true here, because the “rationalist community” is not a single organization with a hierarchy, or indeed (I claim) even really a single community. So you can’t make enforceable global rules of conduct, and it’s very hard to kick someone out entirely (although I would say it’s effectively been done a couple of times.)
You might be relieved to learn that, at least from where I’m standing, a substantial fraction of the community is not in fact working towards (or necessarily even believing strongly in) the higher goal of preventing the AI apocalypse. (I am not personally working towards it; I would not say that I have a firm resolution either way on how much I believe in it, but I tend towards being skeptical of most specific forms that I have seen described.)
And, not to “tu quoque” exactly, I hope, but… my sense is that academia is not great along this axis? I have never been a grad student, but I would say at least half my grad student friends have had significant mental health problems directly related to their work. And a small but substantial number have had larger problems stemming directly from abusive or (more often) incompetent advisors. In most cases, the latter seemed to have very little recourse against their advisors, especially the truly abusive ones, which seems like exactly the sort of thing that you’re calling out here. There were always theoretically paths they could take to deal with the problem, but in practice the advisor has so much more power in the relationship that it would usually involve major bridge-burning to use them, and in some cases it’s not clear it would have helped even then.
This latter problem—of theoretical escalation paths around your manager existing, but being unusable in practice—seems pretty similar, to me, between academia and industry. But my impression is that academia has much worse “managers”, on average, because advisors are selected primarily for research skill, and often have poor management skills.
This is all to say—coming back around to the point—that I think academia has lots of people who behave in ways similar to how Michael Vassar is described here. (I have not met him personally, and cannot speak to that description myself.) Granted, academia has rules of conduct that would prevent some of the things seen here. I expect it would be very rare for an advisor to get their advisees into psychedelic drugs. But on the flip side, people in Vassar’s “orbit” who grow disillusioned with him are free to leave. Grad students generally cannot do that, without a significant risk of losing years of work, and their hopes of an academic career.
If anything, I think the ability to say “this person is a terrible influence, and also we can acknowledge the good they have done” may be protective from a failure mode that I have anecdotally heard of in academia multiple times: the PI who is abusive in some way, and the “grapevine” is somewhat aware of this, but whose work is too valuable (e.g. in terms of grant money) to do anything about.
I find this position rather disturbing, especially coming from someone working at a university. I have spent the last sixish years working mostly with high school students, occasionally with university students, as a tutor and classroom teacher. I can think of many high school students who are more ready to make adult decisions than many adults I know, whose vulnerability comes primarily from the inferior status our society assigns them, rather than any inherent characteristic of youth.
As a legal matter (and I believe the law is correct here), your implication that someone acts in loco parentis with respect to college students is simply not correct (with the possible exception of the rare genius kid who attends college at an unusually young age). College students are full adults, both legally and morally, and should be treated as such. College graduates even more so. You have no right to impose a special concern on adults just because they are 18-30.
I think one of the particular strengths of the rationalist/EA community is that we are generally pretty good at treating young adults as full adults, and taking them and their ideas seriously.
I want to more or less second what River said. Mostly I wouldn’t have bothered replying to this… but your line of “today around <30” struck me as particularly wrong.
So, first of all, as River already noted, your claim about “in loco parentis” isn’t accurate. People 18 or over are legally adults; yes, there used to be a notion of “in loco parentis” applied to college students, but that hasn’t been current law since about the 60s.
But also, under 30? Like, you’re talking about grad students? That is not my experience at all. Undergrads are still treated as kids to a substantial extent, yes, even if they’re legally adults and there’s no longer any such thing as “in loco parentis”. But in my experience grad students are, absolutely, treated as adults, nor have I heard of things being otherwise. Perhaps this varies by field (I’m in math) or location or something, I don’t know, but I at least have never heard of that before.
Thanks for the outside perspective. If you’re willing to go into more detail, I’m interested in a more detailed account from you on both what academia’s safeguards are and (per gwillen’s comment) where do you think academia’s safeguards fall short and how that can be fixed.
This is decision-relevant to me as I work in a research organization outside of academia (though not working on AI risk specifically), and I would like us to both be more productive than typical in academia and have better safeguards against abuse.
If it helps, we have about 15 researchers now, we’re entirely remote, and we hire typically from people who just finished their PhDs or have roughly equivalent research experience, although research interns/fellows are noticeably younger (maybe right after undergrad is the median).
Sure. I’m really glad to hear. This is not my community, but you did explicitly ask.
This is just off the top of my head, and I don’t mean it to be a final complete and correct list. It’s just to give you a sense of some things I’ve encountered, and to help you and your org think about how to empower people and help them flourish. Academia uses a lot of these to avoid the geek-MOP-sociopath cycle.
I’m assuming your institution wants to follow an academic model, including teaching, mentorship, hiearchical student-teacher relationships, etc.
An open question is when you have a duty of care. My rule of thumb is (1) when you or the org is explicitly saying “I’m your teacher”, “I’m your mentor”; (2) when you feel a power imbalance with someone because this relationship has arisen implicitly; (3) when someone is soliciting this role from you, whether you want it or not.
If you’re a business making money, that’s quite different, just say “we’re going to use your body and mind to make money” and you’ve probably gotten your informed consent. :)
* Detection
1. Abuse is non-Gaussian. A small number of people may experience a great deal, while the majority see nothing wrong. That means that occasional random sampling is not going to identify problems. There are a lot of comments here saying “XYZ org (etc) was great, I saw nothing bad” — this is not a good signal.
2. Women and people from marginalized groups are at much higher risk. They’re less able to trust a random stranger, and they’re also less able to appeal to social norms or law enforcement. They also are at higher risk if they do report.
Somebody in the comments said that many of the people reporting abuse are trans, and “trans people suffer from mental illness more”, so maybe they’re just crazy and everything was actually pretty OK.
Hopefully this reasoning looks as crazy to you as it does to me; in the 1970s people would have said the same about gay people, but now we realize that a lot of that was due to homophobia (etc), and a lot of it was due to the fact that gay people, being marginalized, made soft targets for manipulation, blackmail, etc.
3. Always take reports seriously, even if “the person seems weird”.
* Prevention
4. The most obvious thing is use common sense. If they didn’t need it at Solvay in 1927, you probably don’t need it now.
For example, avoid weird hyper-personal psychological interventions (circling, debugging, etc). Therapy is a regulated profession for good reasons, and the evidence-based therapies we know about have safeguards (e.g., asymmetric privacy, theraputic alliance, regulations about sexual activity and business relationships, boards that manage complaints, etc.)
5. Obey the law. Don’t allow underage drinking, illegal drug use, drunk driving, etc., and don’t allow others to allow it. Have a zero tolerance policy on this (if that feels like a buzzkill, you can say it has to do with liability).
The reason for this is (IMO) actually quite interesting. It’s not that the law is necessarily a good guide to morals. It’s more that abusers tend to be out of control (because they have a psychological disorder, because they think they’re above or beyond ordinary requirements, or because they’re abusing drugs themselves, etc), and violating the law is a sign of this.
The extreme example I know of is the high school personality cult I mentioned above. The colleague in question was (in retrospect) terrifying: he engaged in animal abuse and setting fires (two of the Macdonald triad), and the young men in his cult engaged in sexual abuse.
In the end, however, he was “busted” (fired) for statutory rape. The other stuff going on was too fuzzy, gradual, and excusable to hit people’s radar at first (think boiling frog). But SR is a bright line, and if someone’s crazy enough to cross that line, it’s a signal that other things are off as well.
6. Preserve personal-professional boundaries with students/mentees. A baseline assumption is that you shouldn’t really know much about anyone’s personal life—who they’re dating, what their mental problems are, what kind of sex they like. It’s not forbidden knowledge, but if you (or someone else in the org) does, you might ask: to what end? Is this helping them thrive?
Similarly, respect when someone wants those boundaries, or when they want to re-establish them.
Dating and sexual relationships across the student-teacher boundary should be completely out.
* Mitigation
7. When powerful people in your group say that an abusive person is an advsior, that sends a message to vulnerable people that they ought to, or need to, tolerate abuse by that person in other contexts. If you believe a person is abusing vulnerable people to whom you, or the org, owe a duty of care, you ought to cut communication with that person.
8. Don’t give charismatic or “high performing” people a pass. There’s no real correlation between excellence and being abusive—if anything, the positive correlation with drug and mental problems makes it a negative correlation. Meanwhile, the same thing that can enable abuse (dark triad traits) can also appear as high performance.
9. Done right, none of this requires drama. Among other things, if your org is aware of (1) through (6), abusers will go elsewhere. Having zero tolerance also makes it a lot easier to help good-faith people not abuse unintentionally—you can step in before things go off the rails, when the stakes are low, and save important relationships.
EDIT: since you asked where academia is falling short. I’d say it falls short in (1) and (2), is sort of OK in (3) in part because of Title IX and similar things, is good in (4) in part because there are long-standing traditions of common sense, and in (5) because lawyers, and falls short in (6), (7), and (8).
What’s being described here seems to be violating all eight rules at different levels. Most obvious to me from the outside is (1), (4), (5), (6) and (7).
EDIT2: since this came up. Good practice is that the vulnerable person can’t waive these concerns.
For example, the answer to “but I want to do [intense weird psychological thing] with my mentor” should be “not as long as you or this mentor remains with the org”, or at the very least “not as long as this mentor remains with the org with a duty of care towards you”.
So, I think this is not a fair reading of the comment in question. Not a million miles away from, but far enough that I wanted to point it out.
But also, you seem to be saying something like: “consider that maybe trans people’s rates of mental illness are downstream of them being trans and society being transphobic, not that their transness is downstream of mental illness”.
And, okay, but...
Consider a hypothetical trans support forum. If rationalistthrowaway is right, you’d expect the members of that forum to have higher than average rates of mental illness, possibly leading to high profile events like psychotic breaks and suicides. And it sounds like you don’t disagree with this?
(Like, it sounds like you might want to add “some of what gets diagnosed in mental illness in trans people is just the diagnostic machinery being transphobic, and that accounts for some of the increase”. Sure, stipulated. But it doesn’t sound like you’d say that accounts for all of the increase.)
Then someone sees these high profile events, and wonders what’s going on here? Is it something about the forum that’s triggering them? And someone else points out that trans people have a high baseline rate of mental illness, and that seems highly relevant.
It seems to me that your reply would be just as fitting there. Which is to say, I think it misunderstands the point being made; and also (through social punishment) makes it less likely that people will be able to figure out what’s going on and be able to make things better.
Thanks so much for the response! I really appreciate it.
I think we have more of a standard manager-managee hierarchal relationship, with the normal corporate guardrails plus a few more. We also have explicit lines of reporting for abuse or other potential issues to people outside of the organization to minimize potential coverups.
Here are my general thoughts:
I’m kind of confused. Surely organizations by default have a power dynamic over employees, and managers over reports, and abusing this is bad? Maybe I’m confused and you mean a stronger thing by “duty of care”
Seems straightforwardly true to me, though I think you’re maybe underestimating correlates of direct harm. (eg I expect in many of the cases cited, there’s things like megalomania, insufficient humility, insufficient willingness to listen to contrary evidence, caring more about charismatic personalities than object-level arguments, etc)
Speaking as someone in the subset of “women and minorities”, I’d be pretty concerned about any form of special treatments or affordances given because “women and minorities” are at higher risk, aside from really obvious ones like being moderately more careful about male supervisor/female supervisee.
In particular, this creates bad dynamics/incentive structures, like making it less likely to provide honest/critical feedback to “marginalized” groups, which is one of the things I was warned against in management training.
This seems correct. Also you want multiple trusted points of contact outside the organization, which I think both academia and rationality are failing at.
EA organizations often have Julia Wise, but she’s stretched too thin and thus have (arguably) made significant mistakes as a result, as pointed out in a different thread.
This seems right to me. I think “common sense” should be dereferenced a little for people coming from different cultures, but the company culture of the AngloAmerican elite seems not-crazy as a starting point.
I think it’s Very Bad to allow most forms of lawbreaking on “work time.” But I think you’re implying something much stronger than that, and (speaking as someone who think all recreational drugs are dumb and straightforwardly do not pass any cost-benefits analysis, and have consumed less than a bottle of wine in my entire life) I really don’t think it’s the job of a workplace to police employee’s time off, regardless of whether it’s doing recreational drugs or listening to pirated music.
maybe it’s different if jobs are in person?
But I once worked at a company which had in our code-of-contact that employees can’t drink in parties with other employees, and even though I had no inclination to drink, I still thought that was clearly too crazy/controlling
This seems right. Most companies have rules against managers dating subordinates, and I think for probably good reasons.
This sounds right, though “if you believe” is a probabilistic claim, and if I think the base rate is 5%, I’m not sure you think cutting communication should have at 15% (already ~3x elevated risk!) or 75% or 95%.
I think I agree? But I think your reasoning is shoddy here. “There’s no real correlation between excellence and being abusive” is a population claim, but obviously what people are evaluating is usually individuals.
“Among other things, if your org is aware of (1) through (6), abusers will go elsewhere” One thing I’m confused about is if an organization has credible Bayesian evidence (say 40% is the cutoff) that an employee abuses their reports, it may make sense for the organization to fire them, way before there’s enough evidence to convict in a court of law. But it’s unclear what you should do in the broader ecosystem.
In academia my impression is that professors often switch universities after charges of suspicion, which seems not ideal and not what I’d want to replicate.
This seems like the beginning of a very good discussion, but:
I want to be clear that I’m not a member of the LW community, and I don’t want to take up space here.
There are complex and interesting ideas in play on both sides that are hard to communicate in a back-and-forth, and are perhaps better saved for a structured long-form presentation.
To that end, I’ll suggest that if you like we chat offline. I’m in NYC, for example, and you’re welcome to get in touch via PM.
To be clear, my own organization is a nonprofit. We are not interested in making money, nor in doing other things of low moral value.
I currently think emulating the culture of normal companies is a better starting template than academia or other research nonprofits (many of whom have strong positions that they want to believe and research that oh-so-interestingly happen to justify their pre-existing beliefs), though of course different cultures have different poisons that are more or less salient to different people.
But yeah, let’s take this offline.
That seems to me doubtful. Relative to viticization survey reported rape numbers women seem to be much more willing to report it if they get raped then men.
A woman who reports sexual harrassment from a male mentor has it radically easier then a man who reports sexual harrassment from a female mentor.
(this does not deminish the fact that it’s worth listening to reports from women, but the mental model behind believing that it’s easy to report for men is wrong)