I’ve seen a bit of this in some organizations I’ve been part of. The most important part I see missing is enforcement powers. If you have a group of excellent and sage judges who can impartially consider the facts but all they can do is issue advisory opinions, all you have is another social bloc taking one side or the other in an interpersonal debate. You have gossip and the whisper network cosplaying a court of law. You have nothing.
I have not the first clue how to handle this outside of a formal organization, but solving this in an organization with a real structure is at least a step forward. Not naming names because I don’t speak for them, but one organization I’ve seen do this well had a small elected committee that handled any complaints about members. They did basic investigation, worked with both accuser and accused, and normally focused on repairing the harm and reintegrating both people into the community (the keyword here is restorative justice, if you want details). Often this caught troublemakers early, and people have been accused of wrongdoing, gone through this process, and remained members of the organization with much drama. This works because the committee also had a hammer: they could ban people from attending organization events temporarily while they put permanently removing the person from the organization to an organization wide vote. While I was part of the organization, no one was removed by a vote, but people have been removed by vote before, and people have quit the org when it became clear that there would be consequences for the bad actions due to this process.
Importantly, the committee was explicitly held to far lower standards than a court of law. They were expected to be impartial (and not handle a case if they couldn’t be), but no one was spending hundreds of hours on a single case. There are no lawyers, no rules of evidence. The trade-off for the whole process being far less formal and less work—not just for the committee members but also for the accuser and accused—is the relatively lightness of the penalties. Defendants in a criminal court need the full protection of formal systems of law because the court can take away your money, your freedom, or even your life. The committee I’m talking about can at worst take away your membership in one organization, and even that has a safeguard. The people who wrote the rules for the committee understood that not being a massive burden on everyone involved was worth the trade-off of less protections. The focus on repairing and preventing harm over punishment also helped—the consequences of ruling the wrong way on something are minimized here, which helps smooth over any wrong decisions.
It’s also worth making it explicit that when this sort of issue comes up, of how to handle accusations of wrongdoing in organizations or groups without involving the courts, it’s almost always about rape. The whisper networks or public accusations that these sorts of more formal structures try to avoid aren’t about someone getting beat up or stolen from, they’re almost always about rape, other sexual assault, or behavior that make people feel like they’re in danger of being raped. If someone beats you up or steals from you, you don’t have to start a whisper campaign, you go to the police (or a lawyer in some cases). Explicitly saying something I don’t have proof of, epistemic status “confident but maybe you shouldn’t be”: this is because the (American) courts are bad at dealing with rape and sexual assault, and in the absence of formal systems of justice you get informal systems of justice, and those tend to suck for everyone, accuser included (public accusations and whisper campaigns aren’t a great way to achieve justice, but if they’re what you have, they’re what you have).
I agree with most of this, except for the part “if someone steals from you, you can go to police”. Yes, if someone literally grabs your purse and starts running away, call the police.
But there are also situations that are less clear, for example when people didn’t write a contract because they trusted a person from the same community, when they just made a verbal agreement and when the time came for the other person to do what they said, they denied it or said it was all a misunderstanding. Sometimes you have no legal evidence.
Imagine you and me renting a car together for a trip. You rent the car and pay for the gas, and the agreement is that when the trip is over, I will pay you 50% of the expenses. Except that afterwards I don’t give you a cent, I claim that this was a misunderstanding, that I sincerely believed that you were offering me a free ride from the goodness of your heart otherwise I would never have agreed to that, and I am a poor person and don’t have so much money anyway. (For bonus points, I can act offended and accuse you of playing dirty tricks on me.) Now what? It is your name on the car rent, you paid cash for the gas, I deny everything. I don’t think you would have a good case in court, and even if you did, it is probably not worth the effort. You will remember never to trust me again, but next time I will simply misuse someone else.
Situations like this are typically addressed by gossip, but it is your word against my word, and maybe I am more popular than you because I am a charismatic sociopath. Or I may threaten to sue you for slander. Or I may proactively share my story first (how you tried to scam me out of money by offering me a free ride and then trying to make me pay you an absurd amount of money—for better effect I will exaggerate the number) and warn people against trusting you. Or I may start an unrelated conflict with you, for example a political debate on LW or Facebook, and then insist that you just made up the story about the car as a punishment for me expressing insufficiently woke opinions. Etc.
Now what a panel can do in such situation is to listen to both sides, make no conclusion at first, but if I keep having “misunderstandings” with more people who have no past record of similar behavior, after two or three it cumulatively becomes a strong Bayesian evidence that I am actually the bad guy. Even if there is still zero evidence admissible in court.
“if I keep having “misunderstandings” with more people who have no past record of similar behavior, after two or three it cumulatively becomes a strong Bayesian evidence that I am actually the bad guy.”
It’s not quite that easy. Abuser’s may particularly tend to seek out vulnerable people, and it’s a real effect that when you are already raising a complaint about someone, this may open you up to further abuse by other bad actors, who can now have exploit that you now have spent your social capital.
In other words, Bayesian considerations have a place, but you need to be extra careful that you’re not misattributing the correlations.
You’re correct. I wish we had any sort of tradition that let people with a minor dispute go before some neutral party without expense or bureaucracy—less in the sense of court of extremely small claims, and more that people should be more willing to say to a trusted friend, “hey, resolve this dispute for us and we’ll buy you dinner.” Then again, this requires you to both trust the same person, and for neither person to be acting in such bad faith that they refuse the process. If there’s a default place people can go, with very low costs in time and no cost in money, refusing to even have an argument heard would be a pretty big strike against you in most situations, and as you said if the panel has multiple cases/ complaints against a person that’s at least Bayesian evidence that they’re doing something wrong.
I’ve seen a bit of this in some organizations I’ve been part of. The most important part I see missing is enforcement powers. If you have a group of excellent and sage judges who can impartially consider the facts but all they can do is issue advisory opinions, all you have is another social bloc taking one side or the other in an interpersonal debate. You have gossip and the whisper network cosplaying a court of law. You have nothing.
I have not the first clue how to handle this outside of a formal organization, but solving this in an organization with a real structure is at least a step forward. Not naming names because I don’t speak for them, but one organization I’ve seen do this well had a small elected committee that handled any complaints about members. They did basic investigation, worked with both accuser and accused, and normally focused on repairing the harm and reintegrating both people into the community (the keyword here is restorative justice, if you want details). Often this caught troublemakers early, and people have been accused of wrongdoing, gone through this process, and remained members of the organization with much drama. This works because the committee also had a hammer: they could ban people from attending organization events temporarily while they put permanently removing the person from the organization to an organization wide vote. While I was part of the organization, no one was removed by a vote, but people have been removed by vote before, and people have quit the org when it became clear that there would be consequences for the bad actions due to this process.
Importantly, the committee was explicitly held to far lower standards than a court of law. They were expected to be impartial (and not handle a case if they couldn’t be), but no one was spending hundreds of hours on a single case. There are no lawyers, no rules of evidence. The trade-off for the whole process being far less formal and less work—not just for the committee members but also for the accuser and accused—is the relatively lightness of the penalties. Defendants in a criminal court need the full protection of formal systems of law because the court can take away your money, your freedom, or even your life. The committee I’m talking about can at worst take away your membership in one organization, and even that has a safeguard. The people who wrote the rules for the committee understood that not being a massive burden on everyone involved was worth the trade-off of less protections. The focus on repairing and preventing harm over punishment also helped—the consequences of ruling the wrong way on something are minimized here, which helps smooth over any wrong decisions.
It’s also worth making it explicit that when this sort of issue comes up, of how to handle accusations of wrongdoing in organizations or groups without involving the courts, it’s almost always about rape. The whisper networks or public accusations that these sorts of more formal structures try to avoid aren’t about someone getting beat up or stolen from, they’re almost always about rape, other sexual assault, or behavior that make people feel like they’re in danger of being raped. If someone beats you up or steals from you, you don’t have to start a whisper campaign, you go to the police (or a lawyer in some cases). Explicitly saying something I don’t have proof of, epistemic status “confident but maybe you shouldn’t be”: this is because the (American) courts are bad at dealing with rape and sexual assault, and in the absence of formal systems of justice you get informal systems of justice, and those tend to suck for everyone, accuser included (public accusations and whisper campaigns aren’t a great way to achieve justice, but if they’re what you have, they’re what you have).
I agree with most of this, except for the part “if someone steals from you, you can go to police”. Yes, if someone literally grabs your purse and starts running away, call the police.
But there are also situations that are less clear, for example when people didn’t write a contract because they trusted a person from the same community, when they just made a verbal agreement and when the time came for the other person to do what they said, they denied it or said it was all a misunderstanding. Sometimes you have no legal evidence.
Imagine you and me renting a car together for a trip. You rent the car and pay for the gas, and the agreement is that when the trip is over, I will pay you 50% of the expenses. Except that afterwards I don’t give you a cent, I claim that this was a misunderstanding, that I sincerely believed that you were offering me a free ride from the goodness of your heart otherwise I would never have agreed to that, and I am a poor person and don’t have so much money anyway. (For bonus points, I can act offended and accuse you of playing dirty tricks on me.) Now what? It is your name on the car rent, you paid cash for the gas, I deny everything. I don’t think you would have a good case in court, and even if you did, it is probably not worth the effort. You will remember never to trust me again, but next time I will simply misuse someone else.
Situations like this are typically addressed by gossip, but it is your word against my word, and maybe I am more popular than you because I am a charismatic sociopath. Or I may threaten to sue you for slander. Or I may proactively share my story first (how you tried to scam me out of money by offering me a free ride and then trying to make me pay you an absurd amount of money—for better effect I will exaggerate the number) and warn people against trusting you. Or I may start an unrelated conflict with you, for example a political debate on LW or Facebook, and then insist that you just made up the story about the car as a punishment for me expressing insufficiently woke opinions. Etc.
Now what a panel can do in such situation is to listen to both sides, make no conclusion at first, but if I keep having “misunderstandings” with more people who have no past record of similar behavior, after two or three it cumulatively becomes a strong Bayesian evidence that I am actually the bad guy. Even if there is still zero evidence admissible in court.
“if I keep having “misunderstandings” with more people who have no past record of similar behavior, after two or three it cumulatively becomes a strong Bayesian evidence that I am actually the bad guy.” It’s not quite that easy. Abuser’s may particularly tend to seek out vulnerable people, and it’s a real effect that when you are already raising a complaint about someone, this may open you up to further abuse by other bad actors, who can now have exploit that you now have spent your social capital. In other words, Bayesian considerations have a place, but you need to be extra careful that you’re not misattributing the correlations.
Yes, that makes sense. But if we already assume that the truth may be impossible to figure out reliably, no solution is going to be perfect.
(There is also a similar problem, that some people are more likely to be falsely accused than others.)
You’re correct. I wish we had any sort of tradition that let people with a minor dispute go before some neutral party without expense or bureaucracy—less in the sense of court of extremely small claims, and more that people should be more willing to say to a trusted friend, “hey, resolve this dispute for us and we’ll buy you dinner.” Then again, this requires you to both trust the same person, and for neither person to be acting in such bad faith that they refuse the process. If there’s a default place people can go, with very low costs in time and no cost in money, refusing to even have an argument heard would be a pretty big strike against you in most situations, and as you said if the panel has multiple cases/ complaints against a person that’s at least Bayesian evidence that they’re doing something wrong.