What happened to the "Women and Effective Altruism" post?
By Cornelis Dirk Haupt @ 2022-11-20T19:36 (+53)
There was a post up some time last week I wanted to read called Women and Effective Altruism. Later last week I noticed the page seemed down and now I just get "Sorry, you don't have access to this page." I was wondering why that was. My 60 second glance at the two top comments gave me the impression that the post stimulated healthy discourse among EA women on their experiences in EA.
Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2022-11-20T19:50 (+26)
The author asked to take it down from the forum based on the comments received, you can see it on her website here.
Cornelis Dirk Haupt @ 2022-11-21T02:51 (+37)
So just FYI:
I've had members in my community point out concern that the post being taken down is evidence of censorship in EA.
The message "Sorry, you don't have access to this page" should probably read something like "Sorry, this post has been removed by the author." This is not even "only about optics". This is just updating a message so that it says something true rather than false.
Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2022-11-21T08:58 (+17)
Thanks for flagging! Added a feature request in the feature request thread
Ivy_Mazzola @ 2023-02-05T06:51 (+3)
Why was that page not fixed immediately? It seems clear to me that fixing that particular page was a very high priority? It seems it was added to a feature queue when the issue could also have have been treated immediately by manually changing that particular link.
I also had someone in my community message me about the post 2 weeks ago and censorship concerns. I honestly didn't even know the post was gone til then so it was very hard to explain. I am concerned about how tasks get prioritized that this was left that long tbh. I don't expect a response exactly but like.. Seems important to register a complaint or something. Please with sensitive things like this just triage them by putting a bandaid on too of the particular problem and add it as a full feature later.
[Edit: I see it is fixed now (it now implies that the post is usually deleted by author) but I could swear it wasn't fixed 2 weeks ago because I had to ask friends to log in and check the link for me to make sure we all saw the same message, and I don't think I'd have done that if deleting by author had been mentioned]
Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2023-02-05T11:37 (+16)
Just to clarify, I don't work on the forum, I only help out with moderation, so I'm only speculating here.
If you want to contact the people that run the forum, you can use these channels (but keep in mind they're currently probably a bit overloaded)
The forum codebase seems to be public, you can see that the text was changed in November https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/6143 https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/6153/files#diff-5dc494c8af9a70df8c13a716cab8cd560735eb4e5638e21d2735f87a39f96ad8: approximately one day after I posted the feature request.
Maybe the person in your community had concerns even with the new text? Or maybe they were not logged in? I think having a detailed report/request for change could help the developers (e.g. including a screenshot of what you saw, and a mention of what you would have preferred to see).
As for:
Why was that page not fixed immediately? It seems clear to me that fixing that particular page was a very high priority?
As a software developer (not working on the forum), I have to admit I sighed a bit while reading this.
These kinds of things are sadly often more tricky than they seem (as you just found out, the solution didn't fix the issue in your case). You can see some of the things the developers were working on at the time here https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pulls?page=19&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed, and prioritization is very tricky.
It seems it was added to a feature queue when the issue could also have have been treated immediately by manually changing that particular link.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean that we could have changed this post not to include a link to the original post? We don't edit user posts or comments unless we have a very good reason to (e.g. someone asks us to remove sensitive information)
Ivy_Mazzola @ 2023-02-06T03:26 (+12)
Hi I'm really sorry. I wrote that late last night very tired and frustrated after thinking about this or gender EA stuff all day. I thought about deleting or retracting my comment a few minutes after I wrote it, but I just left it in what I hoped was decent form. But unfortunately it was so not decent form nor correct. So now I've retracted it.
It seems that when I revisited the link back in November, it was before the page was changed (probably before this post was made), so I didn't see the update in November. And when I and others visited 2 weeks ago I guess we all just missed that second sentence "This is usually due to the user deleting the post" because it isn't as obvious on mobile? I do struggle to see how we could have missed the sentence about it, so perhaps I'm the only one who missed it, and others saw it but still felt the language implied foul play.
As you suggest, I'll message the people in my community about how it looked to them. And if that does yield good feedback or I think of some better language I'll message mods.
And yeah, my latter sentences you quote where I speak about it not being treated immediately aren't valid. It does look like the issue was treated immediately/next-day (TYSM you even went so far as to check out the codebase), so that's pretty epic prioritization by the team and I'm grateful for that. So please just ignore those lines.
Sorry to waste your time and be discouraging as all heck (your sighs are valid). I gave you a strong upvote and strong agree which I hope counts for something even though your time is worth way more than that. I truly appreciate the thoughtful, detailed response.
Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2023-02-06T10:25 (+7)
<3
I don't think your comment was that bad, it was clearly not norm-violating or anything, and thank you for writing it even if you were very tired and frustrated (I now upvoted it, and I hope you're now feeling better and taking time for self-care).
It could result in useful feedback on how to improve the forum, which is valuable. I would personally much prefer people write imperfect feedback than nothing at all for fear of being discouraging or incorrect
Habryka's Interior Design Choices @ 2023-02-05T07:07 (+2)
(You may have seen this) As mentioned above, all of the comments are here, if it is useful to you:
ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NacFjEJGoFFWRqsc8/women-and-effective-altruism
Habryka's Interior Design Choices @ 2023-02-05T07:08 (+6)
For a number of reasons, comments should not be made inaccessible by removing posts.
(I don't have time, but there is a lot of say about the root issues here, I actually believe the poster is justified in her core mission.) However, the poster has no right to remove comments of uninvolved people, that she then characterizes later.
In addition to the victims of severe crime and misconduct, this situation has been humiliating and damaging to a lot of women and contributors to EA, who are not culpable and are also affected.
Having a way to communicate with integrity and verify basic facts (such as the content of their discussions and character, which have been described in Time magazine!) seems like a basic service.
HenryStanley @ 2022-11-20T21:42 (+32)
This seems like generally a bad precedent to set - lots of people put a bunch of time into writing thoughtful comments; those comments are now gone. Even leaving the post up with the body blanked out would be preferable. I’m not sure the author of a post should have the power to erase all the discussion of it unless they have a very good reason.
Habryka @ 2022-11-20T22:59 (+19)
I think it's a somewhat hard tradeoff to set in terms of visibility and streisand-effect like things. I am currently happy with the equilibrium where you can still find the comments on the greaterwrong mirror:
https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NacFjEJGoFFWRqsc8/women-and-effective-altruism
Vaidehi Agarwalla @ 2022-11-21T01:20 (+6)
I doubt many people are aware of this option or know what greater wrong is. I wonder if it is a good idea to make that easier to find?
Habryka @ 2022-11-21T01:25 (+2)
Yeah, it seems reasonable (IMO) to add it to the site-FAQ, though I wouldn't want it to be more prominent than that.
Sharmake @ 2022-11-20T23:59 (+1)
It doesn't link to greater wrong, instead it links to the deleted post.
Habryka @ 2022-11-21T00:01 (+2)
It links to the deleted post, without the post itself, but with the comments still visible.
Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2022-11-21T00:03 (+4)
The link text is to greaterwrong, the link address is to the ea forum (where the post is not visible). Clickable link: https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NacFjEJGoFFWRqsc8/women-and-effective-altruism
Edit: it was actually correct in the first comment, but it's not clickable, my bad, you need to use https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NacFjEJGoFFWRqsc8/women-and-effective-altruism
Habryka @ 2022-11-21T00:15 (+2)
Huh, yeah, seems like it's not clickable. That seems bad. I'll add it to the list of bugs.
Devin Kalish @ 2022-11-20T22:06 (+14)
My understanding is that the author ultimately decided to take it down when someone called them a bigot in the comments (for their points related to polyamory). I think both the comment and reaction to it were a bit much personally, but I can understand not wanting the comments visible if that was the key worry for the author.
Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2022-11-20T22:52 (+12)
To clarify, authors have always been able to make a post private by clicking "Move to Draft" on their posts.
Moderators can do so as well (like has been done in this case) if, for example, the author does not know about that possibility.
Jeff Kaufman @ 2022-11-21T17:42 (+8)
The comments are not completely gone: you can still see them on the profile pages of the authors. For example, if you look at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/jeff_kaufman you'll see a comment "Asking and guessing aren't the only options here: double-opt in methods ..." that was originally on the referenced post and is now detached.
Petey @ 2022-11-20T23:48 (+26)
The author has a note at the top of the saying this was “a heavily downvoted post in [the EA] community” when it was posted here. The archive link Dawn provided, however, shows that it received 64 upvotes on net. Is there a reason for this significant discrepancy between her claim and what the archive link shows?
Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2022-11-20T23:59 (+13)
If you mouseover the score, you can see that there were more than 200 total votes. I assume it meant that it had lots of downvotes even if the final score was positive.
Petey @ 2022-11-21T06:53 (+26)
That seems like a misleading framing. When I hear heavily downvoted post, I think of something that’s well in the negatives on net. Otherwise, the post could also be described as “heavily upvoted” even though it only got 64 karma on net.
Will Bradshaw @ 2022-11-21T18:55 (+6)
Yeah, I think the most you could say is that it was controversial in the community.
Dawn Drescher @ 2022-11-20T20:36 (+22)
Interesting! I had missed that post. There’s a backup of the discussion on archive.org. If it was removed to sort of close the discussion, it’s probably okay to link it because that copy can’t be commented on? But I’ll remove my comment if someone feels that it’s uncooperative to link the copy.
BrownHairedEevee @ 2022-11-21T02:47 (+3)
Fwiw, a lot of the comments are collapsed and can't be expanded in the archived copy.
Dawn Drescher @ 2022-11-21T14:11 (+6)
They are in the source code of the page, so I read them in the Elements panel of the developer tools sidebar. But I can see that that’s probably not everyone’s preferred method…
Edit: Oli Habryka’s Greater Wrong solution below is more convenient.
Keerthana Gopalakrishnan @ 2023-01-13T23:23 (+8)
I took it down due to the responses from the forum. The original intention of the post was to catalyze action from the within the community, but after it was around for a day or two, I realized this will not happen. The original goal of posting here will not be served.
In addition, the post being live here brought me a lot of headache. I felt like the responses from the forum were mob-like and fell into three categories 1. normalizing ( this is just a statistic, every community has a few) 2. dismissive (not a big deal) 3. attacking. I also have a full time job so didn't have the time to respond and felt increasingly unsafe given that I wasn't posting as an anon.
There will be some follow up work on this topic in upcoming days.
Evan R. Murphy @ 2022-11-20T19:45 (+6)
Was it this post by chance? https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AbohvyvtF6P7cXBgy/brainstorming-ways-to-make-ea-safer-and-more-inclusive This one seems to be on a very similar topic. But it has a different name so it's probably not the same one but possibly Richard revised the title at some point.
Peter S. Park @ 2022-11-20T21:56 (+6)
No, "Women and Effective Altruism" by Keerthana preceded "Brainstorming ways to make EA safer and more inclusive" by Richard.
Davit Jintcharadze @ 2022-11-20T22:33 (+3)
I think it is largely due to the fact that a woman tried to share her personal experience and a lot of people with a very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face from men decided to comment in not the very kind way. Calling someone who is talking about her very unpleasant experience a 'bigot' and seeing only comments about polyamory in a situation where women are made feel uncomfortable is plane sad to be diplomatic.
Kirsten @ 2022-11-21T12:25 (+44)
There were a lot of comments from a lot of women and men about a wide variety of topics brought up in the post. I strongly disagree that there were "only comments about polyamory" from "a lot of people with a very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face from men".
quinn @ 2022-11-20T23:45 (+29)
esc12a @ 2022-11-21T01:19 (+12)
The term 'bigot' is so vague and so loaded that I think it should be used with a lot of caution if used at all.
Jeff Kaufman @ 2022-11-21T17:37 (+18)
The comment on question referred to the post as "bigoted", not the author as a "bigot"
Devin Kalish @ 2022-11-21T19:25 (+6)
Every time I’ve seen someone make this same point on the forum about Emile Torres’ use of the “white supremacy” label they get net downvoted. A bit off topic, and I hesitate to bring it up because it’s not clear who specifically is implicated in inconsistency here, but I do notice a bias in the voting on comments like this in the different contexts that I think is worth pointing out. For my own part I guess I think the distinction matters denotationally at least but comes with costs in misleading connotation that usually makes it better to phrase things differently.
AgainstOnlineHarassment @ 2022-11-22T16:21 (+17)
A key difference is that there is strong evidence that Émile P. Torres is an intellectually dishonest critic. By contrast, when a typical EA Forum user draws a distinction between e.g. "bigoted" and "bigot", there is no reason to suppose they are exploiting the difference to make toxic insinuations about other people.
(Posted under an anonymous account because I don't want Torres to harass me, as he has done previously when I posted under my real name.)
Jeff Kaufman @ 2022-11-23T02:21 (+6)
he
FYI, pretty sure Torres uses 'they': https://twitter.com/xriskology
Jeff Kaufman @ 2022-11-22T14:49 (+2)
Link?
Devin Kalish @ 2022-11-22T22:32 (+25)
I looked back at the specific instances I remembered of this, and they weren’t quite how I remembered. There were more instances that I don’t remember specific enough information about to find again, which makes linking to a source for my impression hard, but given how I misremembered the instances I could check up on specifically, I’m more generally suspicious of how well grounded my impression actually was. I still think a tendency of this sort exists to some extent, but I’m tentatively unendorsing my original comment.
Kirsten @ 2022-11-22T22:59 (+12)
That's really impressive, love seeing people update their beliefs in real time
GoodEAGoneBad @ 2022-11-21T03:45 (+9)
I have detailed subject matter knowledge here (responding to "very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face") and I thought the comments on poly were inappropriate and, only in so far as bigotted means "a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group", bigoted. I did not say that because I did not want to be unkind but I was very unimpressed.