EA - A statement and an apology by Owen Cotton-Barratt

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A statement and an apology, published by Owen Cotton-Barratt on February 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Since the Time article on sexual harassment came out, people have been asking for information about one paragraph of it, about an “influential figure in EA”. I wanted to respond to that.This is talking about me, more than five years ago. I think I made significant mistakes; I regret them a lot; and I’m sorry.ContextI think the actual mistakes I made look different from what many readers may take away from the article, so I first wanted to provide a bit more context (some of this is straightforwardly factual; other parts should be understood as my interpretation):We had what I perceived as a preexisting friendship where we were experimenting with being unusually direct and honest (/“edgy”)Including about sexual mattersThere was what would commonly be regarded as oversharing from both sides (this wasn’t the first time I’d mentioned masturbation)Our friendship continued in an active way for several months afterwardsI should however note that:We had met via EA and spent a good fraction of conversation time talking about EA-relevant topicsI was older and more central in the EA communityOn other occasions, including early in our friendship, we had some professional interactions, and I wasn’t clear about how I was handling the personal/professional boundaryI was employed as a researcher at that timeMy role didn’t develop to connecting people with different positions until later, and this wasn’t part of my self-conception at the time(However it makes sense to me that this was her perception)I was not affiliated with the org she was interviewing atI’d suggested her as a candidate earlier in the application process, but was not part of their decision-making processOn the other hand I think that a lot of what was problematic about my behaviour with respect to this person was not about this incident in particular, but the broad dynamic where:I in fact had significant amounts of powerThis was not very salient to me but very salient to herShe consequently felt pressure to match my vibee.g. in an earlier draft of this post, before fact-checking it with her, I said that we talked about “feelings of mutual attraction”This was not her experienceI drafted it like that because we’d had what I’d interpreted as conversations where this was stated explicitly(I think this is just another central example of the point I’m making in this set of bullets)Similarly at some point she volunteered to me that she was enjoying the dynamic between us (but I probably interpreted this much more broadly than she intended)She was in a structural position where it was (I now believe) unreasonable to expect honesty about her experienceAs the person with power it was on me to notice and head off these dynamics, and I failed to do that(Sorry, I know that's all pretty light on detail, but I don't want to risk accidentally de-anonymising the other person. I want to stress that I’m not claiming she provided any inaccurate information to the journalist who wrote the story; just that I think the extra context may be helpful for people seeking to evaluate or understand my conduct.)My mistakesIn any case, I think my actions were poorly judged and fell well short of the high standards I would like to live up to, and that I think we should ask from people in positions of leadership. Afterwards, I felt vaguely like the whole friendship wasn’t well done and I wished I had approached things differently. Then when I found out that I’d made the person feel uncomfortable(/disempowered/pressured), I was horrified (not putting pressure on people is something like a core value of mine). I have apologized to the person in question, but I also feel like I’ve let the whole community down,...