Previous: New Things Can Be Built
After the arrests, LessWrong’s “benevolent dictator for life”, Matthew Graves (also an instructor at CFAR) muses on FB abt the girls’ sexual assaults. He wonders: might they have been merely deadnamed/misgendered/frisked?
This is not long before Ziz & Gwen attempt to infiltrate a LessWrong-hosted AMA abt the CFAR reunion. Before getting banned— from the AMA, & from LessWrong writ large— Ziz manages to sneak a few questions in:
Two transfems in the community were witness to the president of CFAR stating a definition of rationality that included considering themselves to be men, which was said to be an important test… How prevelant is this concept of rationality among instructors?
Are there plans to change leadership from someone who has done nothing with confessions of sexual assault by a community member, and probably created a culture of the same?
Was it CFAR staff that swatted protesters at the alumni reunion last month?
How many of the board members are part of the MIRI coverup of the blackmail payout to Louie Helm over statutory rape allegations?
Gwen then reposts Ziz’s questions, & adds a few of her own:
I'm interested in answers to all of these questions, which were deleted by moderation, as well as why CFAR is violating their published whistleblower policy?
Why has cfar never hired a trans woman, despite our being one of the largest demographic portions of the rationality community? (and a demographic from my experience disproportionately interested in understanding the mind and developing mental tech)
She, too, is banned from LessWrong.
LessWrong will explain the bans w/ what Gwen calls the “false accusation that we had a ‘track record of being aggressive offline (and Ziz also online)’”. Neither Ziz nor Gwen— being banned— will be able to respond to these charges.
This will be the first time that any of the girls are (publicly) accused of violent intentions— tho it will be far from the last. Gwen, for her part, takes pains to say that, at their trial, even the prosecuting attorney had to admit to the judge that their protest was entirely nonviolent.
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Meanwhile, a new online group has opened up: Bay Area Rationalist Community Safety Discussion (BARCSD). Ziz, needless to say, is banned from the get-go.
Anna breaks the BARCSD ice w/ this post:
I think Ben Hoffman's post "Me too is good" is basically right -- there's something good and usefully asymmetric about lots of people getting together to share what they have seen, and to hear and evaluate what others have seen (while, ideally, taking care to neither automatically accept nor automatically reject what is said, but to evaluate and try to understand), and to share pieces of their reasoning in common.
I hope lots of people come in with their concrete observations about Ziz, positive or negative (or non-valenced but informative). So that we can make detailed accurate sense of things together.
If people want to do that about (me, CFAR, or other topics that Ziz makes allegations about) that seems okay too, if some people are finding the allegations plausible.
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Gwen attempts to post, is denied, wrangles w/ mods over which rules she’s broken, gets no answers, retracts her post in disgust, & is banned w/ no explanation.
On her blog, Gwen includes this erstwhile post.
She starts by apologizing for not being able to “explain fully”— she is, after all, “still emotionally processing being sexually assaulted by police officers”.
She continues:
I spent several years of my life organizing my life around the belief that MIRI and CFAR were the best hope for humanity’s future […] I… dropped out of college to work on AI research… after meeting someone familiar with [Eliezer’s writing].
[…]
When I learned [abt the MIRI/CFAR skullduggery & alleged crimes that we have covered so far in "Strange New Vegan Death Cult Murders"] my remaining trust was lost and I both felt that this information was very important to share with the community and that it was very important to pave the way for people in the community to figure out how to build something new that can actually save the world and not become an inversion of their original principles like MIRI/CFAR/Anna did. Which is a nontrivial problem and I spent months thinking about it. I’m still thinking about it, as should all rationalists who care about global/multiversal outcomes.
And then I was swatted, and I was rendered unable to speak as I had wanted to.
Also I’ve discovered that I’ve been banned from all CFAR venues, due to speaking up about these things. Which is both illegal and against CFAR’s published whistleblower policy.
Also why tf is Anna in this group but not Ziz?! That is not the kind of thing that leads to justice. Please don’t selectively give a platform to the person who has enabled more sexual abuse in the community than anyone else (again, to the best I’m able to tell with the information I’ve seen) but not the whistleblower who is trying to fix this! That is completely antithetical to community safety.
Also I’ve discovered that I’ve been banned from all CFAR venues, due to speaking up about these things. Which is both illegal and against CFAR’s published whistleblower policy.
Also why tf is Anna in this group but not Ziz?! That is not the kind of thing that leads to justice. Please don’t selectively give a platform to the person who has enabled more sexual abuse in the community than anyone else (again, to the best I’m able to tell with the information I’ve seen) but not the whistleblower who is trying to fix this! That is completely antithetical to community safety.
This community has a responsibility to all sentient life to do better than this.
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Gwen continues:
Also, though I’ve said it elsewhere already, Ziz has not abused me and I am extremely pissed at those who are trying to use this narrative to discredit Ziz and me and distract attention from problems with miri/cfar/anna/the community that both I and Ziz and others want to raise to attention. […] I have had excessive opportunities to counterfactually seek help if I had felt Ziz was being abusive […] but she wasn’t so i didn’t. Multiple witnesses have stated that they have not seen any signs of abuse between Ziz and me, based on people who have interacted with us on a daily basis. I don’t desire to write more because […] the attempted framing was dishonest in the first place and does not deserve to be made an emphasis
Indeed, rumors have been circulating among the Rationalists that Ziz is abusing Gwen, & that this is why Gwen is supportive of Ziz’s ~craaazy allegations~. This abuse narrative was initially stoked by Davis Kingsley:
the CFAR instructor whom we saw in pt. 3 throwing ample shade on the queer community. There we learned that Davis has also defended the Spanish Inquisition & Japanese internment camps.
He has further voiced support for theocratic rule, for the enslavement of Native Americans by Spanish missionaries, has enjoined the Rationalists to “reconsider their negative opinions abt authoritarianism”, & has opined that all LGBT ppl are going to hell.
Davis, the previous year, had been reported to CFAR “after sending threatening comments to several people saying they would be ostracized if they didn’t change their behavior to be in line with catholic codes”. CFAR did nothing, while the person who brought the complaint against Davis eventually left the Rationalists altogether (we wish them godspeed!)
Ziz had drawn Davis’s ire after she blamed him, on a Discord server, of helping to cover up Alice’s abuse. Davis had responded by “ramping up darvo”, at which Ziz had banned him from the server.
Minutes later, Davis wrote in another server that Ziz was abusing Gwen “and several unnamed others”. Ziz & Gwen denied this, as did two other people who they “interacted with daily”. He then repeated his accusations in *another* server. Anna, in BARCSD, would later quote these allegations in order to “claim that Ziz was violent”. For good measure, Davis then took to BARCSD himself, & repeated the repeat, which “Anna referred people to read as ‘helpful context’.”
Davis has, as if this writing, been a CFAR employee for 11.5 years.
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Next: Bad Dynamics
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Related Bonus Content (w/ possible spoilers):