The Nonlinear Library LW - The impossible problem of due process by mingyuan
Jan 16, 2024
21:05
Welcome 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: The impossible problem of due process, published by mingyuan on January 16, 2024 on LessWrong.
I wrote this entire post in February of 2023, during the fallout from the TIME article. I didn't post it at the time for multiple reasons:
because I had no desire to get involved in all that nonsense
because I was horribly burned out from my own community conflict investigation and couldn't stand the thought of engaging with people online
because I generally think it's bad to post on the internet out of frustration or outrage
But after sitting on it for a full year, I still think it's worth posting, so here it is. The only edits I have made since February 16th, 2023, were to add a couple interstitial sentences for clarity, and change 'recent articles' to 'articles from February 2023'. So, it's not intended to be commenting on anything more recent than that.
I am precommitting to not engaging with any comments, because I am mostly offline and I think that is good. I probably won't even look at this post again for several weeks. Do what you will. Here is the post:
Note: I am erring on the side of not naming any names in this article. There is one exception for the sake of clarity.
In my time overseeing the global rationalist community, living in the Bay community, and just generally being a person, I've seen a lot of people face up to complicated conflicts.
People often get really mad at each other for mishandling these cases, and will sometimes publicly point to these failures as reasons to condemn a person or group. However, I challenge you to point to a single entity in the world that has figured out a process for handling non-criminal misconduct that you would be happy with no matter whether you were the aggrieved or the accused party. Maybe such a thing exists, but if so I have not heard of it.
This post is a survey of the different ways that people try to resolve community conflicts, and the ways that each of them fail.
Committees/panels
In cases of major conflict or disagreement, it often seems like the right thing to do to convene a panel of impartial judges and have them hear all the evidence. I personally know of at least seven specific cases of this happening in the rationalist community. Here are some of the problems with this approach.
Investigations eat up hundreds of person-hours
The case I'm most familiar with has been investigated four different times, by different people and from different angles. Five separate reports have been written. At time of writing the situation has dragged out for three full years, and it's consumed over 100 hours of my time alone, and who knows how much time for the other like 30 people involved.
You might think "holy shit, at that point who even cares, this is obviously not worth all those precious life hours that those 30 people will never get back, just ban the guy." I'm inclined to agree, but unfortunately:
Panels generally don't have much real ability to enforce things
If the members of your community don't agree with your decision to ban someone, you can't force them to abide by your decision.
Here are the actions available to you:
Announce your decision to everyone in the community
Ban the person from spaces that you personally have control over, which may include your home, events you are organizing, and online spaces like Discord servers, Google groups, etc.
Make recommendations for the behavior of other people and institutions
Apply vague social pressure in the hope of making people follow your recommendations
Here are things you cannot do:
Make people stop being friends with the person
Make the person stop holding events in their own home or in public
Panels act like they are courts of law
In a court of law, you are presumed innocent unless and until you can definitively be proven guilty of a specific crime. But this is ...
I wrote this entire post in February of 2023, during the fallout from the TIME article. I didn't post it at the time for multiple reasons:
because I had no desire to get involved in all that nonsense
because I was horribly burned out from my own community conflict investigation and couldn't stand the thought of engaging with people online
because I generally think it's bad to post on the internet out of frustration or outrage
But after sitting on it for a full year, I still think it's worth posting, so here it is. The only edits I have made since February 16th, 2023, were to add a couple interstitial sentences for clarity, and change 'recent articles' to 'articles from February 2023'. So, it's not intended to be commenting on anything more recent than that.
I am precommitting to not engaging with any comments, because I am mostly offline and I think that is good. I probably won't even look at this post again for several weeks. Do what you will. Here is the post:
Note: I am erring on the side of not naming any names in this article. There is one exception for the sake of clarity.
In my time overseeing the global rationalist community, living in the Bay community, and just generally being a person, I've seen a lot of people face up to complicated conflicts.
People often get really mad at each other for mishandling these cases, and will sometimes publicly point to these failures as reasons to condemn a person or group. However, I challenge you to point to a single entity in the world that has figured out a process for handling non-criminal misconduct that you would be happy with no matter whether you were the aggrieved or the accused party. Maybe such a thing exists, but if so I have not heard of it.
This post is a survey of the different ways that people try to resolve community conflicts, and the ways that each of them fail.
Committees/panels
In cases of major conflict or disagreement, it often seems like the right thing to do to convene a panel of impartial judges and have them hear all the evidence. I personally know of at least seven specific cases of this happening in the rationalist community. Here are some of the problems with this approach.
Investigations eat up hundreds of person-hours
The case I'm most familiar with has been investigated four different times, by different people and from different angles. Five separate reports have been written. At time of writing the situation has dragged out for three full years, and it's consumed over 100 hours of my time alone, and who knows how much time for the other like 30 people involved.
You might think "holy shit, at that point who even cares, this is obviously not worth all those precious life hours that those 30 people will never get back, just ban the guy." I'm inclined to agree, but unfortunately:
Panels generally don't have much real ability to enforce things
If the members of your community don't agree with your decision to ban someone, you can't force them to abide by your decision.
Here are the actions available to you:
Announce your decision to everyone in the community
Ban the person from spaces that you personally have control over, which may include your home, events you are organizing, and online spaces like Discord servers, Google groups, etc.
Make recommendations for the behavior of other people and institutions
Apply vague social pressure in the hope of making people follow your recommendations
Here are things you cannot do:
Make people stop being friends with the person
Make the person stop holding events in their own home or in public
Panels act like they are courts of law
In a court of law, you are presumed innocent unless and until you can definitively be proven guilty of a specific crime. But this is ...