How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy

Douglas_Reay

One of the lessons highlighted in the thread "Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter" is Gender ratio matters.

There have recently been a number of articles addressing one social skills issue that might be affecting this, from the perspective of a geeky/sciencefiction community with similar attributes to LessWrong, and I want to link to these, not just so the people potentially causing problems get to read them, but also so everyone else knows the resource is there and has a name for the problem, which may facilitate wider discussion and make it easier for others to know when to point towards the resources those who would benefit by them.

However before I do, in the light of RedRobot's comment in the "Of Gender and Rationality" thread, I'd like to echo a sentiment from one of the articles, that people exhibiting this behaviour may be of any gender and may victimise upon any gender. And so, while it may be correlated with a particular gender, it is the behaviour that should be focused upon, and turning this thread into bashing of one gender (or defensiveness against perceived bashing) would be unhelpful.

Ok, disclaimers out of the way, here are the links:

Some of those raise deeper issues about rape culture and audience as enabler, but the TLDR summary is:

Creepy behaviour is behaviour that tends to make others feel unsafe or uncomfortable.
If a significant fraction of a group find your behaviour creepy, the responsibility to change the behaviour is yours.
There are specific objective behaviours listed in the articles (for example, to do with touching, sexual jokes and following people) that even someone 'bad' at social skills can learn to avoid doing.
If someone is informed that their behaviour is creeping people out, and yet they don't take steps to avoid doing these behaviours, that is a serious problem for the group as a whole, and it needs to be treated seriously and be seen to be treated seriously, especially by the 'audience' who are not being victimised directly.

EDITED TO ADD:

Despite the way some of the links are framed as being addressed to creepers, this post is aimed at least as much at the community as a whole, intended to trigger a discussion on how the community should best go about handling such a problem once identified, with the TLDR being "set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons", rather that a complete description that guarantees that anyone who doesn't meet it isn't creepy. (Thank you to jsteinhardt for clearly verbalising the misinterpretation - for discussion see his reply to this post)

One of the lessons highlighted in the thread "Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter" is Gender ratio matters.

Ok, disclaimers out of the way, here are the links:

Some of those raise deeper issues about rape culture and audience as enabler, but the TLDR summary is:

Creepy behaviour is behaviour that tends to make others feel unsafe or uncomfortable.
If a significant fraction of a group find your behaviour creepy, the responsibility to change the behaviour is yours.
There are specific objective behaviours listed in the articles (for example, to do with touching, sexual jokes and following people) that even someone 'bad' at social skills can learn to avoid doing.
If someone is informed that their behaviour is creeping people out, and yet they don't take steps to avoid doing these behaviours, that is a serious problem for the group as a whole, and it needs to be treated seriously and be seen to be treated seriously, especially by the 'audience' who are not being victimised directly.

EDITED TO ADD:

Oh the irony. The last link in the OP specifically discusses exactly this scenario.

While the outcome for a woman targeted by a man like this is poor, the damage done to the group by all the other men staying silent (or outright supporting him) is huge. Really, this isn't even buried in the comments, this is the whole point of the two letters discussed in that link.

I can't speak to whether there are problems of this sort in LW meetups, but right here is our evidence of it here in LW comments.

I understand concerns about censorship, arbitrary moderation, special treatment, etc, but everyone who downvoted Alicorn and upvoted wedrifid here has also sent a message of tacit support for SilasBarta and a very clear message to any other woman here.

From my link above, edited:

Step 1: A creepy dude does creepy, entitled shit and makes women feel unsafe {in LW}

Step 2: The women speak up about it {in LW}

Step 3: It gets written off as “not a big deal” or “he probably didn’t mean it” or “he’s not a bad guy, really.” {...}

Step 4: Everyone is worried about hurting creepy dude’s feelings or making it weird for creepy dude. Better yet, everyone is worried about how the other dudes in the friend group will feel if they are called out for enabling creepy dude. Women are worried that if they push the issue, that the entire friend group will side with creepy dude or that they’ll be blamed for causing “drama.” {...}

Step 5: Creepy dude creeps on with his creepy self. He’s learned that there are no real (i.e. “disapproval & pushback from dudes and dude society”) consequences to his actions. Women feel creeped out and unsafe. Some of them decide to take a firm stand against creeping and not {participate in LW} anymore. {...} Some of the woman decide to just quietly put up with it, because they’ve learned that no one will really side with them and it’s easier to go along than to lose one’s entire community. The whole group works around this missing stair.

The Geek Social Fallacies seem rather apt here, too.

(Edit to fix square bracket use)

By this exact scenario, do you mean something TOTALLY different? disagreeing with someone who makes public comments on an internet forum is not "creepy entitled shit" (you wouldn't even have thought to make this accusation here if SilasBarta was female and Eliezer was the target) and even if we assume that the original situation of banning him from responding to her was totally justified (I don't know, I haven't read the backdrama), then it's still ridiculous for Alicorn to respond to a thread SilasBarta is talking in without him being able to re... (read more)

-1Kindly14y

The obvious solution is to only ban creepy, personal comments.

12bogus14y

No way. Hounding users on an internet site can cause a lot of annoyance and status problems, but it's not creepy, i.e. it entails no shared threat of bodily harm. People routinely get away with extremely weird behavior on internet groups, even though corresponding behaviors (even something as mild as a heated social confrontation) would get them shunned and ostracized, or perhaps physically assaulted and injured, in a real-world actual community where bodily harm considerations are critical. There is nothing wrong with this persay - it just takes some getting used to.

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