I think ⓐ is an example where trust is given because they mother knows the guy and has a relationship with a guy but the trust isn't warranted.
In situations like this our system I is trained to trust and it takes hard system II thinking to acknowledge the problem and respond well to the incident.
The problem is further exacerbated because people treat their stereotypical idea's of how an unsafe person looks as if it would be real knowledge.
This overall conversation is a good example. The guidelines around risk of abuse suggest that having a good support network reduces risk. At the same time you have a person who is afraid of strangers and who thinks minimizing the amount of trusted adult relationships helps to reduce the risk of abuse and they argue their opinion.
An intelligent psychopath doesn't give up the kind of red flags that result in most neurotypical people distrusting them.
I am not saying the filters are flawless, just that not using them at all is a fallacy of grey.
Having a way to filter people is useful for many reasons but at least in our Berlin community we don't lack processes to do that. Both our weekly Dojo and our new biweekly Circling event isn't simply open to everybody and participating at one of the open meetups doesn't automatically qualify a person.
Alicorn also wrote in the OP about having resident- and guest-vetting plans.
More centrally I don't think you should plan in a way that assumes that your filtering process actually keeps out every problematic person. Open sharing of information is important. The way the girl in ⓒ would have been helped is when she shared her issues with friends who talked her through it.
I agree that evaluation of other people needs to be an ongoing process. Sometimes people change. Or some people behave differently to different kinds of people, so it's possible that the original evaluator just happened to be one of those towards whom this person feels no hostility.
But I'd still say that new people are a much higher risk, simply because when crappy people are expelled from one community, they are looking for another one, so they are statistically overrepresented among the newcomers. (A similar effect to how software companies, when doing j...
Rationalists like to live in group houses. We are also as a subculture moving more and more into a child-having phase of our lives. These things don't cooperate super well - I live in a four bedroom house because we like having roommates and guests, but if we have three kids and don't make them share we will in a few years have no spare rooms at all. This is frustrating in part because amenable roommates are incredibly useful as alloparents if you value things like "going to the bathroom unaccompanied" and "eating food without being screamed at", neither of which are reasonable "get a friend to drive for ten minutes to spell me" situations. Meanwhile there are also people we like living around who don't want to cohabit with a small child, which is completely reasonable, small children are not for everyone.
For this and other complaints ("househunting sucks", "I can't drive and need private space but want friends accessible", whatever) the ideal solution seems to be somewhere along the spectrum between "a street with a lot of rationalists living on it" (no rationalist-friendly entity controls all those houses and it's easy for minor fluctuations to wreck the intentional community thing) and "a dorm" (sorta hard to get access to those once you're out of college, usually not enough kitchens or space for adult life). There's a name for a thing halfway between those, at least in German - "baugruppe" - buuuuut this would require community or sympathetic-individual control of a space and the money to convert it if it's not already baugruppe-shaped.
Maybe if I complain about this in public a millionaire will step forward or we'll be able to come up with a coherent enough vision to crowdfund it or something. I think there is easily enough demand for a couple of ten-to-twenty-adult baugruppen (one in the east bay and one in the south bay) or even more/larger, if the structures materialized. Here are some bulleted lists.
Desiderata:
Obstacles:
Please share this wherever rationalists may be looking; it's definitely the sort of thing better done with more eyes on it.