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CFAR - Mistakes Regarding Brent
webCredibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Center for Applied Rationality
Relevant to AI safety community governance as CFAR is closely tied to the rationalist and EA communities; illustrates challenges of community safety, institutional accountability, and the risks of weak vetting procedures in trust-based communities adjacent to AI safety work.
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Importance: 35/100blog postprimary source
Summary
CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality) publicly details the institutional failures that allowed a community member ('Brent') who was later credibly accused of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse to participate in and assist at multiple CFAR events. The document outlines specific errors in judgment, failure to investigate warning signs, and the lack of formal safety policies, serving as an accountability statement and commitment to future improvement.
Key Points
- •CFAR acknowledges failing to act on warning signs of manipulative behavior, allowing Brent to volunteer at events including a youth program (ESPR 2017) for high school students.
- •Staff had informal concerns about Brent's behavior but lacked formal investigative processes, leading to ad-hoc rather than systematic safety decisions.
- •Brent allegedly sought CFAR friendships strategically to gain social legitimacy and stated a goal of eventually controlling the organization.
- •The document identifies failures in community safety culture: not reviewing public writings, no formal vetting policy, and inadequate response to soft warning signs.
- •CFAR frames transparent self-accountability as a mechanism to credibly commit to better practices and reduce harm in future community interactions.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Center for Applied Rationality | Organization | 62.0 |
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This document is a follow-up to the public statements we made in [September](http://rationality.org/resources/updates/2018/acdc) and [November](http://rationality.org/resources/updates/2018/further-updates).
Last September there were multiple public allegations that Brent caused grave harm to members of our community. We consider these allegations credible: we believe that Brent routinely manipulated those around him, and that he physically, sexually, and emotionally abused at least two of his partners.
Until these abuse allegations were made public, most of our staff were wholly unaware of them, and all of us were unaware of substantial portions of them. Nevertheless, we believe we had sufficient evidence long beforehand to notice that Brent might be harmful, and that even accounting for hindsight bias, our failure to investigate this hypothesis explicitly was a mistake. As a result, we allowed Brent to attend and assist at several CFAR events, which we now suspect afforded him social legitimacy and caused significant harm in expectation.[1](https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent#fn:1)
CFAR messed up badly here. We have a responsibility to ensure that the events we host don’t pose undue risk to our attendees, and in this case we failed at that responsibility. What follows is a detailed account of the main mistakes we think we made regarding Brent.
Some community members advised us against publicly releasing this letter when we sent them a draft, out of concern that its length and detail would imply CFAR felt it was largely responsible for the harm caused by Brent. We do not believe this is the case. But we do think our actions caused significant harm in expectation, and that the mistakes we made were both serious and preventable. It is our hope that by clearly and openly acknowledging these errors, we can more credibly commit to avoiding such mistakes in the future.
## Background
Brent started commenting on LessWrong in 2012, and moved into a rationalist group house in Berkeley in 2014. He helped organize a variety of events involving other community members, including a solstice celebration and a camp at Burning Man. He also attended a variety of CFAR events: he was a participant at two workshops (Mainline 2015, Tier II 2017), and a volunteer or contractor at three more (MSFP 2015, Ops Workshop 2017, and ESPR 2017). He attended two alumni reunions, and came to at least three post-workshop afterparties, including two that took place after abuse allegations had been filed with the Alumni Community Disputes Council (ACDC).
During this time some CFAR staff members developed friendships with Brent. Brent described actively seeking out these friendships in order to raise his social standing, and at times stated a goal of eventually taking “control of CFAR.”[2](https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent#fn:2) Many of our staff, including those who were Brent’s fri
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