It is reasonable that 5- 20% of the community are scared that their harmless sexual behaviour will become unacceptable and that they will be seen as bad/unsafe if they support it.
It’s fair that they are upset and see this as something that might hurt them and fear the outcome.
There are two main models I have for many of these discussions:
Rationalist EAs—like truth-seeking, think a set of discourse norms should be obeyed at all times
Progressive EAs—think that some discussions require much more energy from some than others and need to be handled differently/more carefully. Want an environement where they feel safe
I think it’s easy to see these groups as against one another, but I think that’s not true. There are positive sum improvements.
Women being sad matters. And yes there are tradeoffs here, but it’s really sad that the women in the time article and all the other women who have been sad are sad.
If we could have a community where everyone says “EA does romantic relationships a lot better than the outside world” that would be worth spending $10 − 100mn on purely in community building terms, let alone in just welfare of individual EAs.
We spend millions each year of EAGs + 80k. Imagine if everyone just was like “Yeah EA is just a great safe fun place”
It is pretty reasonable for 5 − 20% of the community to have a boundary about not being caught up in coversations about sex in houses they need to stay in in foreigh countries. Or similarly bad conversations.
It’s reasonable they want to be sure this is taken really seriously, because they don’t want it to happen to them or their friends.
It’s complicated that this might lead to unintended consequences, but their desire seems very comprehensible.
It was very likely bad that Owen Cotton-Barrett upset a couple of women and then didn’t drastically change his behaviour, such that there were other instances.
That’s not to say other things weren’t bad. But this feels like something we can agree on.
Some attempts at concensus thoughts on sexual behaviour:
I’ll split them up into subcomments
It is reasonable that 5- 20% of the community are scared that their harmless sexual behaviour will become unacceptable and that they will be seen as bad/unsafe if they support it.
It’s fair that they are upset and see this as something that might hurt them and fear the outcome.
There are two main models I have for many of these discussions:
Rationalist EAs—like truth-seeking, think a set of discourse norms should be obeyed at all times
Progressive EAs—think that some discussions require much more energy from some than others and need to be handled differently/more carefully. Want an environement where they feel safe
I think it’s easy to see these groups as against one another, but I think that’s not true. There are positive sum improvements.
Women being sad matters. And yes there are tradeoffs here, but it’s really sad that the women in the time article and all the other women who have been sad are sad.
I guess CEA doesn’t want to push specific norms here because the more they engage the more they will get blamed when things go wrong.
There should be a process on the forum for contentious discussions where there are 3 types of post.
An emotions post, where people talk about how they feel and try and say uncontentious things we all agree wtih
A few days later, a discourse post, where we try and have all the discussion
Two weeks later, a concensus post where we try to come up with some widely agreed concusions.
If we could have a community where everyone says “EA does romantic relationships a lot better than the outside world” that would be worth spending $10 − 100mn on purely in community building terms, let alone in just welfare of individual EAs.
We spend millions each year of EAGs + 80k. Imagine if everyone just was like “Yeah EA is just a great safe fun place”
It is pretty reasonable for 5 − 20% of the community to have a boundary about not being caught up in coversations about sex in houses they need to stay in in foreigh countries. Or similarly bad conversations.
It’s reasonable they want to be sure this is taken really seriously, because they don’t want it to happen to them or their friends.
It’s complicated that this might lead to unintended consequences, but their desire seems very comprehensible.
It was very likely bad that Owen Cotton-Barrett upset a couple of women and then didn’t drastically change his behaviour, such that there were other instances.
That’s not to say other things weren’t bad. But this feels like something we can agree on.