I’m not sure how relevant this is to the EA forum? Is the idea that relationships are so very important to wellbeing that perhaps EA organizations should be prioritizing promoting these pieces of advice?
Relevance notwithstanding, it’s not clear to me that a lot of this is actually very good advice for a lot of people. There are some major omissions—notably pregnancy, childbirth and parenting somehow get absolutely no mention whatsoever, despite these issues dominating most people’s relationships for decades on end. A lot of what it does contain seemed like the sort of thing that I might personally appreciate, but only because I am an extreme outlier in terms of need for cognition.
Certainly there does not seem to be a huge amount of evidence for much of it. For example, you write that both ‘introspection’ and ‘communication’ are ‘essential’:
Each person has to be able to know what’s going on inside of them (wants/desires/ emotions/etc) and be able to communicate about it.
But it seems to me that many successful relationships actually do not feature much of these: rather, they feature two people who are largely following what is expected by their society, and because they are members of the same society, they both expect the same things, and because most people are relatively similar, these things are relatively well calibrated for what is good for those people. Given that one of the core lessons of LW is that introspection and communication are hard, it shouldn’t be surprising that many people lack them—but they form successful relationships nonetheless.
Similarly, I found the section on conflict very confusing. Many successful real-world relationships seem to exist by simply avoiding conflict for decades on end, and I’m not sure why they are wrong to do this. Given the number of empirical, moral and theological issues in the world, it’s implausible that couples will agree on all of them, and if philosophers haven’t managed to settle them through debate it’s implausible that ordinary couples will manage to do so either. In contrast, there have been a lot of couples that have stayed happily together despite vast differences by simply not discussing conflict-laden topics that are not relevant to them anyway. If a couple told me that they argued every night, my reaction wouldn’t be that this was great—it would be to council them on a way to avoid this. Most people do not want their relationships to ‘fail fast’ - they are in long-term relationships that they want to survive and prudently avoid unnecessarily annoying their partner.
I’m also not sure why you linked to a list of ‘negative expectation value’ ‘infohazard’ questions that you don’t recommend people do? The whole point of infohazards is to not share them, or at least not share them widely, and they are literally listed as something you should not post in the forum rules. (The fact that you regard them as negative expected value also seems incongruous with your belief that conflict qua conflict is good.)
And finally, most bizarrely… why is 50% of the ‘sex’ advice section a survey on what it is like to have sex with one particular guy?
I’m not sure how relevant this is to the EA forum?
I personally think that for Effective Altruists to be effective, they need to be healthy/well-adjusted/flourishing humans and therefore something as crucial as good relationship advice ought to be shared on the EA Forum (much the same productivity, agency or motivation advice).
I didn’t mention it in the post, but part of the impetus for this post came from Julia’s recent Power Dynamics between people in EA post that discusses relationships, and it seemed like collecting broader advice on that would make for a healthier community overall. Mm, that’s a point I’d emphasize – healthy relationships between individuals makes for a healthy community, especially when the individuals are working within and across EA orgs.
I think this post is maybe a format that the EA Forum hasn’t done before, but this is intended to be a repository of advice that’s crowd-sourced. This is also maybe not obvious because I “seeded” it with a lot of content I thought was worth sharing (and also to make it less sad if it didn’t get many contributions – so far a few).
As I wrote:
I’ve seeded this post with a mix of advice, experience, and resources from myself and a few friends, plus various good content I found on LessWrong through the Relationships tag. The starting content is probably not the very best content possible (if it was, why make this a thread?), but I wanted to launch with something.Don’t anchor too hard on what I thought to include! Likely as better stuff is submitted, I’ll move some stuff out of the post text and into comments to keep the post from becoming absurdly long.
I also solicit disagreement:
Please disagree with advice you think is wrong! (It probably makes sense to add notes/links about differing views next to advice items in the main text, so worth the effort to call out stuff you disagree with.)
If you’re okay with it, I will add your points of disagreement into the main post.
It is definitely not comprehensive! I put this together within a few hours over the weekend, I did not aim to start off with everything that’s relevant. (Somehow still reached 10k words). If someone has good content on childbirth, pregnancy, etc., I think that would be great to add. On reflection, I’m in favor it being a behemoth and people hunting for sections relevant to them and/or later distillation.
it’s not clear to me that a lot of this is actually very good advice for a lot of people.
I agree, because giving universal advice is extremely hard. The approach I’d advise for this is for people to read it, and if it seems like a good idea for them, try it. But also “consider reversing all advice you hear”.
I’m also not sure why you linked to a list of ‘negative expectation value’ ‘infohazard’ questions that you don’t recommend people do?
Because it’s funny and fun. Note that I didn’t write the text around it. Like most of the text, it’s stuff I copied in. Also, it’s a not a major world-ending infohazard. It’s clearly marked. And as a commenter wrote on LW, it’s only an infohazard if your relationship is bad (I think his bar for good relationships is too high, but I agree that healthier relationships/people aren’t at as much risk.
And finally, most bizarrely… why is 50% of the ‘sex’ advice section a survey on what it is like to have sex with one particular guy?
Going back to how I was just seeding the crowd-sourced post with content I had, that was something I had on hand. I didn’t have other stuff and didn’t feel like going hunting for advice, but thought it’d be good if other people had things that wanted to recommend be added to that section. As I write in that section:
How to have good and healthy sex is beyond the intended scope for this thread, but I welcome people to add links to external resources here (or submit them via comments with spoiler text/warning, or the Google Form).
I agree that it’d be much better if that one link was not 50% of the list! But I actually thought it’s a helpful read for people who don’t find it TMI.
I’m not sure how relevant this is to the EA forum? Is the idea that relationships are so very important to wellbeing that perhaps EA organizations should be prioritizing promoting these pieces of advice?
Relevance notwithstanding, it’s not clear to me that a lot of this is actually very good advice for a lot of people. There are some major omissions—notably pregnancy, childbirth and parenting somehow get absolutely no mention whatsoever, despite these issues dominating most people’s relationships for decades on end. A lot of what it does contain seemed like the sort of thing that I might personally appreciate, but only because I am an extreme outlier in terms of need for cognition.
Certainly there does not seem to be a huge amount of evidence for much of it. For example, you write that both ‘introspection’ and ‘communication’ are ‘essential’:
But it seems to me that many successful relationships actually do not feature much of these: rather, they feature two people who are largely following what is expected by their society, and because they are members of the same society, they both expect the same things, and because most people are relatively similar, these things are relatively well calibrated for what is good for those people. Given that one of the core lessons of LW is that introspection and communication are hard, it shouldn’t be surprising that many people lack them—but they form successful relationships nonetheless.
Similarly, I found the section on conflict very confusing. Many successful real-world relationships seem to exist by simply avoiding conflict for decades on end, and I’m not sure why they are wrong to do this. Given the number of empirical, moral and theological issues in the world, it’s implausible that couples will agree on all of them, and if philosophers haven’t managed to settle them through debate it’s implausible that ordinary couples will manage to do so either. In contrast, there have been a lot of couples that have stayed happily together despite vast differences by simply not discussing conflict-laden topics that are not relevant to them anyway. If a couple told me that they argued every night, my reaction wouldn’t be that this was great—it would be to council them on a way to avoid this. Most people do not want their relationships to ‘fail fast’ - they are in long-term relationships that they want to survive and prudently avoid unnecessarily annoying their partner.
I’m also not sure why you linked to a list of ‘negative expectation value’ ‘infohazard’ questions that you don’t recommend people do? The whole point of infohazards is to not share them, or at least not share them widely, and they are literally listed as something you should not post in the forum rules. (The fact that you regard them as negative expected value also seems incongruous with your belief that conflict qua conflict is good.)
And finally, most bizarrely… why is 50% of the ‘sex’ advice section a survey on what it is like to have sex with one particular guy?
Hi Larks, thanks for taking the time to engage.
I personally think that for Effective Altruists to be effective, they need to be healthy/well-adjusted/flourishing humans and therefore something as crucial as good relationship advice ought to be shared on the EA Forum (much the same productivity, agency or motivation advice).
I didn’t mention it in the post, but part of the impetus for this post came from Julia’s recent Power Dynamics between people in EA post that discusses relationships, and it seemed like collecting broader advice on that would make for a healthier community overall. Mm, that’s a point I’d emphasize – healthy relationships between individuals makes for a healthy community, especially when the individuals are working within and across EA orgs.
Again, thanks for taking the time to engage.
I think this post is maybe a format that the EA Forum hasn’t done before, but this is intended to be a repository of advice that’s crowd-sourced. This is also maybe not obvious because I “seeded” it with a lot of content I thought was worth sharing (and also to make it less sad if it didn’t get many contributions – so far a few).
As I wrote:
I also solicit disagreement:
If you’re okay with it, I will add your points of disagreement into the main post.
It is definitely not comprehensive! I put this together within a few hours over the weekend, I did not aim to start off with everything that’s relevant. (Somehow still reached 10k words). If someone has good content on childbirth, pregnancy, etc., I think that would be great to add. On reflection, I’m in favor it being a behemoth and people hunting for sections relevant to them and/or later distillation.
I agree, because giving universal advice is extremely hard. The approach I’d advise for this is for people to read it, and if it seems like a good idea for them, try it. But also “consider reversing all advice you hear”.
Because it’s funny and fun. Note that I didn’t write the text around it. Like most of the text, it’s stuff I copied in. Also, it’s a not a major world-ending infohazard. It’s clearly marked. And as a commenter wrote on LW, it’s only an infohazard if your relationship is bad (I think his bar for good relationships is too high, but I agree that healthier relationships/people aren’t at as much risk.
Going back to how I was just seeding the crowd-sourced post with content I had, that was something I had on hand. I didn’t have other stuff and didn’t feel like going hunting for advice, but thought it’d be good if other people had things that wanted to recommend be added to that section. As I write in that section:
I agree that it’d be much better if that one link was not 50% of the list! But I actually thought it’s a helpful read for people who don’t find it TMI.
Minor comment:
In my tiny opinion, I thought the post was fine and I strong upvoted it and I think it should remain.
Also in my tiny opinion, I also thought Lark’s comment was fine and I strong upvoted it because of content.
We are doing the learnings.
(It seems like the post could have value in multiple ways) but I wanted to say this comment was extremely deep and thoughtful.