Just to flag in some ways it would be good to be less inclusive. There is a lot of discussion right now about how/if/when we could have spotted the FTX/crypto fraud sooner and that is all about being quicker to exclude them.
To engage more productively with the prompt, I think the de-normalisation of Polygamy seems plausible. I’ve long been uncomfortable with (some) EA’s embrace of this, as given the harmful effects of the institution on societies, like encouraging male violence and suppressing womens rights. Even though these issues didn’t seem like huge issues for EAs, I don’t think we should adopt norms that would be bad for society if everyone did them. But there seem to be also two significant more concrete inclusion reasons to oppose it.
Firstly, it enables predatory men and abuses of power. In a traditional environment, all the senior men will be married, and thus any proposition they make to vulnerable young women is clearly illicit. It can still happen—though probably with lower frequency—but the woman will clearly understand from the beginning that a norms violation is occurring, and there is more support for shutting it down sooner. Additionally, to the extent the leaders wives are involved in the community, there is a native constituency naturally opposed to this behavior.
Additionally, as people have pointed out, sexual relations in the workplace create clear conflicts of interest. There is a reason they are tightly regulated in many professional environments. This is not the first scandal we have had where key decision makers seem to have covered up for their romantic partners.
As a queer person, it definitely makes me feel unwelcome to hear people suggest that the social movement I’m part of gets to have an opinion on my consensual relationship choices.
So I strongly disagree with this. First, what’s the evidence that polyamory has ‘harmful effects… on societies, like encouraging male violence and suppressing womens rights’? Isn’t it more of a suppression of women’s rights to say that they can only have one romantic partner at a time, if they want more?
Second, I don’t think polyamory meaningfully enables predatory men. It seems a bit patronizing to say that vulnerable young women can only understand that something is going wrong if the guy who hits on them is married. A bigger issue is that power dynamics make it hard for victims to speak up.
The point about sexual relations in the workplace is a non-sequitur—people can be poly without dating their co-workers.
Finally, I’m poly and a woman, so if the community became hostile to or suspicious of polaymory per se, it would become less inclusive for me. One of the things I like about this community is the fact that people are open to people who make unusual lifestyle choices, and they’re not (usually!) tempted to mock or scorn something just because it’s weird or unusual. i’d be sad to lose that.
what’s the evidence that polyamory has ‘harmful effects… on societies, like encouraging male violence and suppressing womens rights’?
There is lots—I don’t want to exhaustively list it for you, but you can easily google to find stuff like this economist article about the negative social effects of rampant non-monogamy.
It seems a bit patronizing to say that vulnerable young women can only understand that something is going wrong if the guy who hits on them is married.
It would be patronizing, which is why I didn’t say ‘can only’. Please don’t misrepresent me like this.
What is the case is that some victims don’t understand that something is going wrong, and it is good to make this clearer. Also, bystanders who could intervene often can’t tell something is going wrong—it would be good to make this clearer also. We do this in many other areas—to avoid moral violations that are hard to catch, we insist on easily-observable bright lines even if those bright lines seem less inherently morally noteworthy. As you point out, this can make it easier for victims to speak up, because the violation is more unambiguous.
they’re not (usually!) tempted to mock or scorn something just because it’s weird or unusual
I’m not saying it is bad because ‘just because it is weird or unusual’, nor was I scornful or mocking. Rather, I made specific arguments for why the practice is bad. Just because we tolerate weird and unusual things doesn’t mean that bad things are ok so long as they are also weird and unusual.
Again, polygamy (in the sense of formal polygyny) is very different to egalitarian polyamory as practiced in the EA community, so it’s not clear to me that articles criticizing that practice should be relevant.
The Economist article discusses the practice of widespread polygyny: that is, men who have multiple wives and whose wives are only married to them. As a matter of mathematics, polygyny (without polyandry) means that many men will stay unmarried, which makes them less connected to society and more likely to behave violently. That argument seems true to me.
However, the argument hardly seems applicable to the egalitarian polyamory almost always practiced by effective altruists. Poly female effective altruists can and do date multiple people. Further, many poly effective altruists are in same-gender relationships. If anything, polyamory as practiced by most effective altruists seems to reduce relationship inequality. People who have trouble finding a primary relationship can find a secondary relationship and receive many of the benefits of a romantic relationship. (Although not all, of course—I don’t mean to erase the very real loneliness that comes from having a hard time finding a primary partner, even if you have secondaries you love.)
Further, the article discusses polygyny in cultures where women are literally bought from their families by wealthy men. Both polygamy and monogamy are harmful relationship structures when women are sold by their fathers to strangers three times their age. That doesn’t mean that either is harmful when freely chosen by an individual in a society with much better protections for human rights in general and women’s rights specifically.
You seem to be both arguing that EAs should discourage polyamory because it’s harmful, and that having a norm of monogamy would make it easier to identify predators crossing boundaries—which is closer to your central point (or do you believe them both)?
Thanks for commenting :) I think the dynamics around polyamory are important to think about in these types of discussions.
My own take: I agree that lots of people being poly makes it harder to identify norm violations, compared with traditional environments, and that this is a significant cost. So when thinking about how to set norms about professional boundaries, we should be aware that the “standard” norms are calibrated for primarily-monogamous environments, and therefore err on the side of being more careful than we otherwise would.
De-normalizing is pretty broad, though, so I’m keen to think more about what this might involve. Things like not assuming people are poly by default definitely seem valuable. On the other hand, I wouldn’t endorse “opposing” poly more generally—I think we should be very cautious about passing judgement on people’s sexual identities (especially when poly people often face hostility from the rest of society).
Hi Richard, Could you explain how lots of people being poly makes it harder to identify norm violations? What kind of norms do you perceive to be different? I certainly agree it is bad to assume anyone is poly/not poly/interested in any kid of romantic interaction/gay/straight/or anything else, but I am curious about what kind of norm violations you are referring to.
I think you may have the sign wrong on this though:
especially when poly people often face hostility from the rest of society
In general people have decent reasons for the things they do. For this reason, EAs generally align with most of western society on most issues. e.g. we are against theft. The fact that the rest of society is also hostile to thieves isn’t a reason for us to be nice to thieves—it is supportive evidence that we should also avoid theft, because similar reasons apply. Unless there is some strong EA-specific argument at play, I think our default in most scenarios should be to adopt similar norms to the rest of society.
It’s also worth noting that while western society is generally somewhat intolerant of polygamy, much of the world is not. It is legal in much of Africa and Sourthern Asia, and quite common in some countries. However, I generally think we should prefer to adopt western moral norms to those of these places, partly because they often treat women poorly.
While wider western societies are often a good baseline to use, I think it’s important for EA to try to be more moral than our surroundings. Based on my moral standards, if existing norms punish consenting adults for making certain personal decisions about their private lives, we should try to strongly avoid adopting similar hostility (I think this is a pretty widely-endorsed principle in general, and it’s just that others aren’t as consistent about it).
That’s separate from noticing ways in which higher prevalence of polyamory has flow-through effects on other dynamics (like the ones I identified in my previous comment) and trying to ensure those go well; I think that’s a more productive discussion than trying to debate about polyamory as a whole.
While polyamory definitely leads to different dynamics of women’s safety issues(like the ones throwaway5 pointed out), making every discussion of women’s safety as a discussion about poly is unproductive.
I dunno, you’re the one making this very much about that. As is throwaway5, who seems to share your views, writing style, and confusion the difference between polygamy and polyamory.
I don’t agree. I am monogamous but some of the most loving and healthy families I have ever seen are poly. Most of my relationship goals are from poly families.
No, because I think the main purpose of the term ‘polyamory’ is a rebranding exercise to avoid negative associations due to Mormons and other groups, to try to make it sound progressive rather than regressive. The technical difference (strictly referring to marriage vs also including other relationships) is not that important.
Imo this post seemed pretty explicitly based on the prioritization of inclusivity towards women, nonbinary people, and people of the global majority and while I can see that you could conceivably frame this as a women’s safety/workplace harassment thing, there’s probably just as much to be said about e.g. monogamy being an antifeminist prison, so it seems strange to me that you’d want to bring this up here.
The rhetoric around “senior men” and “the leaders wives” rings very handmaid’s tale-y which is probably an exaggeration. Also not sure why the solution in the third paragraph isn’t “don’t hit on women who are your professional junior.”
Yes reducing workplace and social harassment of women is an important issue for inclusivity. I brought this up because there is a lot of research that monogamy is good for women because it reduces violence and increases wellbeing.
The rhetoric around “senior men” and “the leaders wives” rings very handmaid’s tale-y which is probably an exaggeration.
Do you deny that most organizations are lead by senior men, who sometimes inappropriately approach more junior women? Or that traditionally most senior men had wives? I don’t understand the handmaiden’s tale reference. In that book important men get multiple wives which I am opposed to?
Also not sure why the solution in the third paragraph isn’t “don’t hit on women who are your professional junior.”
The same reason the solution to theft isn’t “don’t steal”. We need a response which is robust to some bad actors, not just assume everyone will be good. This helps increase the social costs of bad behaviour.
Both of the studies you linked are about polygamous cultures where men have multiple (formal) wives, rather than men and women both having multiple partners of varying degrees of commitment, so I don’t see why they would be relevant to polyamory as practiced in the EA community.
Also, this whole discussion takes away women’s agency and is framed as if women are just passive victims. You know what’s ‘good for women’? Letting them choose who they date, marry or sleep with.
I don’t understand why bad actors who are already willing to harass women wouldn’t be willing to cheat on their wives. I also don’t understand why we can’t just stigmatize people hitting on their employees, if that is the thing we actually care about. Your proposed system has no advantages if the senior men are single or serially monogamous—both very common.
Your language also strikes me as oddly and unnecessarily gendered. It isn’t exactly better if a senior woman is hitting on a younger, vulnerable man! Effective altruists are much more LGBT+ than the general population, and poly effective altruists even more so; it seems to me to be a very incomplete analysis to assume that everyone is heterosexual.
Just to flag in some ways it would be good to be less inclusive. There is a lot of discussion right now about how/if/when we could have spotted the FTX/crypto fraud sooner and that is all about being quicker to exclude them.
To engage more productively with the prompt, I think the de-normalisation of Polygamy seems plausible. I’ve long been uncomfortable with (some) EA’s embrace of this, as given the harmful effects of the institution on societies, like encouraging male violence and suppressing womens rights. Even though these issues didn’t seem like huge issues for EAs, I don’t think we should adopt norms that would be bad for society if everyone did them. But there seem to be also two significant more concrete inclusion reasons to oppose it.
Firstly, it enables predatory men and abuses of power. In a traditional environment, all the senior men will be married, and thus any proposition they make to vulnerable young women is clearly illicit. It can still happen—though probably with lower frequency—but the woman will clearly understand from the beginning that a norms violation is occurring, and there is more support for shutting it down sooner. Additionally, to the extent the leaders wives are involved in the community, there is a native constituency naturally opposed to this behavior.
Additionally, as people have pointed out, sexual relations in the workplace create clear conflicts of interest. There is a reason they are tightly regulated in many professional environments. This is not the first scandal we have had where key decision makers seem to have covered up for their romantic partners.
As a queer person, it definitely makes me feel unwelcome to hear people suggest that the social movement I’m part of gets to have an opinion on my consensual relationship choices.
They don’t and I’m sorry. If you want to chat feel free to hit me up (kathryn@magnifymentoring.org).
Don’t worry, I’m robust to bad comments on the EA Forum. :) Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be a norm anywhere close to being adopted.
In another comment in this thread you literally express an opinion on other people’s consensual relationship choices!
So I strongly disagree with this. First, what’s the evidence that polyamory has ‘harmful effects… on societies, like encouraging male violence and suppressing womens rights’? Isn’t it more of a suppression of women’s rights to say that they can only have one romantic partner at a time, if they want more?
Second, I don’t think polyamory meaningfully enables predatory men. It seems a bit patronizing to say that vulnerable young women can only understand that something is going wrong if the guy who hits on them is married. A bigger issue is that power dynamics make it hard for victims to speak up.
The point about sexual relations in the workplace is a non-sequitur—people can be poly without dating their co-workers.
Finally, I’m poly and a woman, so if the community became hostile to or suspicious of polaymory per se, it would become less inclusive for me. One of the things I like about this community is the fact that people are open to people who make unusual lifestyle choices, and they’re not (usually!) tempted to mock or scorn something just because it’s weird or unusual. i’d be sad to lose that.
There is lots—I don’t want to exhaustively list it for you, but you can easily google to find stuff like this economist article about the negative social effects of rampant non-monogamy.
It would be patronizing, which is why I didn’t say ‘can only’. Please don’t misrepresent me like this.
What is the case is that some victims don’t understand that something is going wrong, and it is good to make this clearer. Also, bystanders who could intervene often can’t tell something is going wrong—it would be good to make this clearer also. We do this in many other areas—to avoid moral violations that are hard to catch, we insist on easily-observable bright lines even if those bright lines seem less inherently morally noteworthy. As you point out, this can make it easier for victims to speak up, because the violation is more unambiguous.
I’m not saying it is bad because ‘just because it is weird or unusual’, nor was I scornful or mocking. Rather, I made specific arguments for why the practice is bad. Just because we tolerate weird and unusual things doesn’t mean that bad things are ok so long as they are also weird and unusual.
Again, polygamy (in the sense of formal polygyny) is very different to egalitarian polyamory as practiced in the EA community, so it’s not clear to me that articles criticizing that practice should be relevant.
The Economist article discusses the practice of widespread polygyny: that is, men who have multiple wives and whose wives are only married to them. As a matter of mathematics, polygyny (without polyandry) means that many men will stay unmarried, which makes them less connected to society and more likely to behave violently. That argument seems true to me.
However, the argument hardly seems applicable to the egalitarian polyamory almost always practiced by effective altruists. Poly female effective altruists can and do date multiple people. Further, many poly effective altruists are in same-gender relationships. If anything, polyamory as practiced by most effective altruists seems to reduce relationship inequality. People who have trouble finding a primary relationship can find a secondary relationship and receive many of the benefits of a romantic relationship. (Although not all, of course—I don’t mean to erase the very real loneliness that comes from having a hard time finding a primary partner, even if you have secondaries you love.)
Further, the article discusses polygyny in cultures where women are literally bought from their families by wealthy men. Both polygamy and monogamy are harmful relationship structures when women are sold by their fathers to strangers three times their age. That doesn’t mean that either is harmful when freely chosen by an individual in a society with much better protections for human rights in general and women’s rights specifically.
You seem to be both arguing that EAs should discourage polyamory because it’s harmful, and that having a norm of monogamy would make it easier to identify predators crossing boundaries—which is closer to your central point (or do you believe them both)?
Thanks for commenting :) I think the dynamics around polyamory are important to think about in these types of discussions.
My own take: I agree that lots of people being poly makes it harder to identify norm violations, compared with traditional environments, and that this is a significant cost. So when thinking about how to set norms about professional boundaries, we should be aware that the “standard” norms are calibrated for primarily-monogamous environments, and therefore err on the side of being more careful than we otherwise would.
De-normalizing is pretty broad, though, so I’m keen to think more about what this might involve. Things like not assuming people are poly by default definitely seem valuable. On the other hand, I wouldn’t endorse “opposing” poly more generally—I think we should be very cautious about passing judgement on people’s sexual identities (especially when poly people often face hostility from the rest of society).
Hi Richard, Could you explain how lots of people being poly makes it harder to identify norm violations? What kind of norms do you perceive to be different? I certainly agree it is bad to assume anyone is poly/not poly/interested in any kid of romantic interaction/gay/straight/or anything else, but I am curious about what kind of norm violations you are referring to.
Thanks for the thoughtful response!
I think you may have the sign wrong on this though:
In general people have decent reasons for the things they do. For this reason, EAs generally align with most of western society on most issues. e.g. we are against theft. The fact that the rest of society is also hostile to thieves isn’t a reason for us to be nice to thieves—it is supportive evidence that we should also avoid theft, because similar reasons apply. Unless there is some strong EA-specific argument at play, I think our default in most scenarios should be to adopt similar norms to the rest of society.
It’s also worth noting that while western society is generally somewhat intolerant of polygamy, much of the world is not. It is legal in much of Africa and Sourthern Asia, and quite common in some countries. However, I generally think we should prefer to adopt western moral norms to those of these places, partly because they often treat women poorly.
While wider western societies are often a good baseline to use, I think it’s important for EA to try to be more moral than our surroundings. Based on my moral standards, if existing norms punish consenting adults for making certain personal decisions about their private lives, we should try to strongly avoid adopting similar hostility (I think this is a pretty widely-endorsed principle in general, and it’s just that others aren’t as consistent about it).
That’s separate from noticing ways in which higher prevalence of polyamory has flow-through effects on other dynamics (like the ones I identified in my previous comment) and trying to ensure those go well; I think that’s a more productive discussion than trying to debate about polyamory as a whole.
+1 agree with Richard.
While polyamory definitely leads to different dynamics of women’s safety issues(like the ones throwaway5 pointed out), making every discussion of women’s safety as a discussion about poly is unproductive.
I dunno, you’re the one making this very much about that. As is throwaway5, who seems to share your views, writing style, and confusion the difference between polygamy and polyamory.
I don’t agree. I am monogamous but some of the most loving and healthy families I have ever seen are poly. Most of my relationship goals are from poly families.
Terminology clarification: did you mean to say polyamory and not polygamy in this comment?
No, because I think the main purpose of the term ‘polyamory’ is a rebranding exercise to avoid negative associations due to Mormons and other groups, to try to make it sound progressive rather than regressive. The technical difference (strictly referring to marriage vs also including other relationships) is not that important.
Imo this post seemed pretty explicitly based on the prioritization of inclusivity towards women, nonbinary people, and people of the global majority and while I can see that you could conceivably frame this as a women’s safety/workplace harassment thing, there’s probably just as much to be said about e.g. monogamy being an antifeminist prison, so it seems strange to me that you’d want to bring this up here.
The rhetoric around “senior men” and “the leaders wives” rings very handmaid’s tale-y which is probably an exaggeration. Also not sure why the solution in the third paragraph isn’t “don’t hit on women who are your professional junior.”
Yes reducing workplace and social harassment of women is an important issue for inclusivity. I brought this up because there is a lot of research that monogamy is good for women because it reduces violence and increases wellbeing.
Do you deny that most organizations are lead by senior men, who sometimes inappropriately approach more junior women? Or that traditionally most senior men had wives? I don’t understand the handmaiden’s tale reference. In that book important men get multiple wives which I am opposed to?
The same reason the solution to theft isn’t “don’t steal”. We need a response which is robust to some bad actors, not just assume everyone will be good. This helps increase the social costs of bad behaviour.
Both of the studies you linked are about polygamous cultures where men have multiple (formal) wives, rather than men and women both having multiple partners of varying degrees of commitment, so I don’t see why they would be relevant to polyamory as practiced in the EA community.
Also, this whole discussion takes away women’s agency and is framed as if women are just passive victims. You know what’s ‘good for women’? Letting them choose who they date, marry or sleep with.
I don’t understand why bad actors who are already willing to harass women wouldn’t be willing to cheat on their wives. I also don’t understand why we can’t just stigmatize people hitting on their employees, if that is the thing we actually care about. Your proposed system has no advantages if the senior men are single or serially monogamous—both very common.
Your language also strikes me as oddly and unnecessarily gendered. It isn’t exactly better if a senior woman is hitting on a younger, vulnerable man! Effective altruists are much more LGBT+ than the general population, and poly effective altruists even more so; it seems to me to be a very incomplete analysis to assume that everyone is heterosexual.