Severin—I think this might sound reasonable at first glance. However, it seems to be based on a model of human motivation that is very dubious, empirically false, and deeply sex-negative.
You claim that “Status is sexy. Predatorily-minded people know this. Thus, they are incentivized to climb the social EA ladder for the wrong reasons. If we set norms that make it harder for people to leverage their social status for romantic purposes, we can correct for this.”
Well, you’re right that signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues is sexually and romantically attractive. Indeed, what we evolutionary psychologists call ‘mating effort’ (investing in difficult, challenging behaviors to attract mates) seems to be a major driver of human innovation, insight, and moral progress. (I’ve spent the last 35 years of my academic career studying this, and published 5 books on it.)
So, it’s not just ‘predatorily-minded people’ who invest mating effort in giving good talks, writing good EA Forum posts, running podcasts, doing public outreach, offering helpful insights, doing social networking, refining their moral virtues, and defending against existential threats to their group. It is, to a first approximation, all of us.
Is trying to be romantically attractive the “wrong reason” for doing excellent intellectual work, displaying genuine moral virtues, and being friendly at meetings? Well, if they’re wrong, what would count as the “right reasons” for doing these things? Should we rely instead on careerism? Economic ambition? Intellectual vanity? Pure curiosity? A totally dispassionate, disinterested commitment to maximizing ultra-long-term cosmic sentient welfare?
People generally do good stuff because they’re motivated to get some kind of survival benefit or reproductive benefit from doing good stuff. Mating effort is one of the most powerful and effective motivations—if it’s harnessed in productive ways.
My concern is that if we sexually neuter all EA groups, meetings, and interactions, and sever the deep human motivational links between our mating effort and our intellectual and moral work, we’ll be taking the wind out of EA’s sails. We’ll end up as lonely, dispirited incels rowing our little boats around in circles, afraid to reach out, afraid to fall in love.
Put another way, human intellectual and moral culture has already spent centuries figuring out effective ways to tame and channel our mate-seeking, status-seeking, and validation-seeking into positive-sum, socially-beneficial work—rather than into zero-sum competition, aggression, and warfare. This is basically the story of civilization: sublimating our sexual motivations into doing work for the greater good. (This is one of those rare occasions when Sigmund Freud got something right.)
The social costs of overt sexual harassment, stalking, and coercion are obvious. So there’s a temptation to clamp down on all sex and romance within any subculture that values mutual respect, consent, and professionalism. However, there may be hidden motivational costs and relationship costs to going too far in that sex-negative, romance-deterring directions.
(Disclosure: I fell in love with my wife Diana Fleischman partly because we were both passionate about EA. I admired her work. She admired my work. If EA had been a more sex-negative, romance-negative subculture, we might not have formed a relationship, gotten married, or had our daughter. I would hate for other EAs not to be able to find like-minded mates within the EA community.)
My concern is that if we sexually neuter all EA groups, meetings, and interactions, and sever the deep human motivational links between our mating effort and our intellectual and moral work, we’ll be taking the wind out of EA’s sails. We’ll end up as lonely, dispirited incels rowing our little boats around in circles, afraid to reach out, afraid to fall in love.
These are some pretty strong claims that don’t seem particularly well substantiated.
Is trying to be romantically attractive the “wrong reason” for doing excellent intellectual work, displaying genuine moral virtues, and being friendly at meetings?
I also feel a bit confused about this. I think if someone is taking a particular action, or “investing in difficult, challenging behaviors to attract mates”, it does seem clear there are contexts where the added intention of “to attract mates” changes how the interaction feels to me, and contexts where that added intention makes the interaction feel inappropriate. For example, if I’m at work and I think someone is friendly at the meeting because they primarily want to attract a mate vs if they are following professional norms vs if they’re a kind person who cares about fostering a welcoming space for discussion, I do consider some reasons better than others.
While I don’t think it’s wrong to try to attract mates at a general level, I think this can happen in ways that are deceitful, and ways that leverage power dynamics in a way that’s unfair and unpleasant (or worse) for the receiving party. In a similar vein, I particularly appreciated Dustin’s tweet here.
I do think International Women’s Day is a timely prompt for EA folks to celebrate and acknowledge the women in EA who are drawn to EA because they want to help find the best ways to help others, or to put them into practice. I appreciate (and am happy for you & Diana!) that there will be folks who benefit from finding like-minded mates in EA. I also agree that often there are overt actions that come with obvious social costs, and “going too far” in the other direction seems bad by definition. But I also want to recognise that sometimes there are likely actions that are not “overtly” costly, or may even be beneficial for those who are primarily motivated to attract mates, but may be costly in expectation for those who are primarily interested in EA as a professional space, or as a place where they can collaborate with people who also care about tackling some of the most important issues we face today. And I think this is a tradeoff that’s important to consider—ultimately the EA I want to see and be part of is one that optimises for doing good, and while that’s not mutually exclusive to trying to attract mates within EA, I’d be surprised if doing so as the primary goal also happened to be the best approach for doing good.
bruce—I appreciate the respectful and constructive reply.
For now, I just want to clarify that when we evolutionary psychologists talk about ‘mating effort’, we’re not usually referring to a conscious, self-aware goal of seducing particular people.
Rather, we’re usually referring to an unconscious, evolved motivational state that often nudges people towards public displays of excellence, creativity, and morality, and that is sensitive to contextual & environmental cues of whether such displays are likely to be successful in attracting mates (e.g. tracking local sexual norms, sex ratios, etc). This motivation state evolved because it tends to promote successful reproduction in prehistory—even if we’re not usually making any conscious connection in the modern world between ‘giving an excellent, inspiring talk at an EA Global meeting’ and ‘maximizing genetic self-replication through attracting mates’.
Mating effort is often unconscious by evolutionary design, because people benefit from having plausible deniability about whether they’re really trying to attract mates (e.g. to minimize interference from sexual rivals, to save face after sexual rejections, & to keep any current mates from being jealous). This leads to ‘adaptive self-deception’ about what they’re really doing, and why. But we can still empirically study the effects of mating effort by seeing how it’s influenced by the contextual/environmental factors (e.g. it tends to be lower when local sexual norms inhibit courtship).
So what I’m really trying to argue here is that if EA’s sexual norms over-correct for sexual harassment issues by going in an extremely sex-negative direction, without any understanding or acceptance of how mating effort drives a lot of human intellectual, moral, and social life, then we will (1) reduce the formation of happy romantic relationships within EA (which is a significant cost in terms of sentient well-being), and (2) take some of the (unconscious) motivation for excellence and morality out of EA work and social networking.
The main reason I disagree is that to me it seems plainly obvious that it’s far better for a community organiser’s motivations to be related to earning respect/advancing their career/helping others, rather than their reason for participating in EA being so they can have more sex. This is because, if they’re motivated by wanting to have more sex, then this predictably leads to more drama and more sexual harrassment.
I also don’t think you did enough to back up the inference “lots of people are motivated by sex, therefore we should try to harness this, instead of encouraging people to suppress these instincts in problematic contexts”.
As a comparison, lots of people get excited by conflict and gossip too. That doesn’t automatically mean we should be trying to harness, rather than suppress those things
Christian—you’re right that signaling intelligence during events is not the same as signaling social power by leading events.
However, why do you think people are motivated to seek power, status, prestige, influence, etc in the first place? Does (unconscious) mating effort play no role at all in these goals?
In every culture that’s been studied so far (and indeed in every sexually-reproductive highly social species that’s been studied so far), leadership, power, status, and prestige tend to be romantically attractive, and mating effort tends to drive a lot of status-seeking and leadership-motivation. This is why ‘hypergamy’ (desire to mate ‘upwards’ in terms of status and dominance) is a common pattern in social primates.
I guess the EA subculture could take the view that both hypergamy (as a mate preference) and status-seeking (as a mating strategy) are morally illegitimate, and should not be tolerated. But, again, I think that carries a lot of hidden costs for our movement.
These are obviously tricky issues, and it can be very difficult for us to acknowledge many of our unconscious motivations. But I hope that EAs reading these posts and comments will take some time to ruminate on their own mate preferences and motivations, and the roles that they have played—for better or worse—in their own intellectual and moral lives.
I really don’t think the crux is people who disagree with you being unwilling to acknowledge their unconscious motivations. I fully admit that sometimes I experience desires to do unsavory things such as
- Say something cruel to a person that annoys me - Smack a child when they misbehave - Cheat on my taxes - Gossip about people in a negative way behind their backs - Eat the last slice of pizza without offering it to anyone else - Not stick to my GWWC pledge - Leave my litter on the ground instead of carrying it to a bin - Lie to a family member and say “I’m busy” when they ask me to help them with home repairs - Be unfaithful to my spouse - etc.
If you like, for sake of argument let’s even grant that for all the nice things I’ve ever done for others, ultimately I only did them because I was subconsciously trying to attract more mates (leaving aside the issue that if this was my goal, EA would be a terribly inefficient means by which to achieve it).
Even if we grant that that’s how my subconscious motivations are operating, it still doesn’t matter. It’s still better for me to not go around hitting on women at EA events, and the EA movement is still better off if I’m incentivised not to do it.
Maybe all men have have a part of ourselves which wants to live the life of Genghis Khan and torture our enemies and impregnate every attractive person we ever lay eyes on—but if that were true, that wouldn’t imply it’s ethical or rational to indulge that fantasy! And it definitely wouldn’t imply that the EA project would be better off if we designed our cultural norms+taboos+signals of prestige in ways which encourage it.
The better I am at not giving in to these shitty base urges, and the more the culture around me supports and rewards me for not doing these degenerate things, the happier I will be in the long run and the more positive the impact I have on those around me will be.
Severin—I think this might sound reasonable at first glance. However, it seems to be based on a model of human motivation that is very dubious, empirically false, and deeply sex-negative.
You claim that “Status is sexy. Predatorily-minded people know this. Thus, they are incentivized to climb the social EA ladder for the wrong reasons. If we set norms that make it harder for people to leverage their social status for romantic purposes, we can correct for this.”
Well, you’re right that signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues is sexually and romantically attractive. Indeed, what we evolutionary psychologists call ‘mating effort’ (investing in difficult, challenging behaviors to attract mates) seems to be a major driver of human innovation, insight, and moral progress. (I’ve spent the last 35 years of my academic career studying this, and published 5 books on it.)
So, it’s not just ‘predatorily-minded people’ who invest mating effort in giving good talks, writing good EA Forum posts, running podcasts, doing public outreach, offering helpful insights, doing social networking, refining their moral virtues, and defending against existential threats to their group. It is, to a first approximation, all of us.
Is trying to be romantically attractive the “wrong reason” for doing excellent intellectual work, displaying genuine moral virtues, and being friendly at meetings? Well, if they’re wrong, what would count as the “right reasons” for doing these things? Should we rely instead on careerism? Economic ambition? Intellectual vanity? Pure curiosity? A totally dispassionate, disinterested commitment to maximizing ultra-long-term cosmic sentient welfare?
People generally do good stuff because they’re motivated to get some kind of survival benefit or reproductive benefit from doing good stuff. Mating effort is one of the most powerful and effective motivations—if it’s harnessed in productive ways.
My concern is that if we sexually neuter all EA groups, meetings, and interactions, and sever the deep human motivational links between our mating effort and our intellectual and moral work, we’ll be taking the wind out of EA’s sails. We’ll end up as lonely, dispirited incels rowing our little boats around in circles, afraid to reach out, afraid to fall in love.
Put another way, human intellectual and moral culture has already spent centuries figuring out effective ways to tame and channel our mate-seeking, status-seeking, and validation-seeking into positive-sum, socially-beneficial work—rather than into zero-sum competition, aggression, and warfare. This is basically the story of civilization: sublimating our sexual motivations into doing work for the greater good. (This is one of those rare occasions when Sigmund Freud got something right.)
The social costs of overt sexual harassment, stalking, and coercion are obvious. So there’s a temptation to clamp down on all sex and romance within any subculture that values mutual respect, consent, and professionalism. However, there may be hidden motivational costs and relationship costs to going too far in that sex-negative, romance-deterring directions.
(Disclosure: I fell in love with my wife Diana Fleischman partly because we were both passionate about EA. I admired her work. She admired my work. If EA had been a more sex-negative, romance-negative subculture, we might not have formed a relationship, gotten married, or had our daughter. I would hate for other EAs not to be able to find like-minded mates within the EA community.)
These are some pretty strong claims that don’t seem particularly well substantiated.
I also feel a bit confused about this. I think if someone is taking a particular action, or “investing in difficult, challenging behaviors to attract mates”, it does seem clear there are contexts where the added intention of “to attract mates” changes how the interaction feels to me, and contexts where that added intention makes the interaction feel inappropriate. For example, if I’m at work and I think someone is friendly at the meeting because they primarily want to attract a mate vs if they are following professional norms vs if they’re a kind person who cares about fostering a welcoming space for discussion, I do consider some reasons better than others.
While I don’t think it’s wrong to try to attract mates at a general level, I think this can happen in ways that are deceitful, and ways that leverage power dynamics in a way that’s unfair and unpleasant (or worse) for the receiving party. In a similar vein, I particularly appreciated Dustin’s tweet here.
I do think International Women’s Day is a timely prompt for EA folks to celebrate and acknowledge the women in EA who are drawn to EA because they want to help find the best ways to help others, or to put them into practice. I appreciate (and am happy for you & Diana!) that there will be folks who benefit from finding like-minded mates in EA. I also agree that often there are overt actions that come with obvious social costs, and “going too far” in the other direction seems bad by definition. But I also want to recognise that sometimes there are likely actions that are not “overtly” costly, or may even be beneficial for those who are primarily motivated to attract mates, but may be costly in expectation for those who are primarily interested in EA as a professional space, or as a place where they can collaborate with people who also care about tackling some of the most important issues we face today. And I think this is a tradeoff that’s important to consider—ultimately the EA I want to see and be part of is one that optimises for doing good, and while that’s not mutually exclusive to trying to attract mates within EA, I’d be surprised if doing so as the primary goal also happened to be the best approach for doing good.
bruce—I appreciate the respectful and constructive reply.
For now, I just want to clarify that when we evolutionary psychologists talk about ‘mating effort’, we’re not usually referring to a conscious, self-aware goal of seducing particular people.
Rather, we’re usually referring to an unconscious, evolved motivational state that often nudges people towards public displays of excellence, creativity, and morality, and that is sensitive to contextual & environmental cues of whether such displays are likely to be successful in attracting mates (e.g. tracking local sexual norms, sex ratios, etc). This motivation state evolved because it tends to promote successful reproduction in prehistory—even if we’re not usually making any conscious connection in the modern world between ‘giving an excellent, inspiring talk at an EA Global meeting’ and ‘maximizing genetic self-replication through attracting mates’.
Mating effort is often unconscious by evolutionary design, because people benefit from having plausible deniability about whether they’re really trying to attract mates (e.g. to minimize interference from sexual rivals, to save face after sexual rejections, & to keep any current mates from being jealous). This leads to ‘adaptive self-deception’ about what they’re really doing, and why. But we can still empirically study the effects of mating effort by seeing how it’s influenced by the contextual/environmental factors (e.g. it tends to be lower when local sexual norms inhibit courtship).
So what I’m really trying to argue here is that if EA’s sexual norms over-correct for sexual harassment issues by going in an extremely sex-negative direction, without any understanding or acceptance of how mating effort drives a lot of human intellectual, moral, and social life, then we will (1) reduce the formation of happy romantic relationships within EA (which is a significant cost in terms of sentient well-being), and (2) take some of the (unconscious) motivation for excellence and morality out of EA work and social networking.
PS—for folks who have disagree-voted on my post here, I’d appreciate any feedback on which specific ideas or arguments you disagree with.
The main reason I disagree is that to me it seems plainly obvious that it’s far better for a community organiser’s motivations to be related to earning respect/advancing their career/helping others, rather than their reason for participating in EA being so they can have more sex. This is because, if they’re motivated by wanting to have more sex, then this predictably leads to more drama and more sexual harrassment.
I also don’t think you did enough to back up the inference “lots of people are motivated by sex, therefore we should try to harness this, instead of encouraging people to suppress these instincts in problematic contexts”.
As a comparison, lots of people get excited by conflict and gossip too. That doesn’t automatically mean we should be trying to harness, rather than suppress those things
Also the claim that
”We’ll end up as lonely, dispirited incels rowing our little boats around in circles, afraid to reach out, afraid to fall in love.”
Srikes me as patently false given myself and many people I know personally who engage with EA have partners from outside the EA community
Signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues is not the same as signaling social power by leading events.
To the extent that people have power through their roles, that’s not directly about signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues.
Christian—you’re right that signaling intelligence during events is not the same as signaling social power by leading events.
However, why do you think people are motivated to seek power, status, prestige, influence, etc in the first place? Does (unconscious) mating effort play no role at all in these goals?
In every culture that’s been studied so far (and indeed in every sexually-reproductive highly social species that’s been studied so far), leadership, power, status, and prestige tend to be romantically attractive, and mating effort tends to drive a lot of status-seeking and leadership-motivation. This is why ‘hypergamy’ (desire to mate ‘upwards’ in terms of status and dominance) is a common pattern in social primates.
I guess the EA subculture could take the view that both hypergamy (as a mate preference) and status-seeking (as a mating strategy) are morally illegitimate, and should not be tolerated. But, again, I think that carries a lot of hidden costs for our movement.
These are obviously tricky issues, and it can be very difficult for us to acknowledge many of our unconscious motivations. But I hope that EAs reading these posts and comments will take some time to ruminate on their own mate preferences and motivations, and the roles that they have played—for better or worse—in their own intellectual and moral lives.
I really don’t think the crux is people who disagree with you being unwilling to acknowledge their unconscious motivations. I fully admit that sometimes I experience desires to do unsavory things such as
- Say something cruel to a person that annoys me
- Smack a child when they misbehave
- Cheat on my taxes
- Gossip about people in a negative way behind their backs
- Eat the last slice of pizza without offering it to anyone else
- Not stick to my GWWC pledge
- Leave my litter on the ground instead of carrying it to a bin
- Lie to a family member and say “I’m busy” when they ask me to help them with home repairs
- Be unfaithful to my spouse
- etc.
If you like, for sake of argument let’s even grant that for all the nice things I’ve ever done for others, ultimately I only did them because I was subconsciously trying to attract more mates (leaving aside the issue that if this was my goal, EA would be a terribly inefficient means by which to achieve it).
Even if we grant that that’s how my subconscious motivations are operating, it still doesn’t matter. It’s still better for me to not go around hitting on women at EA events, and the EA movement is still better off if I’m incentivised not to do it.
Maybe all men have have a part of ourselves which wants to live the life of Genghis Khan and torture our enemies and impregnate every attractive person we ever lay eyes on—but if that were true, that wouldn’t imply it’s ethical or rational to indulge that fantasy! And it definitely wouldn’t imply that the EA project would be better off if we designed our cultural norms+taboos+signals of prestige in ways which encourage it.
The better I am at not giving in to these shitty base urges, and the more the culture around me supports and rewards me for not doing these degenerate things, the happier I will be in the long run and the more positive the impact I have on those around me will be.
Geoffrey Miller fighting the good fight, upvoted.