Yeah, I was also unsure about this. In the original Google Doc, I had the comment:
I sure feel like this is going to confuse people, but not sure what else to do. Any help would be appreciated.
Highlighting the word metamour. If someone has a better word for that, or a good alternative explanation, that would be good.
I think I would eventually want this policy to be public and linked from our funds page, though it should probably go through at least one more round of editing before that.
Overall, I think if you want a good conflict of interest policy, you have to be concrete about things, which includes talking about things that in reality are often the sources of conflict of interest, which are pretty often messy romantic and sexual relationships and sharing weird intense experiences together. I don’t know of a way to both be concrete here, and not be off-putting, while also actually addressing many of these potential sources for COIs.
Go over this with a lawyer and let them formulate it right.
Replace ‘romantic and/or sexual’ with ‘intimate’.
Right now those terms are at the top level of the bullets. One could make them stand out less by turning the hierarchy around. Example:
Sufficient causes for recusal of a fund member: Applicant is a close family member, or is/was a romantic/sexual partner within the last year.
Not sufficient for recusal, but should be made public: Intimate relationship that lasted longer than two weeks and ended more than a year ago. / Current intimate relationship with a third person who is in an intimate relationship with the applicant.
Pull things together to make them more innocuous:
The fund member has shared particularly intense experiences with the applicant on the level of, eg. a week-long silent meditation retreat, a CFAR workshop, or a shared psychedelic experience.
Go over this with a lawyer and let them formulate it right.
Huh, I am a bit confused. This is not intended to be a legally binding document, so I am not sure how much a lawyer would help. Do you have any specific questions you would ask a lawyer? Or is it just because lawyers have a lot of experience writing clear documents like this?
Replace ‘romantic and/or sexual’ with ‘intimate’.
Yeah, I could see that, though it feels a bunch less clear to me, and maybe too broad? I don’t have a great model of what qualifies as an “intimate” relationship, but do feel pretty comfortable judging a romantic and/or sexual relationship.
I do like all of your edit suggestions, and will incorporate them sometime today.
Regarding the lawyer: Perhaps I have a wrong idea both about the legal nature of the document and about what a lawyer does. But yes, in my imagination a lawyer is able to advise you on how to formulate a policy clearly and remove vagueness. So I might go to the lawyer and ask: ‘If this were to be legally binding, how would we have to write it?’
My imagination might be wrong, though – I haven’t dealt with lawyers much.
My model suggests that a lawyer would say: “Very little of this is legally enforceable, I could help you write something legally enforceable, but it would be a much smaller subset of this document, and I don’t know how to help with the rest”.
Would be curious if people disagree. I also don’t have a ton of experience in dealing with lawyers.
Fwiw, I think you’re both right here. If you were to hire a reasonably good lawyer to help with this, I suspect the default is they’d say what Habryka suggests. That said, I also do think that lawyers are trained to do things like remove vagueness from policies.
Basically, I don’t think it’d be useful to hire a lawyer in their capacity as a lawyer. But, to the extent there happen to be lawyers among the people you’d consider asking for advice anyway, I’d expect them to be disproportionately good at this kind of thing.
[Source: I went to two years of law school but haven’t worked much with lawyers on this type of thing.]
Instead of metamour, you could expand to say “the partner or immediate family of your romantic partner”
(Metamour means partner of your partner, right?)
Yeah, I was also unsure about this. In the original Google Doc, I had the comment:
Highlighting the word metamour. If someone has a better word for that, or a good alternative explanation, that would be good.
I think I would eventually want this policy to be public and linked from our funds page, though it should probably go through at least one more round of editing before that.
Overall, I think if you want a good conflict of interest policy, you have to be concrete about things, which includes talking about things that in reality are often the sources of conflict of interest, which are pretty often messy romantic and sexual relationships and sharing weird intense experiences together. I don’t know of a way to both be concrete here, and not be off-putting, while also actually addressing many of these potential sources for COIs.
Some suggestions:
Go over this with a lawyer and let them formulate it right.
Replace ‘romantic and/or sexual’ with ‘intimate’.
Right now those terms are at the top level of the bullets. One could make them stand out less by turning the hierarchy around. Example:
Pull things together to make them more innocuous:
Huh, I am a bit confused. This is not intended to be a legally binding document, so I am not sure how much a lawyer would help. Do you have any specific questions you would ask a lawyer? Or is it just because lawyers have a lot of experience writing clear documents like this?
Yeah, I could see that, though it feels a bunch less clear to me, and maybe too broad? I don’t have a great model of what qualifies as an “intimate” relationship, but do feel pretty comfortable judging a romantic and/or sexual relationship.
I do like all of your edit suggestions, and will incorporate them sometime today.
Regarding the lawyer: Perhaps I have a wrong idea both about the legal nature of the document and about what a lawyer does. But yes, in my imagination a lawyer is able to advise you on how to formulate a policy clearly and remove vagueness. So I might go to the lawyer and ask: ‘If this were to be legally binding, how would we have to write it?’
My imagination might be wrong, though – I haven’t dealt with lawyers much.
My model suggests that a lawyer would say: “Very little of this is legally enforceable, I could help you write something legally enforceable, but it would be a much smaller subset of this document, and I don’t know how to help with the rest”.
Would be curious if people disagree. I also don’t have a ton of experience in dealing with lawyers.
Fwiw, I think you’re both right here. If you were to hire a reasonably good lawyer to help with this, I suspect the default is they’d say what Habryka suggests. That said, I also do think that lawyers are trained to do things like remove vagueness from policies.
Basically, I don’t think it’d be useful to hire a lawyer in their capacity as a lawyer. But, to the extent there happen to be lawyers among the people you’d consider asking for advice anyway, I’d expect them to be disproportionately good at this kind of thing.
[Source: I went to two years of law school but haven’t worked much with lawyers on this type of thing.]
Instead of metamour, you could expand to say “the partner or immediate family of your romantic partner” (Metamour means partner of your partner, right?)