Directly funding advocacy against particular relationship styles is something that we take seriously as a possible cause area: the numbers don’t currently seem to check out compared to alternatives, but a strong stance against child marriage seems like a very reasonable position for EA to take.
“community gatherings” is an incredibly vague category that stretches from “socializing over a meal at an EAG” to “dinner at someone’s house that they invited their friends, all of whom are EAs, to”. I don’t think it’s useful to try to identify events that way, and saying that people can’t have the latter because those events are not for helping others effectively is clearly too far. Personally, I think EAs are pretty good about not branding informal social events as EA Events TM, but that distinction in branding doesn’t necessarily mean that much to anyone.
There seems to be strong disagreement about my comment, so I’ll explain why I believe it’s somewhat arrogant for Effective Altruists to take a definite position in some relationship styles (certainly not all!):
(0) Like I said, this is a deep cultural issue, which evades many of the conventional tools of Effective Altruism. It doesn’t mean we cannot discuss it, or even have personal opinions, but it seems that we should avoid taking position on it (as a movement), without consensus of society, given we probably lack the expertise and tools to make such judgement.
(1) Some relationship styles probably have conventional (contemporary) wisdom to cause harm to people. That includes abuse, or things that form consensus in social sciences to be harmful. I don’t know much about customs around child marriage, but it seems like something that can be discussed, in light of cultural literature as well.
(2) It seems that polyamory is very much a cultural gray area, and I don’t think there’s any kind of consensus on whether it could be harmful and in what ways, or whether it could be good for individuals
(reminder: things like this need to be seen from many points of views, not only through studies, but also from personal experiences that are very complicated—think trying to justify numerically your favorite food. It’s very difficult, it tends to evade conclusive and analytic evidence, instead appealing to intuition and maybe long discussions on taste and other factors that elude this kind of argument)
(3) This sort of evades from the core of Effective Altruism, that is to address most urgent and effectively actionable causes. I don’t think policing relationship styles, around the community or not, or even minor cultural norms, is something we should focus on: again, unless we can back it from a social science consensus (and straightforward quality of life impacts), specifically because I don’t think this will prevent suffering one way or another as much as focusing on our mission.
I’d appreciate further feedback on those points or other points of disagreement.
Thank you for the response. I discarded my point by point response, because I think I have a more elegant explanation: I parse your argument as saying that because there is and should be a high degree of uncertainty around the net harm/benefit of polyamory, we should avoid taking a position on it.
I think that is a fine position to have. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant, because my parse of Keerthana Gopalakrishnan’s perspective is that she thinks polyamory is harmful and there is strong evidence for this.[1] And certainly critics of polyamory can point to a long anthropological tradition and a great number of studies, and advocates can note that those studies are for a wildly different context from modern international elites.
If polyamory is maybe slightly bad, then I think it’s reasonable for EA social consensus, let alone institutionalized EA, to favor letting people make their own choices. We don’t demand that every member eat an optimally healthy diet or practice gratitude journaling, in part because there are substantial differences between people and in part because people get to live their own lives.
If polyamory is very harmful and the evidence for this is very clear, and those harms can’t be pattern-matched exactly to an American gay man in 1970[2], then I would face a much more difficult set of questions. For some people polyamory seems to be intrinsic, and the bar for asking them to suppress that should be very high. I think that EAs should have a social consensus against relationships that we think are very likely to be harmful.
For example, many bright young people think that visa-motivated marriages are an obviously great idea. Having seen that obviously great idea crash and burn multiple times, with relatively few successes, and relatively causal explanations observed in the failures, I am now against it. I would advise a friend against it if they asked my opinion, and for a good friend perhaps even if they didn’t. And many EAs have EA friends.
I have recently seen someone try to claim that harms of polyamory are different because it’s not just social stigma: more people are affected because of multiple partners and STI risks are higher. Some people clearly don’t know queer history. Much of the “harms” of polyamory that critics raise in this piece seem to be exactly analogous to straight men being deeply offended at being propositioned by queer men.
Directly funding advocacy against particular relationship styles is something that we take seriously as a possible cause area: the numbers don’t currently seem to check out compared to alternatives, but a strong stance against child marriage seems like a very reasonable position for EA to take.
“community gatherings” is an incredibly vague category that stretches from “socializing over a meal at an EAG” to “dinner at someone’s house that they invited their friends, all of whom are EAs, to”. I don’t think it’s useful to try to identify events that way, and saying that people can’t have the latter because those events are not for helping others effectively is clearly too far. Personally, I think EAs are pretty good about not branding informal social events as EA Events TM, but that distinction in branding doesn’t necessarily mean that much to anyone.
There seems to be strong disagreement about my comment, so I’ll explain why I believe it’s somewhat arrogant for Effective Altruists to take a definite position in some relationship styles (certainly not all!):
(0) Like I said, this is a deep cultural issue, which evades many of the conventional tools of Effective Altruism. It doesn’t mean we cannot discuss it, or even have personal opinions, but it seems that we should avoid taking position on it (as a movement), without consensus of society, given we probably lack the expertise and tools to make such judgement.
(1) Some relationship styles probably have conventional (contemporary) wisdom to cause harm to people. That includes abuse, or things that form consensus in social sciences to be harmful. I don’t know much about customs around child marriage, but it seems like something that can be discussed, in light of cultural literature as well.
(2) It seems that polyamory is very much a cultural gray area, and I don’t think there’s any kind of consensus on whether it could be harmful and in what ways, or whether it could be good for individuals
(reminder: things like this need to be seen from many points of views, not only through studies, but also from personal experiences that are very complicated—think trying to justify numerically your favorite food. It’s very difficult, it tends to evade conclusive and analytic evidence, instead appealing to intuition and maybe long discussions on taste and other factors that elude this kind of argument)
(3) This sort of evades from the core of Effective Altruism, that is to address most urgent and effectively actionable causes. I don’t think policing relationship styles, around the community or not, or even minor cultural norms, is something we should focus on: again, unless we can back it from a social science consensus (and straightforward quality of life impacts), specifically because I don’t think this will prevent suffering one way or another as much as focusing on our mission.
I’d appreciate further feedback on those points or other points of disagreement.
Thank you for the response. I discarded my point by point response, because I think I have a more elegant explanation: I parse your argument as saying that because there is and should be a high degree of uncertainty around the net harm/benefit of polyamory, we should avoid taking a position on it.
I think that is a fine position to have. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant, because my parse of Keerthana Gopalakrishnan’s perspective is that she thinks polyamory is harmful and there is strong evidence for this.[1] And certainly critics of polyamory can point to a long anthropological tradition and a great number of studies, and advocates can note that those studies are for a wildly different context from modern international elites.
If polyamory is maybe slightly bad, then I think it’s reasonable for EA social consensus, let alone institutionalized EA, to favor letting people make their own choices. We don’t demand that every member eat an optimally healthy diet or practice gratitude journaling, in part because there are substantial differences between people and in part because people get to live their own lives.
If polyamory is very harmful and the evidence for this is very clear, and those harms can’t be pattern-matched exactly to an American gay man in 1970[2], then I would face a much more difficult set of questions. For some people polyamory seems to be intrinsic, and the bar for asking them to suppress that should be very high. I think that EAs should have a social consensus against relationships that we think are very likely to be harmful.
For example, many bright young people think that visa-motivated marriages are an obviously great idea. Having seen that obviously great idea crash and burn multiple times, with relatively few successes, and relatively causal explanations observed in the failures, I am now against it. I would advise a friend against it if they asked my opinion, and for a good friend perhaps even if they didn’t. And many EAs have EA friends.
That point is not made explicitly, but it is hard to parse her as having any other stance based on her writing and the tone of the Time piece.
I have recently seen someone try to claim that harms of polyamory are different because it’s not just social stigma: more people are affected because of multiple partners and STI risks are higher. Some people clearly don’t know queer history. Much of the “harms” of polyamory that critics raise in this piece seem to be exactly analogous to straight men being deeply offended at being propositioned by queer men.