I feel like there’s an implicit prediction of something like [communities with intelligent people which have lots of causal sex are going to be worse at dealing with sexual assualt/harrassment] and I kind of want to note my reaction being ‘given my personal experience i dont really believe this and all else equal I would feel safer in such communities’
I can see why you think that, but I actually wasn’t motivated in writing this post by concerns about sexual assault. Sexual assault is obviously a huge issue, but I don’t think of it as something like “a subset of sexual behaviour” or “sex gone wrong”, but instead something qualitatively different. Sexual harassment is somewhat trickier as it can be more grey (what’s appropriate flirting in one context can be sexual harassment in another), but the main things I was thinking of were more like people being creeped out/feeling uncomfortable or bad community dynamics as opposed to things like people being abused (I don’t know that my proposals would decrease abuse).
you only really have so many dumb mistakes to make and I would prefer it if, unlike Owen, people could get these out of their system while young and not yet in leadership positions
I would prefer it if people made more of their awkward mistakes outside of the community. You didn’t bring this up, but I’d especially prefer this if people are “practicing their dating skills” or similar (which is a thing some people do). I think online dating provides a place for people to make awkward mistakes with very low relative harms, as neither of you have to see each other again if it becomes awkward. This also brings up a point that the traits I mentioned aren’t essentialist, as someone who is socially clumsy now might not be socially clumsy anymore within a few years.
i mean i guess there’s a whole spectrum from sexual assault to harrassment to plain old social awkwardness but “how safe i would feel” is a pretty good proxy both for how common I believe these things are and how likely I am to feel creeped out/feel uncomfortable
like “being creeped out/uncomfortable” is for most people at least something of a truth-tracking thing and we should optimise for the thing it’s trying to track
[quite importantly “be legibly safe to my system 1″ is a very different thing to “try to Goodhart on my system 1′s sense of safety”!]
I can see why you think that, but I actually wasn’t motivated in writing this post by concerns about sexual assault. Sexual assault is obviously a huge issue, but I don’t think of it as something like “a subset of sexual behaviour” or “sex gone wrong”, but instead something qualitatively different. Sexual harassment is somewhat trickier as it can be more grey (what’s appropriate flirting in one context can be sexual harassment in another), but the main things I was thinking of were more like people being creeped out/feeling uncomfortable or bad community dynamics as opposed to things like people being abused (I don’t know that my proposals would decrease abuse).
I would prefer it if people made more of their awkward mistakes outside of the community. You didn’t bring this up, but I’d especially prefer this if people are “practicing their dating skills” or similar (which is a thing some people do). I think online dating provides a place for people to make awkward mistakes with very low relative harms, as neither of you have to see each other again if it becomes awkward. This also brings up a point that the traits I mentioned aren’t essentialist, as someone who is socially clumsy now might not be socially clumsy anymore within a few years.
i mean i guess there’s a whole spectrum from sexual assault to harrassment to plain old social awkwardness
but “how safe i would feel” is a pretty good proxy both for how common I believe these things are and how likely I am to feel creeped out/feel uncomfortable
like “being creeped out/uncomfortable” is for most people at least something of a truth-tracking thing and we should optimise for the thing it’s trying to track
[quite importantly “be legibly safe to my system 1″ is a very different thing to “try to Goodhart on my system 1′s sense of safety”!]