I will not be a part of community which treats conscious and consensual behavior of adult people as their business
I may be reading you overly literally, but I think you’re saying that we should not as a community, strongly discourage, say, grantmakers from sleeping with grantees. As long as its consensual and they’re thoughtful about the power dynamics it’s just their decision, right? But this ignores issues like:
Other grantees would then feel pressured to sleep with grantmakers, leading to bad interactions (even ones where all the signals that the grantmaker receives are that the grantee wants this).
The funders behind the grantmaker may reasonably worry that the grantmaker’s judgement is clouded by their otherwise positive views towards this grantee or that there was quid pro quo.
People may choose to become grantmakers with poor intentions because a norm of “it’s ok to sleep with grantees” is very vulnerable to abuse.
If you think we should draw lines excluding this, however, and I hope you do, then we should be thinking about what lines we want as a community, not insisting that we refuse to be bound by any lines.
I’d feel a lot more comfortable about this post if it were “EAs having ~casual relationships with other EAs is a good thing generally but here’s how we can limit the worse spillover effects” than like, “please be less horny”
I’m not saying that age/power/money/any other differences should be ignored when it comes to consent. I believe we should, as a general rule in the community, discourage grantmakers sleeping with grantees. This post, however, doesn’t stop there, at least to my understanding. And this is what I disagree with.
If you think we should discourage grantmakers from sleeping with grantees but no further, what about managers and reports, highly senior and junior staff at an org who don’t share a management chain, senior researchers and junior researchers in the same field, or community builders and people just joining the community? -- Possibly you were trying to say this with your first sentence; not sure?
What I’m trying to get at here is that determining what sorts of interactions the community should discourage is complex, and asserting strong generic dating rights makes it harder to muddle out.
Yes, I was saying it in my first sentence. Everything which goes beyond that is crossing personal boundaries (at least of mine). This post in my opinion doesn’t talk about the examples you’ve mentioned above. It talks about two people who have no professional connection, but happen to be EA, at least to my understanding. Is my position clear to you now? If not, please let me know, I’ll try to explain it better.
I guess I think this reply is sort of not helpful. The OP was clearly about more than grantmakers and grantees, and other situations where there’s a clear power dynamic. I feel like in a lot of these interactions you are bringing up hypotheticals to refute people’s firm statements, but it’s hard to see what you actually think. Like do you disagree with OP? If so, why are you nitpicking people who also disagree with OP? Do you agree with OP? Or a limited form of it? If so, just say that and let other people have their emotional reactions.
Anyway I want to say I agree with Liv throughout this comment section.
Do you disagree with OP? … Do you agree with OP? Or a limited form of it? If so, just say that...
I did try to say what I think, in my top-level comment. To be more explicit, though, I mostly agree but think that it’s missing important considerations even on its own terms. I think it’s good for EAs to think over the issues raised in the post and the comments, and expect that when some people do that they’ll decide to change how they approach interactions within EA. I think on balance the ways people make decisions about who to sleep with after reading this post will lead them to be slightly personally happier, and will also lead to a slightly healthier EA community.
Why are you nitpicking people?
People are often responding by saying that the only acceptable norm is consent, but then it turns out that they actually are in favor of stricter norms in a variety of situations. As someone who is interested in figuring out whether there are better norms it makes sense to try and push the community towards, I think it’s important that we acknowledge that both current norms and ideal norms are more complex than “anything consensual.” I followed up with Consent Isn’t Always Enough to get into this more.
Let other people have their emotional reactions.
I agree it’s important for people to be able to have emotional reactions and process things, but I think a Forum culture of ignoring the text of what people are actually saying would be disrespectful and harmful.
I may be reading you overly literally, but I think you’re saying that we should not as a community, strongly discourage, say, grantmakers from sleeping with grantees. As long as its consensual and they’re thoughtful about the power dynamics it’s just their decision, right? But this ignores issues like:
Other grantees would then feel pressured to sleep with grantmakers, leading to bad interactions (even ones where all the signals that the grantmaker receives are that the grantee wants this).
The funders behind the grantmaker may reasonably worry that the grantmaker’s judgement is clouded by their otherwise positive views towards this grantee or that there was quid pro quo.
People may choose to become grantmakers with poor intentions because a norm of “it’s ok to sleep with grantees” is very vulnerable to abuse.
If you think we should draw lines excluding this, however, and I hope you do, then we should be thinking about what lines we want as a community, not insisting that we refuse to be bound by any lines.
I’d feel a lot more comfortable about this post if it were “EAs having ~casual relationships with other EAs is a good thing generally but here’s how we can limit the worse spillover effects” than like, “please be less horny”
I’m not saying that age/power/money/any other differences should be ignored when it comes to consent. I believe we should, as a general rule in the community, discourage grantmakers sleeping with grantees. This post, however, doesn’t stop there, at least to my understanding. And this is what I disagree with.
If you think we should discourage grantmakers from sleeping with grantees but no further, what about managers and reports, highly senior and junior staff at an org who don’t share a management chain, senior researchers and junior researchers in the same field, or community builders and people just joining the community? -- Possibly you were trying to say this with your first sentence; not sure?
What I’m trying to get at here is that determining what sorts of interactions the community should discourage is complex, and asserting strong generic dating rights makes it harder to muddle out.
Yes, I was saying it in my first sentence. Everything which goes beyond that is crossing personal boundaries (at least of mine). This post in my opinion doesn’t talk about the examples you’ve mentioned above. It talks about two people who have no professional connection, but happen to be EA, at least to my understanding.
Is my position clear to you now? If not, please let me know, I’ll try to explain it better.
Thanks! I understand your view a lot better than I did initially!
I guess I think this reply is sort of not helpful. The OP was clearly about more than grantmakers and grantees, and other situations where there’s a clear power dynamic. I feel like in a lot of these interactions you are bringing up hypotheticals to refute people’s firm statements, but it’s hard to see what you actually think. Like do you disagree with OP? If so, why are you nitpicking people who also disagree with OP? Do you agree with OP? Or a limited form of it? If so, just say that and let other people have their emotional reactions.
Anyway I want to say I agree with Liv throughout this comment section.
I did try to say what I think, in my top-level comment. To be more explicit, though, I mostly agree but think that it’s missing important considerations even on its own terms. I think it’s good for EAs to think over the issues raised in the post and the comments, and expect that when some people do that they’ll decide to change how they approach interactions within EA. I think on balance the ways people make decisions about who to sleep with after reading this post will lead them to be slightly personally happier, and will also lead to a slightly healthier EA community.
People are often responding by saying that the only acceptable norm is consent, but then it turns out that they actually are in favor of stricter norms in a variety of situations. As someone who is interested in figuring out whether there are better norms it makes sense to try and push the community towards, I think it’s important that we acknowledge that both current norms and ideal norms are more complex than “anything consensual.” I followed up with Consent Isn’t Always Enough to get into this more.
I agree it’s important for people to be able to have emotional reactions and process things, but I think a Forum culture of ignoring the text of what people are actually saying would be disrespectful and harmful.