I think what I said about getting laid as an incentive to showing up was rather misunderstood. I’m not actually good at being precise, and this issue makes it harder for me to speak carefully.
I’m drawing here on two core sets of background ideas, one is the ssc essay about the Fabian society, where it seems like one of the things that made them extremely effective was that the group meetings were an excellent place for people to meet a large set of their social needs (including finding marriage partners), and not just a place where they talked about socialism.
The second is that I grew up in a church where one of the things everyone knew was that one reason young people went to church meetings was to meet other young Christians to date. This was part of why it worked as a cohesive community.
Based on these models I expect communities where people form romantic relationships inside the community to end up more cohesive, more successful, and more functional in terms of their mission than communities where this is disallowed.
Of course nothing here disagrees directly with the idea that ‘sleeping around is bad.’
I suppose I get to disliking that as a statement of a norm because it sounds (to me) sex puritanical, and because it is saying (in my head) that the members of our community are not adults who can make their own choices about how to live their lives and who to sleep with. And, frankly because of the whole context that makes me interpret things unchraritably.
A norm of generally don’t hit on newbies until they’ve been around for a while is probably good (though details in implementation matter!) .
I think there is also a distinction between people like me who see EA primarily as a social organization built around a set of ideas, rather than those who see it as a professional network. The rules for a social network are, and should be different. But part of the strength of EA is that it is both, and unfortunately the two seem to be in tension (and not just around this issue—the whole who gets to go to EA global is another example of the same problem).
I also suspect that EA without a social cloud around the professionals is dead in the long run, because the just here to hang out and talk people are where the money for those jobs come from (and if that view is correct, the way to make EA strongest in the long run is to make it a good social group, and hanging out with cool people where there is a chance you might meet someone to date really is almost always strictly better than the same social group where there is no chance of that).
One last point: The current scandals are caused by visibility and maybe sbf. People out there are trying to attack EA by actively looking for the worst sort of true things they can say about the community. Taking what those attacks say as representative of the community is a serious mistake.
I think what I said about getting laid as an incentive to showing up was rather misunderstood. I’m not actually good at being precise, and this issue makes it harder for me to speak carefully.
I’m drawing here on two core sets of background ideas, one is the ssc essay about the Fabian society, where it seems like one of the things that made them extremely effective was that the group meetings were an excellent place for people to meet a large set of their social needs (including finding marriage partners), and not just a place where they talked about socialism.
The second is that I grew up in a church where one of the things everyone knew was that one reason young people went to church meetings was to meet other young Christians to date. This was part of why it worked as a cohesive community.
Based on these models I expect communities where people form romantic relationships inside the community to end up more cohesive, more successful, and more functional in terms of their mission than communities where this is disallowed.
Of course nothing here disagrees directly with the idea that ‘sleeping around is bad.’
I suppose I get to disliking that as a statement of a norm because it sounds (to me) sex puritanical, and because it is saying (in my head) that the members of our community are not adults who can make their own choices about how to live their lives and who to sleep with. And, frankly because of the whole context that makes me interpret things unchraritably.
A norm of generally don’t hit on newbies until they’ve been around for a while is probably good (though details in implementation matter!) .
I think there is also a distinction between people like me who see EA primarily as a social organization built around a set of ideas, rather than those who see it as a professional network. The rules for a social network are, and should be different. But part of the strength of EA is that it is both, and unfortunately the two seem to be in tension (and not just around this issue—the whole who gets to go to EA global is another example of the same problem).
I also suspect that EA without a social cloud around the professionals is dead in the long run, because the just here to hang out and talk people are where the money for those jobs come from (and if that view is correct, the way to make EA strongest in the long run is to make it a good social group, and hanging out with cool people where there is a chance you might meet someone to date really is almost always strictly better than the same social group where there is no chance of that).
One last point: The current scandals are caused by visibility and maybe sbf. People out there are trying to attack EA by actively looking for the worst sort of true things they can say about the community. Taking what those attacks say as representative of the community is a serious mistake.