To push back on this slightly, I do think the [replace poly with gay] intuition pump works though I think I’ll talk about [replace poly with Christian] so as to use a less contentious example. Imagine we found out that Christian EAs might be worse? Would we ask for a community-wide norm against them? I think the idea makes me pretty queasy.
My norm here is that to infringe upon people’s liberty, you need to be much more certain than other kinds of proposals, perhaps that the benefits 5 − 10x the harms.
I am not sure of that in this case, and I don’t think anyone other than @HaydenW has attempted a quantification of this. I don’t think we know what women in EA want, let alone EAs in general.
And likewise I think I could make a utility case, that we are trying to think clearly about things and that we are going to run into culture war concerns eventually and that we should learn to think well about them. I’m open to being wrong her, but while “politics is the mindkiller” if you get big enough, you need to engage with politics and at that point, having engaged positively with mindkilling topics might be positive.
All this said I’m pretty open to the idea that we should insitute such a norm (against kinds of casual sex) but I think we should be much more confident than we are and I’d like to see some number and what a representative sample of EAs/possible EAs think.
I think if we can reliably target the impact of a change then it is a targeted change. Perhaps that’s good, as I say, I am okay with targeted changes. But this is fundamentally a bit like changes targeted at other groups and our intuitions carry over, I think.
To push back on this slightly, I do think the [replace poly with gay] intuition pump works though I think I’ll talk about [replace poly with Christian] so as to use a less contentious example. Imagine we found out that Christian EAs might be worse? Would we ask for a community-wide norm against them? I think the idea makes me pretty queasy.
My norm here is that to infringe upon people’s liberty, you need to be much more certain than other kinds of proposals, perhaps that the benefits 5 − 10x the harms.
I am not sure of that in this case, and I don’t think anyone other than @HaydenW has attempted a quantification of this. I don’t think we know what women in EA want, let alone EAs in general.
And likewise I think I could make a utility case, that we are trying to think clearly about things and that we are going to run into culture war concerns eventually and that we should learn to think well about them. I’m open to being wrong her, but while “politics is the mindkiller” if you get big enough, you need to engage with politics and at that point, having engaged positively with mindkilling topics might be positive.
All this said I’m pretty open to the idea that we should insitute such a norm (against kinds of casual sex) but I think we should be much more confident than we are and I’d like to see some number and what a representative sample of EAs/possible EAs think.
Is anyone suggesting a “community-wide norm against” any particular group of people?
The original post’s recommendation has a disparate impact on different groups, which is relevant but not the same as a group-targeted norm.
I think if we can reliably target the impact of a change then it is a targeted change. Perhaps that’s good, as I say, I am okay with targeted changes. But this is fundamentally a bit like changes targeted at other groups and our intuitions carry over, I think.