Surprised at the amount of upvotes on the main post, versus the highly upvoted comments talking about being scared, judged, frustrated, etc.
Personally I agree strongly with this post and think it’s a more than reasonable proposal. Also, just seems like common sense. I’d imagine there are quite a few people who feel similarly based on the vote count.
It seems that an extremely large proportion of EAF users are die hard proponents of casual sex and polyamory, which makes this conversation fraught. I’ll also be honest—I get the sense than many defenders of these non-traditional norms within the EA community argue from a stance of emotion and don’t really engage with the idea that promoting polyamory could massively reduce our overall utility as a movement.
Using language and framing like “what if you replace poly with gay” or “personally this makes me feel…” is not compatible with calculating the utility of a norm in EA. As stated elsewhere our goal is to better the world, not make ourselves happy or help EAs find life partners.
I understand this is a deeply personal topic but I would appreciate someone laying out a strong case for why polyamory and casual sex in the EA community actually leads to higher utility overall.
[This comment has been heavily edited since it got a response]
[So, I’m responding to a comment asking for the utility case about casual sex and poly. But I realized I focused exclusively on consensual casual sex within the community because that is the only piece I view as possibly worth engaging with, and it is what the post is about. I don’t have notable-feelings about in-company relations or COI relations so I wouldn’t go out of my way to defend them, and I do NOT think anti-poly-feelings hold water so I’m not wasting my time on that. There is no reason to feel the need to defend polyamory on ethical grounds. It’s as ethical as monogamy, period. That said, I will push back on the lumping together of poly and casual sex in the first place. In my mind, the people who have the most casual sex historically have been like… college kids and people between relationships. These are both groups who will probably end up in monogamous relationships for life. I really don’t get why people conflate casual sex and poly. Casual sex and open relationships? Sure, that’s kind of their thing. Casual sex and single people (both mono and poly)? Sure, that’s how a lot of modern dating gets started and how people blow steam off when they aren’t ready for a relationship. Casual sex and in-relationship poly people? I’m not sold because each relationship has its own rules and for the most part people do go on dates and think carefully of where to spend their time, time which is limited greatly by already having a partner.]
Why do you think casual sex is bad for utility of the movement? It actually doesn’t go without proving. I admit that was my intuition too, when I started thinking about it. But tbh after considering the other hypothesis equally (my gf facetiously was like “lmao EA is really gonna lose what it has going for it without sexual freedom” and I went “wait what” and thought about it), I have changed my mind.
So anyway I’ll make the “sexual freedom within community is good for utility” argument:
[At first glance and often in practice,] EA is either (pick your poison): (1) a doomery apocalypse cult or (2) a morally strict self-flagellating mass of tithers and minimalists. On the other hand, we do poly and flexible sexual connections and those of us who are engaged in those things will even try and help you figure out if it’s for you. Poly is fun[1]. Sex is fun. Play and curiosity are fun. These are some of the major fun things our community does have going for it when comes to hedonism [and utopian way of life, over the rest of society.]
[I want to clarify the term “fun”. I’m afraid that people will think that “fun”, cuz it’s a one-syllable word used by children, is a trivial experience. It isn’t. It’s a complex experience pairing joy with surprise and with acute presence and focus in the world and with lightness of being. Fun is the ultimate “being in the present moment joyfully” experience. It’s basically the hedonic holy grail.]
I’m also, in thinking it aids impact, not talking about using sex as a lure to get people out to events or something. I’m talking about making the lifestyle sustainable and nice and liberating for the people in it. Increasing connection. Increasing joy and laughs. Sex is something special and it leads to special things, not just moans and groans. Even if you do it casually it leads to special things. It’s a shortcut to connection. [More than sexual connection—I mean real human-to-human connection that comes after you’ve engaged intimately. Then a new type of interpersonal comfort emerges. This is very similar to the point made in the top comment of this post, but I’m trying to explain the mechanism and ground it so people who have not experienced it can see it as real and these types of casual explorations as inherently valuable. You know it yourself if you have ever had a new friend who you have stayed up all night with after hooking up, or who, the new hookup opened space in your friendship for increased texting/memesharing/asking each other big questions about the world/etc. I even know one couple in the animal welfare sector who I think are now engaged whose relationship started out with casual sex: they went on a date but it was really lame according to them and they had “no chemistry”. But they (consensually and both knowing what it meant to go back to someone’s place after a date) decided to go back to his and have a one-night stand anyway. Yano for kicks, in a may-as-well-get-some-pleasure kind of way. But then something shifted after they hooked up and they pulled an all nighter talking together. At least, this is what they told me (and some others around). As I say, IIRC they are now engaged, but either way they have been in an enriching relationship for 3+ years now which they surely treasure deeply and which has surely helped with their animal welfare impact.]
Now the apocalypse thing: Many EAs especially want this interpersonal connection shortcut and freedom when a lot of us are afraid we don’t even have that many years left on this earth even. I’m sorry but I’m already hearing friends talk about reducing their interest in AI safety work because they want to cross things off their bucket list before we all die. People are literally spending down their retirement accounts and we’ve just begun to see real worrying AI progress. You make EA and longtermist spaces sex-negative,and I’m just not sure people are gonna keep giving it their all til the end. We may see darker nights ahead than we are now and yet those nights might still have hope and we wouldn’t want people to leave EA the way normies will be flocking away from corporate jobs and stifling culture. Who keeps their 9-to-5 when the world ends ~next month? Nobody. They go and hang out with their loved ones. This will sound dramatic at first glance. But I’m not saying people will leave EA as soon as it becomes more sex negative, I’m saying that the more sex-negative EA becomes, the lower the critical mass of dread is required to abandon your post.*
Now the tithing, self-flagellation thing: Let’s be real, getting involved in this community has been known to prompt onset of a lot of burnout at best and serious mental health struggles at worst. [And this might unfortunately be a bug of the philosophy. It might be stifling by nature, at least in early stages. Read the section “Bad” EAs Caught In a Misery Trap” here: https://michaelnotebook.com/eanotes/ So, firstly, I don’t want EA to become more stifling than it already can feel, or not more stifling in a way that actually feels stifling (there are other norms we could adopt). This seems bad for the weirdos in it (and yup we are basically all weirdos for now). Second, the more deep connections people make with eachother in the beginning (and I argue connections are shortcutted via consensual sex, these are adults after all), the more help people can get moving from [early EA full of shame] to [experienced EA happy to make tradeoffs and prioritize their own wellbeing]. This was actually my experience. I came into EA a hardcore minimalist who was using my altruism obsession to suppress myself, so much so I was really ineffective. Then after hooking up with a certain EA which led to to-this-day friendship and an ongoing romantic relationship at-that-time with that EA, I ended up witnessing how to do EA more sustainably from that person and their friends. It was a big relief, at first I could hardly trust that it was morally okay to say, order random things on amazon or go out for fancy dinner or hire a house cleaner, I had so shamed myself about altruism and money. I think I’d have learned anyway how to make my altruism more sustainable and efficient (I’d have had to), but getting consensually involved with one person who knew the rhythm of it all probably helped me skip a lot of guilt and just move forward faster.]
That we are all high in the “openness to new experience” personality trait, and nonjudgmental about alternative lifestyles including dating styles, actually matters too. I think few people are gonna want to sign up to EA if it’s also a constant HR meeting with the same “you can only bring one partner to the Christmas party” vibe. The people who stick hardest to EA are the weirdos and the people with a healthy distrust in authority and prescribed standards. Despite the ivy league outreach, I think that remains the case. For people like that, social scripts just raise question marks and side-eyes, and seem unhealthy. We want to attract early adopter types. We can’t do that by trying to pattern-match everyone else. I think EA might fall into a trap of trying to “please all of the people all of the time” and that isn’t going to work. We can’t be everything. And if we can’t be everything, it will be a lot more efficient to be ourselves rather than pretend to be something we are not. Give the new members caveats to reduce feelings of discomfort, and kick out the grifters trying to just get laid, but our existing members (the actual EAs tryna work on stuff, not the EAdjacents/grifters) still are served by being who they are. I don’t think you can remove one of the weirdest aspects of EA and expect the other weird and good ways of thinking to flourish in the same way tbh. I really value what EA has going for it and I don’t even want to risk making big cultural changes like that without really good proven reason. Forum reflections are not enough reason for changes so big as a swathe of people forcing themselves to change their preferences and increase their disgust reactions or whatever, anything to get themselves to uphold arbitrary norms about sexual connection within community. At least, I don’t want to risk it yet. I might change my mind next week, but right now it feels rash. The norms of allowing casual sex within community (it’s not even a huge thing tbh but my point is that it’s allowed and many people don’t look twice at you for giving it a go) evolved with effective altruism, in the past say half-dozen years especially. If you think EA kind of discovered a lot in that time, we should be very wary to push back on the norms we have. Maybe our growth and what has been figured out is a little bit due to sexual connection which created a little innovator soup that gave us a lot of great ideas and curated high-trust ingroup spaces to discuss them in. Just maybe an effect like that is enough to tip the scale toward “these norms are actively net positive.” I don’t know that yet, but I at least won’t say confidently that they are net negative so I’ll stay out of people’s business.
Also finally, this is maybe the best reason to destigmatize casual sex within the EA community. I want EA to be the future. I want the philosophy to spread such that almost every person is, by some degree, an EA. I know that we don’t need 100% of humanity working on the world’s most important problems. But I do want future humans to value doing good efficiently. I do want EA to become way way bigger than it is now. We shouldn’t think EA is going to remain tiny and there will always be other people to fool around with if that’s a fundamental life experience you want to have. We should take on a mantle of trying to not only impact the future, but be the future, because we can’t even protect the future if our values don’t spread into it and broaden to more universal ways of life. We should figure out how to live our lives coherently, when we want, within EA just fine, rather than fractioning EA into a smaller box of one’s life. If people want to separate EA from their broader life, that’s fine! But don’t force people who don’t want to, to do it. Those are the people who I think are doing the work of figuring out how to integrate EA with a vision of social utopia. We will doubtless fumble a few balls on the way to the goal, but that doesn’t mean we should advocate for people to get off the field and stop trying. Sex-positivity will be an aspect of a utopia. I believe that anyway. So sex-positivity should be a part of EA. And anyway, if EA grows so big, this rule about not hooking up with community members won’t even be sustainable, it would cut out too many people from the population and we’d have people twiddling their thumbs for want of people to test the waters and explore sexuality with. That would, I think, be net negative. Well, I argue it’s a difference in scale, not of kind, to stigmatize casual sex today, from a moral POV.
I don’t even want to see terminology like “sleeping around” on the forum tbh, which to me is inherently stigmatizing at worst, and at best trivializes the niceness and essential humanness of the experience people are trying to have. Even if they are mistaken in how they are using the tool, how can we surely say yet that the tool has little use? Sure, maybe some people are trying to have causal sex stupidly and riskfully (although I have seen nothing of the sort myself), and perhaps some people don’t want casual sex and need a piece like the above post to help them consider what they really want. But maybe we can help people do what they want less stupidly and find what they really want, without stigmatizing casual sex.
You might not buy these arguments but people who have casual sex might. Let them decide. If you don’t feel too awkward, you can ask people about it. Same as I might ask an EA “Why do you eat meat?” If they say “I think it’s better for my impact” I will drop the question. But If they say “yeah I’d really like to go veg actually” I will help them with that, or if they say “it’s too hard to go veg” I will ask them if they would like to know how easy it can be to go lactovegetarian. Similarly you can ask someone something about their casual connections (or poly) and if they say “I think it’s better for me and does no harm, we both had fun, and it’s none of anyone’s business also” you can drop it. If they say “yeah tbh I’m actually trying to find a relationship”, “yeah I’m worried about my career and this helps me feel more sure in mentoring and the like”, or (big oof) “IDK she’s hot right?” then you can totally offer to talk with them about those things and suggest ways of being which are kinder to themselves and others.
So let people pick what makes them happy where they can get it, I think there are better solutions if we keep looking than cultural mandates about consensual bedroom practices.
But I have other norms I think would work way better than [blanket increased finger wagging at people sleeping around] plus [increased guilt and self-suppression for those interested in sleeping around who are most vulnerable to guilt]. Those two are what I think this suggestion will amount to. I can write those alternative other norms up if people are interested.
Oh yeah, fyi I also have no horse in this race personally. Not these days for sure. I’m ambiamorous and I don’t really feel a deep burning need to love and create fun sexy times with anyone but my partner, and I haven’t dated (at least) anyone else basically our whole relationship. So if it were negative utility to not have casual sex in the community obviously I’d abide. But I do have an ethical compass that all people be treated well, including people with minority sexual inclinations, and people who want to dip their toe into things casually to learn about each other and learn how things work. My ethical compass demands that these people should be allowed to craft their own futures without stigmatization. Even if all that is precisely forseeable about that future at the moment of diving in is just one night of fun (again, fun being one of the most precious things ever), if there aren’t blatant costs in that particular interest (again like COI or in-company relationships), let people figure it out themselves. Curiosity and freedom are both intrinsic values of mine.
*I get that if people are bouncing off right now, that’s a problem that trades against this. But to me that isn’t conclusively proven. We need surveys. Soon hopefully. I do not want people to use their energy or their cultural attention budget on crafting a norm that we don’t even know will do any good. Not sleeping around doesn’t seem to meaningfully address most of the concerns I’ve even gleaned.
Poly is fun if you are well-suited to it. Monogamy can be just as fun if you are suited to that! I know because I’m an ambi-amorous person who is really liking living mono for right now
So as a poly/poly-adjacent EA of many years I’ll start by saying I strong upvoted your post and that insofar as a vision for a better tomorrow is concerned, your comment was poetry to my ears. I am very much aligned. Beautiful stuff.
However, this little nugget just keeps coming back to me and it irks me:
“On the other hand, we do poly and flexible sexual connections and those of us who are engaged in those things will even try and help you figure out if it’s for you. Poly is fun. Sex is fun. Play and curiosity are fun. These are some of the major fun things our community does have going for it when comes to hedonism [and utopian way of life, over the rest of society.]”
I think you’re making the poly-part of the community sound way more accessible than it actually is. You possibly have a blindspot here because you don’t know what it is like to be on the outside trying to get in (?).
So here’s the thing. If poly for you in the community is this fantastically amazing, then it is a tragedy of a vastly worse degree than many EAs might even realize that they can’t be part of it.
I’m reminded of some study I read about years ago that showed that the mental health of people in third world countries decreased markedly when they were shown just how much better off people in first world countries are. Those in the control group that showed clear ignorance over how Europeans lived were… Happier.
Honestly, after reading so much poly-discourse on the forum lately I’m very surprised this point hasn’t been raised. An obvious model for what is going on, in my head, is that the poly-backlash is part of a larger backlash against the “moral fulfillment and life fulfillment and career fulfillment and hedonism fulfillment and just-everything-important fulfillment” that is perceived to be held and disproportionately concentrated among few in EA.
Thanks, that’s great feedback. I’ve been thinking similarly kind of and your reflections help me put it together? Like I think it ties into the fears about gatekeeping which I think are maybe unconsciously comparative-resentment-based too. I think there is some counterargument to what I’m saying which goes something like: this sex positivity does create unequitable situations. It’s the opposite problem of sexual harrassment if it is true. But I’m not sold on that counterargument either.. if I could snap my fingers and sprinkle the value created from sex-positivity/sexual connection evenly throughout the community, I would do so. But I don’t think it works like that. I think there is actual new value created. Unfortunately sex-positivity is not yet one of those features where “a rising tide floats all boats”. It’s more like (to me) some boats are sped up by the sex positive-current and other boats miss the wave and just reach their destination the same time they counterfactually would have. That’s because I don’t see EA positions and social cohesion as win-lose situations, again I think value is just created. I think figuring out how to balance equity with overall prosperity, and how to frame it so no one feels jilted is a fundamental human problem I hope we keep toying with things to make it work.
That said, I will add that I’ve been poly for 15 years, but EA for only 5 years, so I never really tried to “get in” to EA poly or EA sex-positive spaces. I also don’t really identify the EA community as specifically poly or sex-positive, I just don’t want it to lose that streak it has and stifle the EAs who are living that way. Since people are now talking about it and I have had a few key experiences within the community (but more outside of it), I feel comfortable commenting on sex-positivity within the community culture. Maybe it is really hard to get into the specifically-EA poly community and that’s okay. I mean it takes most people a lot of time and strategy to get integrated to any sex-positive community (kink, swingers, private parties, OKC-based polycules lmao). Maybe if people are feeling resentful about it, those people can ask us poly people what’s up and we can send them links and stuff and they can do their exploring outside of the EA community. I don;t want this to be like “an EA infrastructure project” or something, but in my free time if people DM me I always try to help people figure out if poly is right for them.
Also, you are right that speaking in the way I have about poly is almost.. concerning. And I don’t want to be one-sided. I’m actually ambiamorous (but I still say poly cuz I hold a poly ethical position about freedom of my partner, regardless of whether I care about getting a new partner that month/year).. Monogamy can be fun too! I will add a little footnote like “poly is fun [if you are suited to it. Monogamy can be just as fun if you are suited to that]
Fun-fact: even though I’ve been in multi-year poly relationships even I don’t know if poly is right for me. I nominally identify as polyskeptic. This loosely means I believe more people than not are trying to be poly without realising that poly is sub-optimal for reaching their goals (whatever their goals are). I acknowledge I might be projecting here, because my dating life really only “took off” the way I wanted after I stopped trying to be poly and was nothing else other than “single.”
That said, I do also have some empirical backing for my belief: I’ve spoken or know of at least 2-3 long-time poly EAs (i.e. poly for most of their dating life) that have since gone mono. I think the interesting thing was one of them saying they were shocked by how much more fulfilling mono was than they expected it would be given “poly-metaphysics” is what they strongly subscribed to before.
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc. You gain status just due to your private relationship preference in EA, or such is my perception. Nobody cares if you’re mono.
But, this is getting to a point where I need to go to work and I’d like to talk with you over video chat instead to continue—perhaps on EA Gather.town to make it public. DM’d you :)
These discussions are quite enlightening. I had a gut feeling this is how things are but seeing it clearly verbalized confirms my intuition.
It’s more like (to me) some boats are sped up by the sex positive-current and other boats miss the wave and just reach their destination the same time they counterfactually would have.
and
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc. You gain status just due to your private relationship preference in EA, or such is my perception. Nobody cares if you’re mono.
To retain competent people you need to sustain a competitive atmosphere. If success is not just a function of impact / work but also a function of sexual liaisons / sexuality, it calls for a toxic culture because one feels compelled to sleep around to get ahead. Even if you’re not doing it, your peers are.
Do you realize how many competent women will be driven out of EA if they are not open to have sexual liaisons? They’re not offered a seat on the fast boats, not because they’re not smart/hard working but because they’re rejecting sex/ have different relationship preference.
How is that equality of opportunity? How is that inclusive?
“They’re not offered a seat on the fast boats, not because they’re not smart/hard working but because they’re rejecting sex/ have different relationship preference. ”
I think you’ve completely misunderstood what Ivy means by “fast boats.” She is talking about fulfillment through intimate human connection. Not fulfillment through professional success. Makes more sense? By boats being “sped up” Ivy means that sexual positivity is allowing many people to experience a level of fulfilling human connection much sooner in their life than they otherwise might have. Ivy isn’t talking about money and professional power here at all.
^ Moved this paragraph to top of comment because I thought it more important than the rest of my comment below:
I think you have a much higher burden of proof you haven’t met yet to show your comment isn’t a slippery slope fallacy you’re invoking. I can go into why I think this looks like a slippery slope if you like or can you see why I’d see it that way?
“If success is not just a function of impact / work but also a function of sexual liaisons / sexuality”
Success and status are not synonymous. You can be high social status with everyone wanting to hear about your interesting polyamorous life, but at the same time you can be completely unsuccessful professionally. I can think of at least one EA woman off the top of my head who has been poly with multiple prominent EAs, who has social status because of this, and whose professional career hasn’t benefited at all. If anything it hindered her professional life’s growth because God knows being polyamorous means being an unpaid therapist to multiple people, which takes time and energy away from other endeavors.
Just because someone gains social status from something in some group that said group thinks is cool doesn’t mean that this increased status translates into easier professional success in any meaningful way we need to be worried about.
People gain status in LGBTQ social circles if they come out as gay, especially if the coming out story makes for a compelling story (hell, in any social setting where you can tell a compelling story you gain status). I don’t think this means we need to be worried that—for sake of argument—queer theatre productions are preferentially hiring actors with compelling stories to tell about their own private sexual history instead of hiring the most competent actors. They’ll hire the most competent actors—they have tickets to sell. The EA community will hire the most competent women—they have a world to save.
I don’t think we’re anywhere close to needing to be concerned that the social status some in EA gain from talking about poly in a compelling way leads to preferential career treatment.
Because social status and professional success aren’t synonymous and one isn’t causally linked to the other, and because you appear to have misunderstood what is meant by “fast boats” I think all the chain of connections you’ve drawn aren’t connected to anything I or Ivy have said at all.
Again begs the question, why status in a community oriented around “doing good” has anything to do with sexuality and is not uniformly distributed across all sexualities. Status in EA should be a function of doing good and should be sexuality-neutral, period.
I think you’re reframing on a technicality. Status and success are fairly related in many ways in the real world, because status opens doors and signals greater opportunity.
EA might want to hire competent women but competent women might not want to stick around if they’re lower status due to factors outside of their control such as sexuality/race/etc.
EA might want to hire competent women but competent women might not want to stick around if they’re lower status due to factors outside of their control such as sexuality/race/etc.
I fully agree with this point, but I have a hard time drawing the line from what my and Ivy’s topic of conversation is and this. What I think you’re talking about is a problem where power dynamics is involved including mentor/mentee relationships and coworkers etc etc. This is a separate topic from the social status increase and feeling-dejected by it that Ivy and I are talking about.
I’ll try an illustrate why with an example:
When I was at an EA party the other night a woman I had just met brought up the topic of orgies. I immediately found her more interesting and it opened the span of conversation to many other varied topics not even related to sexuality. She didn’t break any norms, she didn’t try to make people feel uncomfortable, she brought the topic up in a funny socially intelligent way. Her social status in the group in this setting increased. EAs trend towards being open-minded enough to talk about anything. Nothing wrong with this. Another pertinent example: When I met one of my closest EA-adjacent friends in the world for the first time: within 5 minutes we were both talking about the topic of suicide and our own personal struggles. Naturally I also immediately found her more interesting and it opened the span of conversation to many other varied topics not even related to suicide. Her openness increased her social status at said party where people were EAs and EA-adjacent open-minded types.
If these women had been at a conservative catholic social gathering their social status would have decreased with this behaviour. And there is nothing wrong with a different social setting having different status hierarchies.
I bring up this example because your comment begs the question: do you think it is problematic these women brought up these topics and that status hierarchies should be different in EA as a community, as a whole? Because we don’t allow this kind of talk at EA conferences and it has finally come down (as it should) that where power dynamics are concerned this kind of talk between coworkers is likely to be problematic. But if what you’re saying is that absent any professional setting, absent any coworker or mentee/mentor relationship, people who identify as “EAs” should still not grant anyone any social status for being interesting when the topic of sexuality is brought up… what you’re effectively demanding is for thousands of people around the world to change their personality and become less sexually liberal and less open-minded.
Now mind you, when I was in my early twenties, I would have felt left out and dejected at these EA parties where people are freely talking about said sexual topics where I don’t have any status because of factors outside of my control. I certainly would have felt like my dating life is some sort of proxy for not being good enough to be part of EA and that it was locking opportunities away from me. But how I feel and how things are are two different things.
It would have been wrong for me to make the leap from “I feel like I’m not high status and not good enough at this EA party” to “EAs wont hire me because I’m not high status enough and sexually liberal enough at their EA parties.” I think this is the mistake you are making when you say “Status and success are fairly related in many ways in the real world, because status opens doors and signals greater opportunity.” This is an obviously true statement in some contexts (e.g. mentor/mentee or grant/grantee relationships etc) and an obviously false statement in the context that Ivy and I are talking about.
That said, an obvious crux here that would convince me that we have a problem that requires action is if the number of women in EA does indeed dwindle or show a downward trend. I don’t see that happening.
If anything the EA Community’s gendar ratio over the years (including at EA casual socials) is trending towards becoming more women-heavy suggesting to me that women are feeling more comfortable as a whole in the movement rather than less so.
This doesn’t mean that there haven’t been incidents that have made some women feel unwelcome or unsafe. These are serious and need to be dealt with. But I’m unconvinced this is indicative of a larger trend. I talk about this view of mine more in this comment on a post by Maya saying they are sad, disappointed and scared of the EA community.
And guess what: she updated her initial negative view towards the EA community after considering the full context of things as you can see in her comment here:
Thanks for your comment—for all who are interested, I did reach out to Scott and he provided me with an in-depth explanation of some of the context behind Kathy’s accusations and suicide. His explanation provided me with a deeper understanding of the situation and helped me realize that action was taken to check the validity of some of Kathy claims and that there was a more involved and nuanced response to the situation than I realized initially.
Final quick point:
Status in EA should be a function of doing good and should be sexuality-neutral, period.
I believe sexuality can be a means of doing good. I think healthy sexuality and specifically talking about it has liberated thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, across history. It’s as valid something to talk about as mental health as an EA cause area. If some are better at talking about it—even if it makes me feel uncomfortable and left out—it’s ok for them to get social status for it.
This is not really entirely different from how when EAs talk about AI Alignment and get status for it that I also feel uncomfortable and left out for not being smart enough. Let their social status increase. It’s my problem for feeling insecure, not theirs.
Likewise it is my problem for feeling like I “need to be better at being poly to be EA.” This is something I genuinely feel. But I know I don’t have to be poly to be fully welcome and I know the feeling is my own problem, not something that is a provably strong indictment against the EA community.
But if what you’re saying is that absent any professional setting, absent any coworker or mentee/mentor relationship, people who identify as “EAs” should still not grant anyone any social status for being interesting when the topic of sexuality is brought up… what you’re effectively demanding is for thousands of people around the world to change their personality and become less sexually liberal and less open-minded.
You’re using the word sexually liberal / open-minded /interesting interchangeably. Catholic nuns can be interesting, monogamous people can be open minded. Private sexual preferences have nothing to do with interestingness or open minded ness.
What I think you’re talking about is a problem where power dynamics is involved including mentor/mentee relationships and coworkers etc etc. This is a separate topic from the social status increase and feeling-dejected by it that Ivy and I are talking about.
I am not just talking about professional relationships. I’m also talking about what the community should value. Treating women differently as higher/lower status based on their sexuality is simply wrong. A lot of people are intentionally monogamous ( like me). Assigning them default lower status due to their private relationship preference is an awful practice that shouldn’t be adopted community wide.
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc
May be you’re struggling to understand my point, so let me try to demonstrate why this sort of language is troubling. If you substitute the word “poly” with “white” ( ethnicity)/”male” (gender)/ “homosexual”(orientation) or other equivalents, this sentence sounds so wrong. I don’t think that my choice / programming of sexuality is something that needs work, I love being monogamous, just like how I don’t feel lesser because of my gender or ethnicity. All other things being equal, I want to be given equal status as someone else with a different sexuality, just like how I want the same status as a man / white person / a person of different nationality. That’s all.
Likewise it is my problem for feeling like I “need to be better at being poly to be EA.” This is something I genuinely feel.
I am sorry you feel this way.
This is not really entirely different from how when EAs talk about AI Alignment and get status for it that I also feel uncomfortable and left out for not being smart enough. Let their social status increase. It’s my problem for feeling insecure, not theirs.
This is actually status working the right way. Status can be used as an incentive to promote behaviors we want from people because humans are great incentive maximizers. We want alignment researchers to gain status by producing high quality alignment work, because EA thinks this work is of high impact. Conversely, we want more people to aspire to become alignment researchers because this work is highly regarded / high status in EA. Unlike promoting certain type of technical AI work over others in EA, the community should not promote a certain type of sexuality over others. Let EA be about doing good alone, and decoupled from sexuality / race / ethnicity / orientation.
You’re using the word sexually liberal / open-minded /interesting interchangeably. Catholic nuns can be interesting, monogamous people can be open minded. Private sexual preferences have nothing to do with interestingness or open minded ness.
A valuable point I am glad you brought up so I can clarify that of course I believe Catholic nuns can be interesting and open minded and even sexually liberal in beliefs without practising. I’d hate to make anyone feel otherwise. I’m not using them interchangeably. I said “sexually liberal and less open-minded” indicating two separate things, not two synonymous things. Private sexual preferences can totally be related to someone’s interestingness, sexually liberal mindset and open-mindedness and there is nothing wrong with that. Some things correlate and this is hardly controversial. And just because I acknowledge they correlate for me (interestingness is subjective after all) does not mean I’m saying other groups cannot be interesting, sexually liberal or open-minded. Likewise poly people can be dull and closed-minded as well.
People just aren’t black-and-white enough to be easily categorized.
I kinda also just want to stop here and point out that it is a private relationship preferences, not sexual preferences. A lot of polyamorous people aren’t even sexual. There are poly people that just sleep together cuddling, yet have full blown loving relationship polycules complete with horrendously messy breakups like any monogamous relationship.
I met a a poly man this year that—to my shock—is asexual. Mostly shocking because he presented to me as interested in sex like me but when I talked to one of the (many) women he is or has dated I found out he doesn’t care much for sex.
And there is nothing wrong with me being more interested in this asexual poly man with multiple girlfriends (some of said girlfriends whom I might add are interested in sex) as a direct consequence of his relationship dynamics. Me assigning him more status in my social circles is no more a moral problem than traditionally monogamous people giving status to people who are traditionally married. Different social groups have different social status hierarchies. Both are as valid as any preference you might have where everyone is consenting to be a part of a social dynamic.
I am not just talking about professional relationships. I’m also talking about what the community should value. Treating women differently as higher/lower status based on their sexuality is simply wrong.
You cannot police people’s preferences when nobody is being harmed. That is wrong. If there are zero problematic power dynamics (e.g. no professional relationships), consenting adults can do as they please. A woman, just like any man, has every right to assign status to different people based on whatever reasons they choose. We all do this instinctively and automatically. The problem is not that that treating women differently as higher/lower status based on whatever preference you might have is wrong—it is that doing so insensitively can hurt someone and that hurting others is wrong.
In eras long forgotten I’ve had brief but magical “poly-heaven” moments where I’m dating multiple people and everyone is happy and it is sheer bliss, but I don’t go loudly proclaiming it all to all my friends who aren’t happy with their dating lives. That would be incredibly insensitive of me. Just because someone is lower status on some subjective metric doesn’t mean I want them to viscerally feel it. We should all be kindly helping lift each other up.
A lot of people are intentionally monogamous ( like me). Assigning them default lower status due to their private relationship preference is an awful practice that shouldn’t be adopted community wide.
So I’ll start by saying it is absolutely awful you feel like the EA community is assigning you lower status for being a monogamous woman. I have to ask though, isn’t this something where you can look at the individuals who were this insensitive towards you and call them assholes without calling the EA community as a whole asshole-ish?
When I, as a poly person, hang out with my more conservative mono friends, they don’t make me feel lower status. I’m their friend. However, I am lower status around them relative to their status hierarchy, especially when it comes to my viability as a mate. I accept and respect that I’m lower status around them.
A perhaps better example (“more conservative mono” is a bit too vague) is that when I a hang out with my death metal friends who have crazy tats and know everything about metal music and playing instruments I likewise have lower relative social status. And perhaps an illustrative example here is that yes, some in the death metal community do put more status on tattoos while some do not—which, like polyamory to EA, is wholly separate from what the core of the community is actually focused on, namely death metal music. I accept and respect that to some people within the metal community I’m lower status due to not having tattoos. They aren’t being mean to me by assigning me lower status.
However, if a particular strictly monogamous person or death metal friend went out of their way to highlight or was insensitive about my relative low status, I’d call them an asshole. I would not however call the death metal community as a whole asshole-ish for assigning me lower status due to my private preference of not wanting to have tattoos. And I wouldn’t say they are wrong to value tattoos and should only appraise my social status based on my love of death metal.
Assigning people status based on their private relationship preference is not something that is adopted community-wide in EA. Assigning status based on your tattoos is not something adopted community-wide in the death metal community. In both cases though there might be an epiphenomenon where the people you hang out within the EA/Death Metal community just happen to also be into polyamory/tattoos, but that doesn’t mean their personal preference and the status hierarchies you experience because of those preferences are a community-wide practice.
You might immediately want to counter-argue that “the sum aggregate of statuses being assigned is what takes something from individuals practising it to it being a community-wide practice.” In anticipating this counter-argument, let’s look at my death metal analogy and see how it can come crashing down:
Let’s assume that women with tattoos disproportionately find themselves in favourable career positions in the death metal community which is not relative to their actual career skill. Women without tattoos do not see this advantage. Let’s assume this is a result of increased professional networking opportunities afforded to women with tattoos as a direct result of many high in power and status in the death metal community disproportionately giving social status to women with tattoos (And it is only due to this and NOT due to problematic romantic relationships with problematic power dynamics). Consequently we enter vicious feedback loop of women without tattoos feeling dis-empowered and unfair pressure to get tattoos to get ahead. And those that wont put up with this obvious bullshit just decide to leave the Death Metal Community altogether despite their talent.
I think we are now looking dead in the eye at something much more like what you’re afraid of is happening in the EA community. You’re saying that even absent problematic power dynamics and the appearance of nobody is being harmed, actually women are still being harmed.
So I think there are a few further steps we need to take before we start calling out the entire Death Metal community:
Women with tattoos actually have to be less competent than women without that aren’t getting said career positions. It’s totally possible that actually there are just more competent Death Metal women with tattoos and their tattoos are completely unrelated to their getting their positions
Women who feel pressured to get tattoos might just be pattern-matching on something that isn’t actually relevant to their professional success in the Death Metal Community
In the EA community I have not seen broad evidence of poly women being treated preferentially professionally because they are poly
It has to be broadly systemic and not just a feature of some subset of the community
It shouldn’t be something like Sonia points out appears to occur mostly in The Bay Area which appears to have features conducive to abusive dynamics
If there was some city where a scandal took place in the Death Metal community where some women appeared to have gotten preferential treatment due to their tattoos, it would be pretty unthinkable for anyone to conclude “The Death Metal Community is abusive” instead of “The Death Metal Community in this city is abusive”
Nobody caring to course correct, no action being taken.
I really doubt I need to make a case that concerns of women are being taken seriously. If they weren’t the number of women in EA wouldn’t be growing.
If things were true, however, we are no longer talking about individuals who are assholes but an entire community that has a deep rot.
But for sub-points I added I don’t think any of them hold for the EA community.
Ergo, I think the correct response is to call out individuals. Which has happened in the EA community a bunch of times leading to said individuals being banned from the EA community (or other punishments that make sense)
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc
May be you’re struggling to understand my point, so let me try to demonstrate why this sort of language is troubling. If you substitute the word “poly” with “white” ( ethnicity)/”male” (gender)/ “homosexual”(orientation) or other equivalents, this sentence sounds so wrong. I don’t think that my choice / programming of sexuality is something that needs work, I love being monogamous, just like how I don’t feel lesser because of my gender or ethnicity. All other things being equal, I want to be given equal status as someone else with a different sexuality, just like how I want the same status as a man / white person / a person of different nationality. That’s all.
Thank you for trying to make your point clearer. I appreciate this a lot. I’m beginning to think we have an unusually high inferential distance between us, but actually at the object-level we don’t disagree on a lot at all.
So, actually, all those do occur and frequently. Certain black (ethnicity), women (gendar), homosexual (orientation) people have interesting stories to tell because of their experience tied to their ethnicity/gendar/orientation and get invited to podcasts because of it. So the sentence doesn’t strike me as “wrong” per se. It strikes me as feeling wrong.
But, if it isn’t just because of some protected characteristic, it is totally ok for people to assign others more social status, in part, because of protected characteristics. People assign people who are women/black/homosexual <insert-reason-here> more status because their experience as a <insert-category-here> is essential to whatever they have to share—e.g. it is something where they are oppressed
Likewise, polyamory is quite stigmatised and we don’t really have many role-models or representation. So, when someone is speaking for us and they do so eloquently, it is only natural that we assign this person more status because they can do so—and doing so is intricately tied to their identity in being poly. Someone who isn’t poly that can still “talk as well” wouldn’t get the status. This would be problematic for the same reason that we don’t assign status to a white man who can “talk as well” about the experience of being black as someone who is black.
I guess the question then is, if you possibly don’t feel it wrong to assign a women more social status for being a good role-model for women as a woman, why do you feel uncomfortable when poly people are assigned more status for being a good role-model for poly people as a poly person themselves? This, like AI Alignment in the EA community, is status working in the right way and incentivising good and worthwhile behaviour in the poly community.
I might feel bad or left out due to this, but that is not really that different from a woman feeling bad and left out when they compare themselves to other women who have gained social status in part for sharing their experiences as women.
Also I just want to explicitly state I didn’t mean for anything I wrote to imply I think your programming of sexuality is something that needs work. I’ll also add, in case you’re worrying whether you’ve offended me, nothing you’ve written thus far has made me feel like you think my programming of sexuality is something I need to work on.
This is actually status working the right way. Status can be used as an incentive to promote behaviors we want from people because humans are great incentive maximizers. We want alignment researchers to gain status by producing high quality alignment work, because EA thinks this work is of high impact. Conversely, we want more people to aspire to become alignment researchers because this work is highly regarded / high status in EA. Unlike promoting certain type of technical AI work over others in EA, the community should not promote a certain type of sexuality over others. Let EA be about doing good alone, and decoupled from sexuality / race / ethnicity / orientation.
And some people want to meet more people who have cool tattoos or more people who are polyamorous. Humans are going to throw out incentives to get what they want. The answer is not to quash it, it is to teach people to do so maturely, tactfully and with kindness. I like big-tent EA so people with near any preference might also like doing EA stuff. They might even be EA leaders. But we shouldn’t let their preferences automatically lead us to conclude that is the preference of the community as a whole.
And maybe I’m too woke but I’d caution against trying to decouple doing good from sexuality / race / ethnicity / orientation completely. A full understanding of people’s identities, I think, is important to doing good better. A sex-race-ethnic-orientation blind approach might invalidate people’s experiences, especially those that are marginalized.
For anyone that actually read this whole damn comment, if you are in the Bay Area for the next month I’d love to meet you at the EA Taco Tuesday meetup and give you an appreciative high five, lol, even if you disagree with me. I’ll be highly talkative excitable guy in the panda hat.
And perhaps an illustrative example here is that yes, some in the death metal community do put more status on tattoos while some do not—which, like polyamory to EA, is wholly separate from what the core of the community is actually focused on, namely death metal music. I accept and respect that to some people within the metal community I’m lower status due to not having tattoos. They aren’t being mean to me by assigning me lower status.
Nice of you, but I do not accept or respect having lower status in EA due to being monogamous. They are being mean to me and thousands of monogamous women they’re recruiting / want to recruit / who are dedicated EAs by assigning us lower status. I am not willing to participate in a community where I have lower status due to factors I didn’t choose (race/gender/sexuality), and I’d think many self respecting others will also not put up with what you’re calling “relative lower status”. No fuck that. We want equality, equal respect, equal opportunity.
So I’ll start by saying it is absolutely awful you feel like the EA community is assigning you lower status for being a monogamous woman. I have to ask though, isn’t this something where you can look at the individuals who were this insensitive towards you and call them assholes without calling the EA community as a whole asshole-ish?
I am not calling the whole EA community asshole-ish, but it is big problem here because there are many such individuals. There’s no push back against these people that I’m seeing widely either. I’m also confused you think individuals who assign me lower status are assholes after saying above yourself that may be I should be ok with being assigned lower status like you’re ok being lower status elsewhere.
I’m sorry but the death metal-tattoo analogy got lost on me. You can get a tattoo if you chose to, many people can’t change their sexual preference, so it’s a false comparison. It’s like you’re saying white people have higher status and you should be ok with that, but I can’t paint my face white and become a white person if I wanted to. Secondly tattoos are nothing like sex. Sex involves two people ( often) and conveys a relationship where you can benefit a higher status individual. Your getting a tattoo is not pleasurable to high status men. I do not want to get into the frame of arguing based on this analogy because the analogy doesn’t model many complications.
I really doubt I need to make a case that concerns of women are being taken seriously. If they weren’t the number of women in EA wouldn’t be growing.
If you recruit more women than you hurt and if you drive out and silence the ones who speak up, number of women will grow but that doesn’t mean concerns of women are taken seriously. I’m not saying this is happening but your logic is flawed in many ways. Your implied casuality, ie, evidence that women’s numbers are growing means concerns of women are taken seriously, is false.
Likewise, polyamory is quite stigmatised and we don’t really have many role-models or representation.
Bay area EA has around 60% poly, so I’d say monogamists are the minority here.
guess the question then is, if you possibly don’t feel it wrong to assign a women more social status for being a good role-model for women as a woman, why do you feel uncomfortable when poly people are assigned more status for being a good role-model for poly people as a poly person themselves?
Your original statement said “if you’re poly you’re interesting and would be invited to speak on podcasts” so matter-of-factly. That is very different from “if you’re a good role-model for poly people as a poly person...”. Good role models should get status, I agree, but that’s not what you said. The equivalent of what you initially said would be ” if you’re a man you’re interesting and would be invited to speak on clearer thinking podcast etc”.
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc
a woman feeling bad and left out when they compare themselves to other women who have gained social status in part for sharing their experiences as women.
Inverted casual reasoning. But if we look carefully at your first quote the order of events is being poly gets status that converts into the opportunity to speak on podcasts. But in your justification, sharing experiences gets status. Sharing experiences should get more status, but just being poly/mono shouldn’t. Being a good role model for monogamous people and sharing that experience should also get higher status, but tell me dear friend, are they getting invited to podcasts? I am amazing at monogamy, the absolute best, do get me an invite. Or are these opportunities gate-kept?
I like big-tent EA so people with near any preference might also like doing EA stuff. They might even be EA leaders. But we shouldn’t let their preferences automatically lead us to conclude that is the preference of the community as a whole.
Have you heard of the netflix quote “The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.” Almost all top rationalists are poly, many top EAs are as well. >50% of bay area EA is poly while base population rate is 15% or less. Tell me this is not a preference of the community once again :) Tell me what monogamous people need to do to rise the ranks.
Thanks for the thought our response! I suppose the main difference is that we have very diverging ideas of what the EA community is and what it will/should become.
I’ve been on the fringe of EA for years, just learning about concepts and donating but never been part of the tighter group so to speak. I see EA as a question—how do we do the most good with the resources available?
Poly is definitely something historically related to the early movement, but I guess I just disagree that the trade off of reputation and attacks over sexual harassment issues etc are positive because of vague notions of fun.
Also—if the EA community creates massive burnout maybe we should change the way we approach our communications and epistemics instead of accepting that and saying we’ll cope by having casual sex. That doesn’t seem like a good road to go down especially long term.
Thanks! Hm well I agree about other ways to tend to burnout I just think it might be a bit of a moot point from what I’ve seen and there may be something in the nature of EA about it. I have now edited my comment based on your thoughts. I think you will kinda get what I mean more about “fun” and of “mitigating burnout” now. I also added something I meant to add but had forgotten: EA as utopian testing grounds. Maybe you will agree with me that this is what the community could become?
Sorry to do you like that (edit rather than give a point by point response), but I might turn it into a big post. The new stuff is in brackets.
If you have more thoughts I’d love to hear them. I def appreciate the feedback.
A last thought is that this community seems to have trouble with slippery slope language.
Morally neutral until proven otherwise and can absolutely be done in transparent ethical ways without throwing out the baby with the bathwater: casual hookups in community>>>casual dating in community>>>relationships in community>>>open relationships>>>polyamory>>>relationships and dating across departments (but likely not within departments and definitely not where there may be conflict of interest)
Bad or risky by nature: Professional misconduct>>>sexism>>>sexist preferential treatment>>>sexist avoidant or dismissive treatment>>>purely self-interested behavior>>>sexual misconduct>>>sexually-inappropriate professional misconduct>>>conflict of interest relationships>>>sexual harrassment>>>sexual coercion>>>sexual assault>>>rape
All these are really different. I appreciated that OP was pretty careful about that, but I think I note that you are starting to slip and making connections where we really don’t know there are any.
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.
Like you say it seems like many people draw a line when it comes to utility between parts of our life that can seem deeply personal (relationships), and aspects of our life that seem less personal (What job I should do, where I should give my money, what cause is best). Perhaps this is a reasonable distinction and we should be drawing that line, but I would like to see it better articulated rather than assumed.
I appreciated @Nathan Young’s comment above which perhaps articulates some of this difficulty. “I feel sad/judged/ frustrated reading this, though that’s not to say it’s wrong.”
i feel like the “what if you replace poly with gay” thing is saying, like empirically something (some kind of instinctual conservatism towards sexual norms) caused people to say the same things about gay people.
so something like instinctual-conservatism-towards-sexual-norms when it’s ~adults doing consensual things is a heuristic that failed in the past and is probably not reliable
if you want to interfere with my private life to that extent there’s a very strong burden of proof upon you
also happier EAs are EAs that are better at doing EA work, generally speaking
like, I feel like if you were in this movement 50 years ago you would be saying “we shouldn’t be encouraging gay relationships within this movement because it’d make the place feel uninviting for people who don’t want to be hit on by people of hte same sex”?
When it comes to intervening in people’s personal lives, I would never advocate a top down solution to something like this to be clear. If an organizer in a local group suggested we should kick out anyone who is poly or sleeps around I would be far more likely to see that organizer as problematic than the group in question.
The reason I strongly agree is that this is a community norm suggestion, and I think it’s a healthy one.
To your point about the gay community fifty years ago—I agree! If there is a subset of highly taboo social norms, regardless of their moral valence, that are promoted in a community it will taint the ideas of that community to the general public. Fifty years ago I would’ve probably said something similar, like “it’s fine to have gay people in the movement and we will not judge you. However this is not a movement to promote the rights of gay people, this is a movement to make charity better and doing good more effective.”
Overall I think it would be better for EA and for poly acceptance if people who were poly tried to form/stick to their own sub culture outside of EA for dating around (which absolutely exists, I practiced polyamory years before I found EA.) People who advocate polyamory could focus more on that, and many folks in EA would have less of their entire life/identity tied up in EA, which I see as a good thing.
I guess my objections to this are -I think the median person’s view of poly is like “seems like a bad way to do relationships but also none of my business” which is distinct from being weirded out by poly people
-I’m not trying to be a poly advocate, I’m trying to live a lifestyle which is poly? I object to you trying to discourage this on the grounds that discrimination is bad? Like i feel like you are saying “it would be better for poly acceptance if EA were less friendly to poly relationships” which no?
-A movement focused on ‘doing the most good’ is going to attract people with moral views pretty different to the median. We’re not a political party, we are a social movement which naturally has people doing weird things in pursuit of its goals so I think it’s good that we advertise ourselves as being tolerant of weird people?
A bit confused on your second point but my thinking goes like this—the more people we get to think rationally about morals relationships etc the better. This is urgent due to issues like value lock in.
If we can get drastically more people overall to even care about morality or be open to changing their moral stances from rational argumentation, then yes that would be way better for poly acceptance! Even if on the margin there were less people in EA that are poly and/or having poly relationships in EA.
if you want to interfere with my private life to that extent there’s a very strong burden of proof upon you
That’s why my advice was for people to consider it personally instead of suggesting a ban or something like that. For clarity’s sake I think a top down ban would be bad, and I don’t think anyone else is proposing a ban either.
I think the issue with “consider” is that like, I suspect most of the people who should be considering this will not and I’d rather give more actionable/precise advice than this for people who are like, struggling with scrupulosity or whatever.
also the issue that people saying “hey that sexually nonnormative thing you’re doing consider not doing that” a lot does create a hostile environment
I suspect most of the people who should be considering this will not
I think if you’re focused only on reducing sexual assault then your point makes sense (I don’t think an abuser will read my post and think “oh okay I won’t assault people then”), but I think if you’re focused on things like reducing the extent to which EAs feel pressured or creeped out by being subjected to certain behaviours then it’s still helpful for people who are not the “worst offenders” to avoid these behaviours. I think both are problem worth addressing and other mechanisms are needed to address sexual assault.
hrmm I think the awkward thing here is ‘socially awkwards around romance and inclined to listen to you’ is going to correlate pretty well to ‘single , insecure +not terribly sexually experienced’ which is going to correlate with ‘will and maybe should be seeking out a serious relationship anyway’ so I think Owen here is kind of the unusual case as someone in this demographic ’sleeping around’
or something
and I can see lots of ways increasing the ambient level of sex-negativity is going to make these people worse/more socially awkward about approaching people
also for poly guys starting out being a secondary partner seems like a good way to get some experience without being too subject to the gender ratio problem
Using language and framing like “what if you replace poly with gay” or “personally this makes me feel…” is not compatible with calculating the utility of a norm in EA. As stated elsewhere our goal is to better the world, not make ourselves happy or help EAs find life partners.
In many other cases, such as social movement research, we look for historical analogues to inform our priors. Why is that a reasonable strategy in other cases but not this?
And why is it not helpful for people who such a norm would directly affect to say “personally this makes me feel…”, but somehow adding to the conversation for someone uninvolved to say ‘Personally I agree strongly with this post and think it’s a more than reasonable proposal. Also, just seems like common sense. I’d imagine there are quite a few people who feel similarly based on the vote count.’?
Here’s two simple and linked cases: Weird aspie poly people are central to what the community has so far done. Also libertarian anti woke people. A sharp cultural change like the one proposed here will drive us out. Losing my part of the community will probably reduce its ability to act more than losing the part of the community that wants these changes.
The impact on the global portfolio of charitable action is much less clear, because people like me will coalesce elsewhere in communities that try to be actively cringe and have a bit of a right wing reputation to avoid new comers who want to drive us out. But we’ll probably still be worrying about ai, utilitarianism, and trying to make ethical concerns into real world changes.
The same thing will also happen if my group stays in/ regains control of ea culture. The people who bounce or leave will end up doing good things elsewhere in communities that match their preferences better.
EA is a way, not the way, and changes to the culture should be judged in utilitarian terms by how they influence the global portfolio of action, not by how they change the level of useful work directly done through EA.
Second: As a poly EA, I’m more likely to bother to show up for things if I think I might get laid. It increases engagement and community cohesion. A group that is a good place to meet interesting opposite gender people is going to have an intrinsic advantage in pulling in casually interested people over one where that is strictly banned.
The claim that functional groups tend to ban dating within the group seems to me to be simply untrue in general and across cultures.
Of course the bouncing because hit on too often issue points in the other direction. But I don’t think anyone has actually tried to measure the relative magnitudes of these effects. There is just a completely non rigorous statement that clearly the expected value calculation points against making poly people happy.
Second: As a poly EA, I’m more likely to bother to show up for things if I think I might get laid. It increases engagement and community cohesion.
I upvoted the comment for sharing a relevant point of view, but I personally care most about an EA community where people obsess over ideas and taking action to make the world better. So, anything that attracts people for other reasons is something I see as a risk (dilution of quality). I’m not sure it’s that important to draw in lots of casually interested people (definitely not saying you fit that description – I’m just talking about the part of “increases engagement”).
To be clear, I know some poly people or people who “sleep around” who seem as serious about EA as it gets, so I’m not saying one can’t have both.
That said, the most committed EAs I know who “sleep around” mostly do so outside of EA because they’ve decided doing it within EA has more risks than benefits and they attend EA events for impact rather than socially. (And my guess is that the most committed EAs who are poly pursue more serious poly relationships rather than lots of casual ones – but I don’t actually know.)
So, there’s a sense in which I totally agree with the OP. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to try to do anything about this from top down. One thing we can do from the bottom up is socially encourage people for being highly dedicated and impact-oriented. (People tend to notice when someone has a high opinion of them and finds their attitude impressive.)
Edit: I guess one point that made me much more sympathetic toward the view that casual dating is not in tension with high dedication to (the moral inspiration of) EA is that several commenters mentioned that some of their best long-term relationships started casually. If that’s the case for someone (that pursuing casual relationships is one of the best ways for finding long-term relationship happiness), then that’s of course different!
Hey Tim, just want to say I really appreciate the honest response. We’ve butted heads a couple times on this topic and you rigorously stick to your values which I admire.
I’ll echo what others have said in that the idea of using casual sex as a motivator to get people out to EA events makes me very uncomfortable. I agree that it’s probably a strong motivator when in play, but I’d rather we get people out because they are interested in the ideas presented.
In the interest of intellectual rigor though, I’m fine with softer/different incentives like free food at events, non impact related activities, etc. I suppose sex seems more risky and messy than those other incentives but my thoughts here aren’t clearly formed yet.
Weird aspie and poly people are absolutely central to what EA has done and how far we’ve come. Frankly I also just enjoy talking with them because those types of people tend to have novel ideas that are well thought out. That being said I don’t think that creating a soft norm of separating poly from EA would necessarily drive those people away.
For instance, what if people in EA communities with a lot of poly folks created a separate meetup specifically for poly people? Or joined an existing one?
For one this would make sexual issues in EA less abundant, and two would help people develop their identity/social network outside of EA. Not putting all their eggs in one basket, so to speak.
On the EV side I agree with you that this is something which would be highly problematic and difficult to study rigorously, but I think it’s still worth looking at it from a lens of utility.
My thought is that because casual sex / making people sexually uncomfortable is such a huge issue for the average person, if we can tone down that behavior a bit it will help us convince far more people to join EA. On top of that it would reduce scandals, and hopefully make decision makers more objective when giving grants or hiring.
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.
Second: As a poly EA, I’m more likely to bother to show up for things if I think I might get laid. It increases engagement and community cohesion.
[emphasis added]
I just want to flag that this makes me pretty uncomfortable. Not all engagement is good, and if a change in policy / culture increases engagement on the margin because it attracts people who want to show up to get laid (who otherwise wouldn’t have been there), I think I’m personally okay with not having this engagement.
It’s also not clear that if EA changes the dynamics of events or the movement such that there are now an extra group of people who are engaging now that there are opportunities to get laid, that this wouldn’t lead to other people disengaging, so I think the extent to which this actually leads to positive engagement and community cohesion is an open question.
The impact on the global portfolio of charitable action is much less clear, because people like me will coalesce elsewhere in communities that try to be actively cringe and have a bit of a right wing reputation to avoid new comers who want to drive us out. But we’ll probably still be worrying about ai, utilitarianism, and trying to make ethical concerns into real world changes.
...changes to the culture should be judged in utilitarian terms by how they influence the global portfolio of action, not by how they change the level of useful work directly done through EA.
I’m not sure if I’m understanding you correctly. Your two claims sound like:
“If people like me are driven out of the EA community, they will coalesce elsewhere, have a cringe + right wing reputation, and continue to do work on AI / try to make ethical concerns into real world changes.”
“Changes to EA culture should take into account all impacts and not just the direct impact done through EA.”
If you assume that more normie / left-leaning EAs[1] won’t continue to do the “EA-equivalent” to the same extent (e.g. they go off and become a campaign coordinator for the median social justice movement), doesn’t this imply EA should actively move away from “cringe + right wing reputation” by your own argument?[2]
i.e. if “cringe right wing” EAs are going to work on AI safety regardless of their involvement in EA, and “normie left wing” EAs will be more impactful in EA than outside of it, this implies the counterfactual loss in impact is asymmetrical, and if you suggest taking into account all impacts and not just the direct impact through EA, then presumably this supports moving in the normie left wing direction.
Fwiw, I’m not the biggest fan of these labels, and I think they risk being more tribal than adding clarity to the conversation. Like I think folks on a wide range on the political spectrum can have meaningful and useful things to contribute to the EA movement. But I am using it just as antonyms to the examples you gave.
Again, just using your words, not necessarily reflective of any personal views of what you might refer to as “weird aspie” / “libertarian anti-woke” EAs. I’m also not necessarily advocating that EA should actually move away from this group, just trying to understand your argument.
Surprised at the amount of upvotes on the main post, versus the highly upvoted comments talking about being scared, judged, frustrated, etc.
Personally I agree strongly with this post and think it’s a more than reasonable proposal. Also, just seems like common sense. I’d imagine there are quite a few people who feel similarly based on the vote count.
It seems that an extremely large proportion of EAF users are die hard proponents of casual sex and polyamory, which makes this conversation fraught. I’ll also be honest—I get the sense than many defenders of these non-traditional norms within the EA community argue from a stance of emotion and don’t really engage with the idea that promoting polyamory could massively reduce our overall utility as a movement.
Using language and framing like “what if you replace poly with gay” or “personally this makes me feel…” is not compatible with calculating the utility of a norm in EA. As stated elsewhere our goal is to better the world, not make ourselves happy or help EAs find life partners.
I understand this is a deeply personal topic but I would appreciate someone laying out a strong case for why polyamory and casual sex in the EA community actually leads to higher utility overall.
[This comment has been heavily edited since it got a response]
[So, I’m responding to a comment asking for the utility case about casual sex and poly. But I realized I focused exclusively on consensual casual sex within the community because that is the only piece I view as possibly worth engaging with, and it is what the post is about. I don’t have notable-feelings about in-company relations or COI relations so I wouldn’t go out of my way to defend them, and I do NOT think anti-poly-feelings hold water so I’m not wasting my time on that. There is no reason to feel the need to defend polyamory on ethical grounds. It’s as ethical as monogamy, period. That said, I will push back on the lumping together of poly and casual sex in the first place. In my mind, the people who have the most casual sex historically have been like… college kids and people between relationships. These are both groups who will probably end up in monogamous relationships for life. I really don’t get why people conflate casual sex and poly. Casual sex and open relationships? Sure, that’s kind of their thing. Casual sex and single people (both mono and poly)? Sure, that’s how a lot of modern dating gets started and how people blow steam off when they aren’t ready for a relationship. Casual sex and in-relationship poly people? I’m not sold because each relationship has its own rules and for the most part people do go on dates and think carefully of where to spend their time, time which is limited greatly by already having a partner.]
Why do you think casual sex is bad for utility of the movement? It actually doesn’t go without proving. I admit that was my intuition too, when I started thinking about it. But tbh after considering the other hypothesis equally (my gf facetiously was like “lmao EA is really gonna lose what it has going for it without sexual freedom” and I went “wait what” and thought about it), I have changed my mind.
So anyway I’ll make the “sexual freedom within community is good for utility” argument:
[At first glance and often in practice,] EA is either (pick your poison): (1) a doomery apocalypse cult or (2) a morally strict self-flagellating mass of tithers and minimalists. On the other hand, we do poly and flexible sexual connections and those of us who are engaged in those things will even try and help you figure out if it’s for you. Poly is fun[1]. Sex is fun. Play and curiosity are fun. These are some of the major fun things our community does have going for it when comes to hedonism [and utopian way of life, over the rest of society.]
[I want to clarify the term “fun”. I’m afraid that people will think that “fun”, cuz it’s a one-syllable word used by children, is a trivial experience. It isn’t. It’s a complex experience pairing joy with surprise and with acute presence and focus in the world and with lightness of being. Fun is the ultimate “being in the present moment joyfully” experience. It’s basically the hedonic holy grail.]
I’m also, in thinking it aids impact, not talking about using sex as a lure to get people out to events or something. I’m talking about making the lifestyle sustainable and nice and liberating for the people in it. Increasing connection. Increasing joy and laughs. Sex is something special and it leads to special things, not just moans and groans. Even if you do it casually it leads to special things. It’s a shortcut to connection. [More than sexual connection—I mean real human-to-human connection that comes after you’ve engaged intimately. Then a new type of interpersonal comfort emerges. This is very similar to the point made in the top comment of this post, but I’m trying to explain the mechanism and ground it so people who have not experienced it can see it as real and these types of casual explorations as inherently valuable. You know it yourself if you have ever had a new friend who you have stayed up all night with after hooking up, or who, the new hookup opened space in your friendship for increased texting/memesharing/asking each other big questions about the world/etc. I even know one couple in the animal welfare sector who I think are now engaged whose relationship started out with casual sex: they went on a date but it was really lame according to them and they had “no chemistry”. But they (consensually and both knowing what it meant to go back to someone’s place after a date) decided to go back to his and have a one-night stand anyway. Yano for kicks, in a may-as-well-get-some-pleasure kind of way. But then something shifted after they hooked up and they pulled an all nighter talking together. At least, this is what they told me (and some others around). As I say, IIRC they are now engaged, but either way they have been in an enriching relationship for 3+ years now which they surely treasure deeply and which has surely helped with their animal welfare impact.]
Now the apocalypse thing: Many EAs especially want this interpersonal connection shortcut and freedom when a lot of us are afraid we don’t even have that many years left on this earth even. I’m sorry but I’m already hearing friends talk about reducing their interest in AI safety work because they want to cross things off their bucket list before we all die. People are literally spending down their retirement accounts and we’ve just begun to see real worrying AI progress. You make EA and longtermist spaces sex-negative,and I’m just not sure people are gonna keep giving it their all til the end. We may see darker nights ahead than we are now and yet those nights might still have hope and we wouldn’t want people to leave EA the way normies will be flocking away from corporate jobs and stifling culture. Who keeps their 9-to-5 when the world ends ~next month? Nobody. They go and hang out with their loved ones. This will sound dramatic at first glance. But I’m not saying people will leave EA as soon as it becomes more sex negative, I’m saying that the more sex-negative EA becomes, the lower the critical mass of dread is required to abandon your post.*
Now the tithing, self-flagellation thing: Let’s be real, getting involved in this community has been known to prompt onset of a lot of burnout at best and serious mental health struggles at worst. [And this might unfortunately be a bug of the philosophy. It might be stifling by nature, at least in early stages. Read the section “Bad” EAs Caught In a Misery Trap” here: https://michaelnotebook.com/eanotes/ So, firstly, I don’t want EA to become more stifling than it already can feel, or not more stifling in a way that actually feels stifling (there are other norms we could adopt). This seems bad for the weirdos in it (and yup we are basically all weirdos for now). Second, the more deep connections people make with eachother in the beginning (and I argue connections are shortcutted via consensual sex, these are adults after all), the more help people can get moving from [early EA full of shame] to [experienced EA happy to make tradeoffs and prioritize their own wellbeing]. This was actually my experience. I came into EA a hardcore minimalist who was using my altruism obsession to suppress myself, so much so I was really ineffective. Then after hooking up with a certain EA which led to to-this-day friendship and an ongoing romantic relationship at-that-time with that EA, I ended up witnessing how to do EA more sustainably from that person and their friends. It was a big relief, at first I could hardly trust that it was morally okay to say, order random things on amazon or go out for fancy dinner or hire a house cleaner, I had so shamed myself about altruism and money. I think I’d have learned anyway how to make my altruism more sustainable and efficient (I’d have had to), but getting consensually involved with one person who knew the rhythm of it all probably helped me skip a lot of guilt and just move forward faster.]
That we are all high in the “openness to new experience” personality trait, and nonjudgmental about alternative lifestyles including dating styles, actually matters too. I think few people are gonna want to sign up to EA if it’s also a constant HR meeting with the same “you can only bring one partner to the Christmas party” vibe. The people who stick hardest to EA are the weirdos and the people with a healthy distrust in authority and prescribed standards. Despite the ivy league outreach, I think that remains the case. For people like that, social scripts just raise question marks and side-eyes, and seem unhealthy. We want to attract early adopter types. We can’t do that by trying to pattern-match everyone else. I think EA might fall into a trap of trying to “please all of the people all of the time” and that isn’t going to work. We can’t be everything. And if we can’t be everything, it will be a lot more efficient to be ourselves rather than pretend to be something we are not. Give the new members caveats to reduce feelings of discomfort, and kick out the grifters trying to just get laid, but our existing members (the actual EAs tryna work on stuff, not the EAdjacents/grifters) still are served by being who they are. I don’t think you can remove one of the weirdest aspects of EA and expect the other weird and good ways of thinking to flourish in the same way tbh. I really value what EA has going for it and I don’t even want to risk making big cultural changes like that without really good proven reason. Forum reflections are not enough reason for changes so big as a swathe of people forcing themselves to change their preferences and increase their disgust reactions or whatever, anything to get themselves to uphold arbitrary norms about sexual connection within community. At least, I don’t want to risk it yet. I might change my mind next week, but right now it feels rash. The norms of allowing casual sex within community (it’s not even a huge thing tbh but my point is that it’s allowed and many people don’t look twice at you for giving it a go) evolved with effective altruism, in the past say half-dozen years especially. If you think EA kind of discovered a lot in that time, we should be very wary to push back on the norms we have. Maybe our growth and what has been figured out is a little bit due to sexual connection which created a little innovator soup that gave us a lot of great ideas and curated high-trust ingroup spaces to discuss them in. Just maybe an effect like that is enough to tip the scale toward “these norms are actively net positive.” I don’t know that yet, but I at least won’t say confidently that they are net negative so I’ll stay out of people’s business.
Also finally, this is maybe the best reason to destigmatize casual sex within the EA community. I want EA to be the future. I want the philosophy to spread such that almost every person is, by some degree, an EA. I know that we don’t need 100% of humanity working on the world’s most important problems. But I do want future humans to value doing good efficiently. I do want EA to become way way bigger than it is now. We shouldn’t think EA is going to remain tiny and there will always be other people to fool around with if that’s a fundamental life experience you want to have. We should take on a mantle of trying to not only impact the future, but be the future, because we can’t even protect the future if our values don’t spread into it and broaden to more universal ways of life. We should figure out how to live our lives coherently, when we want, within EA just fine, rather than fractioning EA into a smaller box of one’s life. If people want to separate EA from their broader life, that’s fine! But don’t force people who don’t want to, to do it. Those are the people who I think are doing the work of figuring out how to integrate EA with a vision of social utopia. We will doubtless fumble a few balls on the way to the goal, but that doesn’t mean we should advocate for people to get off the field and stop trying. Sex-positivity will be an aspect of a utopia. I believe that anyway. So sex-positivity should be a part of EA. And anyway, if EA grows so big, this rule about not hooking up with community members won’t even be sustainable, it would cut out too many people from the population and we’d have people twiddling their thumbs for want of people to test the waters and explore sexuality with. That would, I think, be net negative. Well, I argue it’s a difference in scale, not of kind, to stigmatize casual sex today, from a moral POV.
I don’t even want to see terminology like “sleeping around” on the forum tbh, which to me is inherently stigmatizing at worst, and at best trivializes the niceness and essential humanness of the experience people are trying to have. Even if they are mistaken in how they are using the tool, how can we surely say yet that the tool has little use? Sure, maybe some people are trying to have causal sex stupidly and riskfully (although I have seen nothing of the sort myself), and perhaps some people don’t want casual sex and need a piece like the above post to help them consider what they really want. But maybe we can help people do what they want less stupidly and find what they really want, without stigmatizing casual sex.
You might not buy these arguments but people who have casual sex might. Let them decide. If you don’t feel too awkward, you can ask people about it. Same as I might ask an EA “Why do you eat meat?” If they say “I think it’s better for my impact” I will drop the question. But If they say “yeah I’d really like to go veg actually” I will help them with that, or if they say “it’s too hard to go veg” I will ask them if they would like to know how easy it can be to go lactovegetarian. Similarly you can ask someone something about their casual connections (or poly) and if they say “I think it’s better for me and does no harm, we both had fun, and it’s none of anyone’s business also” you can drop it. If they say “yeah tbh I’m actually trying to find a relationship”, “yeah I’m worried about my career and this helps me feel more sure in mentoring and the like”, or (big oof) “IDK she’s hot right?” then you can totally offer to talk with them about those things and suggest ways of being which are kinder to themselves and others.
So let people pick what makes them happy where they can get it, I think there are better solutions if we keep looking than cultural mandates about consensual bedroom practices.
But I have other norms I think would work way better than [blanket increased finger wagging at people sleeping around] plus [increased guilt and self-suppression for those interested in sleeping around who are most vulnerable to guilt]. Those two are what I think this suggestion will amount to. I can write those alternative other norms up if people are interested.
Oh yeah, fyi I also have no horse in this race personally. Not these days for sure. I’m ambiamorous and I don’t really feel a deep burning need to love and create fun sexy times with anyone but my partner, and I haven’t dated (at least) anyone else basically our whole relationship. So if it were negative utility to not have casual sex in the community obviously I’d abide. But I do have an ethical compass that all people be treated well, including people with minority sexual inclinations, and people who want to dip their toe into things casually to learn about each other and learn how things work. My ethical compass demands that these people should be allowed to craft their own futures without stigmatization. Even if all that is precisely forseeable about that future at the moment of diving in is just one night of fun (again, fun being one of the most precious things ever), if there aren’t blatant costs in that particular interest (again like COI or in-company relationships), let people figure it out themselves. Curiosity and freedom are both intrinsic values of mine.
*I get that if people are bouncing off right now, that’s a problem that trades against this. But to me that isn’t conclusively proven. We need surveys. Soon hopefully. I do not want people to use their energy or their cultural attention budget on crafting a norm that we don’t even know will do any good. Not sleeping around doesn’t seem to meaningfully address most of the concerns I’ve even gleaned.
Poly is fun if you are well-suited to it. Monogamy can be just as fun if you are suited to that! I know because I’m an ambi-amorous person who is really liking living mono for right now
So as a poly/poly-adjacent EA of many years I’ll start by saying I strong upvoted your post and that insofar as a vision for a better tomorrow is concerned, your comment was poetry to my ears. I am very much aligned. Beautiful stuff.
However, this little nugget just keeps coming back to me and it irks me:
“On the other hand, we do poly and flexible sexual connections and those of us who are engaged in those things will even try and help you figure out if it’s for you. Poly is fun. Sex is fun. Play and curiosity are fun. These are some of the major fun things our community does have going for it when comes to hedonism [and utopian way of life, over the rest of society.]”
I think you’re making the poly-part of the community sound way more accessible than it actually is. You possibly have a blindspot here because you don’t know what it is like to be on the outside trying to get in (?).
So here’s the thing. If poly for you in the community is this fantastically amazing, then it is a tragedy of a vastly worse degree than many EAs might even realize that they can’t be part of it.
I’m reminded of some study I read about years ago that showed that the mental health of people in third world countries decreased markedly when they were shown just how much better off people in first world countries are. Those in the control group that showed clear ignorance over how Europeans lived were… Happier.
Honestly, after reading so much poly-discourse on the forum lately I’m very surprised this point hasn’t been raised. An obvious model for what is going on, in my head, is that the poly-backlash is part of a larger backlash against the “moral fulfillment and life fulfillment and career fulfillment and hedonism fulfillment and just-everything-important fulfillment” that is perceived to be held and disproportionately concentrated among few in EA.
Thanks, that’s great feedback. I’ve been thinking similarly kind of and your reflections help me put it together? Like I think it ties into the fears about gatekeeping which I think are maybe unconsciously comparative-resentment-based too. I think there is some counterargument to what I’m saying which goes something like: this sex positivity does create unequitable situations. It’s the opposite problem of sexual harrassment if it is true. But I’m not sold on that counterargument either.. if I could snap my fingers and sprinkle the value created from sex-positivity/sexual connection evenly throughout the community, I would do so. But I don’t think it works like that. I think there is actual new value created. Unfortunately sex-positivity is not yet one of those features where “a rising tide floats all boats”. It’s more like (to me) some boats are sped up by the sex positive-current and other boats miss the wave and just reach their destination the same time they counterfactually would have. That’s because I don’t see EA positions and social cohesion as win-lose situations, again I think value is just created. I think figuring out how to balance equity with overall prosperity, and how to frame it so no one feels jilted is a fundamental human problem I hope we keep toying with things to make it work.
That said, I will add that I’ve been poly for 15 years, but EA for only 5 years, so I never really tried to “get in” to EA poly or EA sex-positive spaces. I also don’t really identify the EA community as specifically poly or sex-positive, I just don’t want it to lose that streak it has and stifle the EAs who are living that way. Since people are now talking about it and I have had a few key experiences within the community (but more outside of it), I feel comfortable commenting on sex-positivity within the community culture. Maybe it is really hard to get into the specifically-EA poly community and that’s okay. I mean it takes most people a lot of time and strategy to get integrated to any sex-positive community (kink, swingers, private parties, OKC-based polycules lmao). Maybe if people are feeling resentful about it, those people can ask us poly people what’s up and we can send them links and stuff and they can do their exploring outside of the EA community. I don;t want this to be like “an EA infrastructure project” or something, but in my free time if people DM me I always try to help people figure out if poly is right for them.
Also, you are right that speaking in the way I have about poly is almost.. concerning. And I don’t want to be one-sided. I’m actually ambiamorous (but I still say poly cuz I hold a poly ethical position about freedom of my partner, regardless of whether I care about getting a new partner that month/year).. Monogamy can be fun too! I will add a little footnote like “poly is fun [if you are suited to it. Monogamy can be just as fun if you are suited to that]
Strongly agree with you on everything you wrote.
Fun-fact: even though I’ve been in multi-year poly relationships even I don’t know if poly is right for me. I nominally identify as polyskeptic. This loosely means I believe more people than not are trying to be poly without realising that poly is sub-optimal for reaching their goals (whatever their goals are). I acknowledge I might be projecting here, because my dating life really only “took off” the way I wanted after I stopped trying to be poly and was nothing else other than “single.”
That said, I do also have some empirical backing for my belief: I’ve spoken or know of at least 2-3 long-time poly EAs (i.e. poly for most of their dating life) that have since gone mono. I think the interesting thing was one of them saying they were shocked by how much more fulfilling mono was than they expected it would be given “poly-metaphysics” is what they strongly subscribed to before.
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc. You gain status just due to your private relationship preference in EA, or such is my perception. Nobody cares if you’re mono.
But, this is getting to a point where I need to go to work and I’d like to talk with you over video chat instead to continue—perhaps on EA Gather.town to make it public. DM’d you :)
These discussions are quite enlightening. I had a gut feeling this is how things are but seeing it clearly verbalized confirms my intuition.
and
To retain competent people you need to sustain a competitive atmosphere. If success is not just a function of impact / work but also a function of sexual liaisons / sexuality, it calls for a toxic culture because one feels compelled to sleep around to get ahead. Even if you’re not doing it, your peers are.
Do you realize how many competent women will be driven out of EA if they are not open to have sexual liaisons? They’re not offered a seat on the fast boats, not because they’re not smart/hard working but because they’re rejecting sex/ have different relationship preference.
How is that equality of opportunity? How is that inclusive?
“They’re not offered a seat on the fast boats, not because they’re not smart/hard working but because they’re rejecting sex/ have different relationship preference. ”
I think you’ve completely misunderstood what Ivy means by “fast boats.” She is talking about fulfillment through intimate human connection. Not fulfillment through professional success. Makes more sense? By boats being “sped up” Ivy means that sexual positivity is allowing many people to experience a level of fulfilling human connection much sooner in their life than they otherwise might have. Ivy isn’t talking about money and professional power here at all.
^ Moved this paragraph to top of comment because I thought it more important than the rest of my comment below:
I think you have a much higher burden of proof you haven’t met yet to show your comment isn’t a slippery slope fallacy you’re invoking. I can go into why I think this looks like a slippery slope if you like or can you see why I’d see it that way?
“If success is not just a function of impact / work but also a function of sexual liaisons / sexuality”
Success and status are not synonymous. You can be high social status with everyone wanting to hear about your interesting polyamorous life, but at the same time you can be completely unsuccessful professionally. I can think of at least one EA woman off the top of my head who has been poly with multiple prominent EAs, who has social status because of this, and whose professional career hasn’t benefited at all. If anything it hindered her professional life’s growth because God knows being polyamorous means being an unpaid therapist to multiple people, which takes time and energy away from other endeavors.
Just because someone gains social status from something in some group that said group thinks is cool doesn’t mean that this increased status translates into easier professional success in any meaningful way we need to be worried about.
People gain status in LGBTQ social circles if they come out as gay, especially if the coming out story makes for a compelling story (hell, in any social setting where you can tell a compelling story you gain status). I don’t think this means we need to be worried that—for sake of argument—queer theatre productions are preferentially hiring actors with compelling stories to tell about their own private sexual history instead of hiring the most competent actors. They’ll hire the most competent actors—they have tickets to sell. The EA community will hire the most competent women—they have a world to save.
I don’t think we’re anywhere close to needing to be concerned that the social status some in EA gain from talking about poly in a compelling way leads to preferential career treatment.
Because social status and professional success aren’t synonymous and one isn’t causally linked to the other, and because you appear to have misunderstood what is meant by “fast boats” I think all the chain of connections you’ve drawn aren’t connected to anything I or Ivy have said at all.
Again begs the question, why status in a community oriented around “doing good” has anything to do with sexuality and is not uniformly distributed across all sexualities. Status in EA should be a function of doing good and should be sexuality-neutral, period.
I think you’re reframing on a technicality. Status and success are fairly related in many ways in the real world, because status opens doors and signals greater opportunity.
EA might want to hire competent women but competent women might not want to stick around if they’re lower status due to factors outside of their control such as sexuality/race/etc.
I fully agree with this point, but I have a hard time drawing the line from what my and Ivy’s topic of conversation is and this. What I think you’re talking about is a problem where power dynamics is involved including mentor/mentee relationships and coworkers etc etc. This is a separate topic from the social status increase and feeling-dejected by it that Ivy and I are talking about.
I’ll try an illustrate why with an example:
When I was at an EA party the other night a woman I had just met brought up the topic of orgies. I immediately found her more interesting and it opened the span of conversation to many other varied topics not even related to sexuality. She didn’t break any norms, she didn’t try to make people feel uncomfortable, she brought the topic up in a funny socially intelligent way. Her social status in the group in this setting increased. EAs trend towards being open-minded enough to talk about anything. Nothing wrong with this. Another pertinent example: When I met one of my closest EA-adjacent friends in the world for the first time: within 5 minutes we were both talking about the topic of suicide and our own personal struggles. Naturally I also immediately found her more interesting and it opened the span of conversation to many other varied topics not even related to suicide. Her openness increased her social status at said party where people were EAs and EA-adjacent open-minded types.
If these women had been at a conservative catholic social gathering their social status would have decreased with this behaviour. And there is nothing wrong with a different social setting having different status hierarchies.
I bring up this example because your comment begs the question: do you think it is problematic these women brought up these topics and that status hierarchies should be different in EA as a community, as a whole? Because we don’t allow this kind of talk at EA conferences and it has finally come down (as it should) that where power dynamics are concerned this kind of talk between coworkers is likely to be problematic. But if what you’re saying is that absent any professional setting, absent any coworker or mentee/mentor relationship, people who identify as “EAs” should still not grant anyone any social status for being interesting when the topic of sexuality is brought up… what you’re effectively demanding is for thousands of people around the world to change their personality and become less sexually liberal and less open-minded.
Now mind you, when I was in my early twenties, I would have felt left out and dejected at these EA parties where people are freely talking about said sexual topics where I don’t have any status because of factors outside of my control. I certainly would have felt like my dating life is some sort of proxy for not being good enough to be part of EA and that it was locking opportunities away from me. But how I feel and how things are are two different things.
It would have been wrong for me to make the leap from “I feel like I’m not high status and not good enough at this EA party” to “EAs wont hire me because I’m not high status enough and sexually liberal enough at their EA parties.” I think this is the mistake you are making when you say “Status and success are fairly related in many ways in the real world, because status opens doors and signals greater opportunity.” This is an obviously true statement in some contexts (e.g. mentor/mentee or grant/grantee relationships etc) and an obviously false statement in the context that Ivy and I are talking about.
That said, an obvious crux here that would convince me that we have a problem that requires action is if the number of women in EA does indeed dwindle or show a downward trend. I don’t see that happening.
If anything the EA Community’s gendar ratio over the years (including at EA casual socials) is trending towards becoming more women-heavy suggesting to me that women are feeling more comfortable as a whole in the movement rather than less so.
This doesn’t mean that there haven’t been incidents that have made some women feel unwelcome or unsafe. These are serious and need to be dealt with. But I’m unconvinced this is indicative of a larger trend. I talk about this view of mine more in this comment on a post by Maya saying they are sad, disappointed and scared of the EA community.
And guess what: she updated her initial negative view towards the EA community after considering the full context of things as you can see in her comment here:
Final quick point:
I believe sexuality can be a means of doing good. I think healthy sexuality and specifically talking about it has liberated thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, across history. It’s as valid something to talk about as mental health as an EA cause area. If some are better at talking about it—even if it makes me feel uncomfortable and left out—it’s ok for them to get social status for it.
This is not really entirely different from how when EAs talk about AI Alignment and get status for it that I also feel uncomfortable and left out for not being smart enough. Let their social status increase. It’s my problem for feeling insecure, not theirs.
Likewise it is my problem for feeling like I “need to be better at being poly to be EA.” This is something I genuinely feel. But I know I don’t have to be poly to be fully welcome and I know the feeling is my own problem, not something that is a provably strong indictment against the EA community.
You’re using the word sexually liberal / open-minded /interesting interchangeably. Catholic nuns can be interesting, monogamous people can be open minded. Private sexual preferences have nothing to do with interestingness or open minded ness.
I am not just talking about professional relationships. I’m also talking about what the community should value. Treating women differently as higher/lower status based on their sexuality is simply wrong. A lot of people are intentionally monogamous ( like me). Assigning them default lower status due to their private relationship preference is an awful practice that shouldn’t be adopted community wide.
May be you’re struggling to understand my point, so let me try to demonstrate why this sort of language is troubling. If you substitute the word “poly” with “white” ( ethnicity)/”male” (gender)/ “homosexual”(orientation) or other equivalents, this sentence sounds so wrong. I don’t think that my choice / programming of sexuality is something that needs work, I love being monogamous, just like how I don’t feel lesser because of my gender or ethnicity. All other things being equal, I want to be given equal status as someone else with a different sexuality, just like how I want the same status as a man / white person / a person of different nationality. That’s all.
I am sorry you feel this way.
This is actually status working the right way. Status can be used as an incentive to promote behaviors we want from people because humans are great incentive maximizers. We want alignment researchers to gain status by producing high quality alignment work, because EA thinks this work is of high impact. Conversely, we want more people to aspire to become alignment researchers because this work is highly regarded / high status in EA. Unlike promoting certain type of technical AI work over others in EA, the community should not promote a certain type of sexuality over others. Let EA be about doing good alone, and decoupled from sexuality / race / ethnicity / orientation.
A valuable point I am glad you brought up so I can clarify that of course I believe Catholic nuns can be interesting and open minded and even sexually liberal in beliefs without practising. I’d hate to make anyone feel otherwise. I’m not using them interchangeably. I said “sexually liberal and less open-minded” indicating two separate things, not two synonymous things. Private sexual preferences can totally be related to someone’s interestingness, sexually liberal mindset and open-mindedness and there is nothing wrong with that. Some things correlate and this is hardly controversial. And just because I acknowledge they correlate for me (interestingness is subjective after all) does not mean I’m saying other groups cannot be interesting, sexually liberal or open-minded. Likewise poly people can be dull and closed-minded as well.
People just aren’t black-and-white enough to be easily categorized.
I kinda also just want to stop here and point out that it is a private relationship preferences, not sexual preferences. A lot of polyamorous people aren’t even sexual. There are poly people that just sleep together cuddling, yet have full blown loving relationship polycules complete with horrendously messy breakups like any monogamous relationship.
I met a a poly man this year that—to my shock—is asexual. Mostly shocking because he presented to me as interested in sex like me but when I talked to one of the (many) women he is or has dated I found out he doesn’t care much for sex.
And there is nothing wrong with me being more interested in this asexual poly man with multiple girlfriends (some of said girlfriends whom I might add are interested in sex) as a direct consequence of his relationship dynamics. Me assigning him more status in my social circles is no more a moral problem than traditionally monogamous people giving status to people who are traditionally married. Different social groups have different social status hierarchies. Both are as valid as any preference you might have where everyone is consenting to be a part of a social dynamic.
You cannot police people’s preferences when nobody is being harmed. That is wrong. If there are zero problematic power dynamics (e.g. no professional relationships), consenting adults can do as they please. A woman, just like any man, has every right to assign status to different people based on whatever reasons they choose. We all do this instinctively and automatically. The problem is not that that treating women differently as higher/lower status based on whatever preference you might have is wrong—it is that doing so insensitively can hurt someone and that hurting others is wrong.
In eras long forgotten I’ve had brief but magical “poly-heaven” moments where I’m dating multiple people and everyone is happy and it is sheer bliss, but I don’t go loudly proclaiming it all to all my friends who aren’t happy with their dating lives. That would be incredibly insensitive of me. Just because someone is lower status on some subjective metric doesn’t mean I want them to viscerally feel it. We should all be kindly helping lift each other up.
So I’ll start by saying it is absolutely awful you feel like the EA community is assigning you lower status for being a monogamous woman. I have to ask though, isn’t this something where you can look at the individuals who were this insensitive towards you and call them assholes without calling the EA community as a whole asshole-ish?
When I, as a poly person, hang out with my more conservative mono friends, they don’t make me feel lower status. I’m their friend. However, I am lower status around them relative to their status hierarchy, especially when it comes to my viability as a mate. I accept and respect that I’m lower status around them.
A perhaps better example (“more conservative mono” is a bit too vague) is that when I a hang out with my death metal friends who have crazy tats and know everything about metal music and playing instruments I likewise have lower relative social status. And perhaps an illustrative example here is that yes, some in the death metal community do put more status on tattoos while some do not—which, like polyamory to EA, is wholly separate from what the core of the community is actually focused on, namely death metal music. I accept and respect that to some people within the metal community I’m lower status due to not having tattoos. They aren’t being mean to me by assigning me lower status.
However, if a particular strictly monogamous person or death metal friend went out of their way to highlight or was insensitive about my relative low status, I’d call them an asshole. I would not however call the death metal community as a whole asshole-ish for assigning me lower status due to my private preference of not wanting to have tattoos. And I wouldn’t say they are wrong to value tattoos and should only appraise my social status based on my love of death metal.
Assigning people status based on their private relationship preference is not something that is adopted community-wide in EA. Assigning status based on your tattoos is not something adopted community-wide in the death metal community. In both cases though there might be an epiphenomenon where the people you hang out within the EA/Death Metal community just happen to also be into polyamory/tattoos, but that doesn’t mean their personal preference and the status hierarchies you experience because of those preferences are a community-wide practice.
You might immediately want to counter-argue that “the sum aggregate of statuses being assigned is what takes something from individuals practising it to it being a community-wide practice.” In anticipating this counter-argument, let’s look at my death metal analogy and see how it can come crashing down:
Let’s assume that women with tattoos disproportionately find themselves in favourable career positions in the death metal community which is not relative to their actual career skill. Women without tattoos do not see this advantage. Let’s assume this is a result of increased professional networking opportunities afforded to women with tattoos as a direct result of many high in power and status in the death metal community disproportionately giving social status to women with tattoos (And it is only due to this and NOT due to problematic romantic relationships with problematic power dynamics). Consequently we enter vicious feedback loop of women without tattoos feeling dis-empowered and unfair pressure to get tattoos to get ahead. And those that wont put up with this obvious bullshit just decide to leave the Death Metal Community altogether despite their talent.
I think we are now looking dead in the eye at something much more like what you’re afraid of is happening in the EA community. You’re saying that even absent problematic power dynamics and the appearance of nobody is being harmed, actually women are still being harmed.
So I think there are a few further steps we need to take before we start calling out the entire Death Metal community:
Women with tattoos actually have to be less competent than women without that aren’t getting said career positions. It’s totally possible that actually there are just more competent Death Metal women with tattoos and their tattoos are completely unrelated to their getting their positions
Women who feel pressured to get tattoos might just be pattern-matching on something that isn’t actually relevant to their professional success in the Death Metal Community
In the EA community I have not seen broad evidence of poly women being treated preferentially professionally because they are poly
It has to be broadly systemic and not just a feature of some subset of the community
It shouldn’t be something like Sonia points out appears to occur mostly in The Bay Area which appears to have features conducive to abusive dynamics
If there was some city where a scandal took place in the Death Metal community where some women appeared to have gotten preferential treatment due to their tattoos, it would be pretty unthinkable for anyone to conclude “The Death Metal Community is abusive” instead of “The Death Metal Community in this city is abusive”
Nobody caring to course correct, no action being taken.
I really doubt I need to make a case that concerns of women are being taken seriously. If they weren’t the number of women in EA wouldn’t be growing.
If things were true, however, we are no longer talking about individuals who are assholes but an entire community that has a deep rot.
But for sub-points I added I don’t think any of them hold for the EA community.
Ergo, I think the correct response is to call out individuals. Which has happened in the EA community a bunch of times leading to said individuals being banned from the EA community (or other punishments that make sense)
Thank you for trying to make your point clearer. I appreciate this a lot. I’m beginning to think we have an unusually high inferential distance between us, but actually at the object-level we don’t disagree on a lot at all.
So, actually, all those do occur and frequently. Certain black (ethnicity), women (gendar), homosexual (orientation) people have interesting stories to tell because of their experience tied to their ethnicity/gendar/orientation and get invited to podcasts because of it. So the sentence doesn’t strike me as “wrong” per se. It strikes me as feeling wrong.
But, if it isn’t just because of some protected characteristic, it is totally ok for people to assign others more social status, in part, because of protected characteristics. People assign people who are women/black/homosexual <insert-reason-here> more status because their experience as a <insert-category-here> is essential to whatever they have to share—e.g. it is something where they are oppressed
Likewise, polyamory is quite stigmatised and we don’t really have many role-models or representation. So, when someone is speaking for us and they do so eloquently, it is only natural that we assign this person more status because they can do so—and doing so is intricately tied to their identity in being poly. Someone who isn’t poly that can still “talk as well” wouldn’t get the status. This would be problematic for the same reason that we don’t assign status to a white man who can “talk as well” about the experience of being black as someone who is black.
I guess the question then is, if you possibly don’t feel it wrong to assign a women more social status for being a good role-model for women as a woman, why do you feel uncomfortable when poly people are assigned more status for being a good role-model for poly people as a poly person themselves? This, like AI Alignment in the EA community, is status working in the right way and incentivising good and worthwhile behaviour in the poly community.
I might feel bad or left out due to this, but that is not really that different from a woman feeling bad and left out when they compare themselves to other women who have gained social status in part for sharing their experiences as women.
Also I just want to explicitly state I didn’t mean for anything I wrote to imply I think your programming of sexuality is something that needs work. I’ll also add, in case you’re worrying whether you’ve offended me, nothing you’ve written thus far has made me feel like you think my programming of sexuality is something I need to work on.
And some people want to meet more people who have cool tattoos or more people who are polyamorous. Humans are going to throw out incentives to get what they want. The answer is not to quash it, it is to teach people to do so maturely, tactfully and with kindness. I like big-tent EA so people with near any preference might also like doing EA stuff. They might even be EA leaders. But we shouldn’t let their preferences automatically lead us to conclude that is the preference of the community as a whole.
And maybe I’m too woke but I’d caution against trying to decouple doing good from sexuality / race / ethnicity / orientation completely. A full understanding of people’s identities, I think, is important to doing good better. A sex-race-ethnic-orientation blind approach might invalidate people’s experiences, especially those that are marginalized.
For anyone that actually read this whole damn comment, if you are in the Bay Area for the next month I’d love to meet you at the EA Taco Tuesday meetup and give you an appreciative high five, lol, even if you disagree with me. I’ll be highly talkative excitable guy in the panda hat.
Nice of you, but I do not accept or respect having lower status in EA due to being monogamous. They are being mean to me and thousands of monogamous women they’re recruiting / want to recruit / who are dedicated EAs by assigning us lower status. I am not willing to participate in a community where I have lower status due to factors I didn’t choose (race/gender/sexuality), and I’d think many self respecting others will also not put up with what you’re calling “relative lower status”. No fuck that. We want equality, equal respect, equal opportunity.
I am not calling the whole EA community asshole-ish, but it is big problem here because there are many such individuals. There’s no push back against these people that I’m seeing widely either. I’m also confused you think individuals who assign me lower status are assholes after saying above yourself that may be I should be ok with being assigned lower status like you’re ok being lower status elsewhere.
I’m sorry but the death metal-tattoo analogy got lost on me. You can get a tattoo if you chose to, many people can’t change their sexual preference, so it’s a false comparison. It’s like you’re saying white people have higher status and you should be ok with that, but I can’t paint my face white and become a white person if I wanted to. Secondly tattoos are nothing like sex. Sex involves two people ( often) and conveys a relationship where you can benefit a higher status individual. Your getting a tattoo is not pleasurable to high status men. I do not want to get into the frame of arguing based on this analogy because the analogy doesn’t model many complications.
If you recruit more women than you hurt and if you drive out and silence the ones who speak up, number of women will grow but that doesn’t mean concerns of women are taken seriously. I’m not saying this is happening but your logic is flawed in many ways. Your implied casuality, ie, evidence that women’s numbers are growing means concerns of women are taken seriously, is false.
Bay area EA has around 60% poly, so I’d say monogamists are the minority here.
Your original statement said “if you’re poly you’re interesting and would be invited to speak on podcasts” so matter-of-factly. That is very different from “if you’re a good role-model for poly people as a poly person...”. Good role models should get status, I agree, but that’s not what you said. The equivalent of what you initially said would be ” if you’re a man you’re interesting and would be invited to speak on clearer thinking podcast etc”.
Inverted casual reasoning. But if we look carefully at your first quote the order of events is being poly gets status that converts into the opportunity to speak on podcasts. But in your justification, sharing experiences gets status. Sharing experiences should get more status, but just being poly/mono shouldn’t. Being a good role model for monogamous people and sharing that experience should also get higher status, but tell me dear friend, are they getting invited to podcasts? I am amazing at monogamy, the absolute best, do get me an invite. Or are these opportunities gate-kept?
Have you heard of the netflix quote “The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.” Almost all top rationalists are poly, many top EAs are as well. >50% of bay area EA is poly while base population rate is 15% or less. Tell me this is not a preference of the community once again :) Tell me what monogamous people need to do to rise the ranks.
Thanks for the thought our response! I suppose the main difference is that we have very diverging ideas of what the EA community is and what it will/should become.
I’ve been on the fringe of EA for years, just learning about concepts and donating but never been part of the tighter group so to speak. I see EA as a question—how do we do the most good with the resources available?
Poly is definitely something historically related to the early movement, but I guess I just disagree that the trade off of reputation and attacks over sexual harassment issues etc are positive because of vague notions of fun.
Also—if the EA community creates massive burnout maybe we should change the way we approach our communications and epistemics instead of accepting that and saying we’ll cope by having casual sex. That doesn’t seem like a good road to go down especially long term.
Then again I don’t have short AI timelines.
Thanks! Hm well I agree about other ways to tend to burnout I just think it might be a bit of a moot point from what I’ve seen and there may be something in the nature of EA about it. I have now edited my comment based on your thoughts. I think you will kinda get what I mean more about “fun” and of “mitigating burnout” now. I also added something I meant to add but had forgotten: EA as utopian testing grounds. Maybe you will agree with me that this is what the community could become?
Sorry to do you like that (edit rather than give a point by point response), but I might turn it into a big post. The new stuff is in brackets.
If you have more thoughts I’d love to hear them. I def appreciate the feedback.
A last thought is that this community seems to have trouble with slippery slope language.
Morally neutral until proven otherwise and can absolutely be done in transparent ethical ways without throwing out the baby with the bathwater:
casual hookups in community>>>casual dating in community>>>relationships in community>>>open relationships>>>polyamory>>>relationships and dating across departments (but likely not within departments and definitely not where there may be conflict of interest)
Bad or risky by nature:
Professional misconduct>>>sexism>>>sexist preferential treatment>>>sexist avoidant or dismissive treatment>>>purely self-interested behavior>>>sexual misconduct>>>sexually-inappropriate professional misconduct>>>conflict of interest relationships>>>sexual harrassment>>>sexual coercion>>>sexual assault>>>rape
All these are really different. I appreciated that OP was pretty careful about that, but I think I note that you are starting to slip and making connections where we really don’t know there are any.
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.
Strongly agree
Like you say it seems like many people draw a line when it comes to utility between parts of our life that can seem deeply personal (relationships), and aspects of our life that seem less personal (What job I should do, where I should give my money, what cause is best). Perhaps this is a reasonable distinction and we should be drawing that line, but I would like to see it better articulated rather than assumed.
I appreciated @Nathan Young’s comment above which perhaps articulates some of this difficulty. “I feel sad/judged/ frustrated reading this, though that’s not to say it’s wrong.”
i feel like the “what if you replace poly with gay” thing is saying, like
empirically something (some kind of instinctual conservatism towards sexual norms) caused people to say the same things about gay people.
so something like instinctual-conservatism-towards-sexual-norms when it’s ~adults doing consensual things is a heuristic that failed in the past and is probably not reliable
if you want to interfere with my private life to that extent there’s a very strong burden of proof upon you
also happier EAs are EAs that are better at doing EA work, generally speaking
like, I feel like if you were in this movement 50 years ago you would be saying “we shouldn’t be encouraging gay relationships within this movement because it’d make the place feel uninviting for people who don’t want to be hit on by people of hte same sex”?
When it comes to intervening in people’s personal lives, I would never advocate a top down solution to something like this to be clear. If an organizer in a local group suggested we should kick out anyone who is poly or sleeps around I would be far more likely to see that organizer as problematic than the group in question.
The reason I strongly agree is that this is a community norm suggestion, and I think it’s a healthy one.
To your point about the gay community fifty years ago—I agree! If there is a subset of highly taboo social norms, regardless of their moral valence, that are promoted in a community it will taint the ideas of that community to the general public. Fifty years ago I would’ve probably said something similar, like “it’s fine to have gay people in the movement and we will not judge you. However this is not a movement to promote the rights of gay people, this is a movement to make charity better and doing good more effective.”
Overall I think it would be better for EA and for poly acceptance if people who were poly tried to form/stick to their own sub culture outside of EA for dating around (which absolutely exists, I practiced polyamory years before I found EA.) People who advocate polyamory could focus more on that, and many folks in EA would have less of their entire life/identity tied up in EA, which I see as a good thing.
I guess my objections to this are
-I think the median person’s view of poly is like “seems like a bad way to do relationships but also none of my business” which is distinct from being weirded out by poly people
-I’m not trying to be a poly advocate, I’m trying to live a lifestyle which is poly? I object to you trying to discourage this on the grounds that discrimination is bad? Like i feel like you are saying “it would be better for poly acceptance if
EA were less friendly to poly relationships” which no?
-A movement focused on ‘doing the most good’ is going to attract people with moral views pretty different to the median. We’re not a political party, we are a social movement which naturally has people doing weird things in pursuit of its goals so I think it’s good that we advertise ourselves as being tolerant of weird people?
A bit confused on your second point but my thinking goes like this—the more people we get to think rationally about morals relationships etc the better. This is urgent due to issues like value lock in.
If we can get drastically more people overall to even care about morality or be open to changing their moral stances from rational argumentation, then yes that would be way better for poly acceptance! Even if on the margin there were less people in EA that are poly and/or having poly relationships in EA.
Does that model make sense?
That’s why my advice was for people to consider it personally instead of suggesting a ban or something like that. For clarity’s sake I think a top down ban would be bad, and I don’t think anyone else is proposing a ban either.
I think the issue with “consider” is that like, I suspect most of the people who should be considering this will not
and I’d rather give more actionable/precise advice than this for people who are like, struggling with scrupulosity or whatever.
also the issue that people saying “hey that sexually nonnormative thing you’re doing consider not doing that” a lot does create a hostile environment
I think if you’re focused only on reducing sexual assault then your point makes sense (I don’t think an abuser will read my post and think “oh okay I won’t assault people then”), but I think if you’re focused on things like reducing the extent to which EAs feel pressured or creeped out by being subjected to certain behaviours then it’s still helpful for people who are not the “worst offenders” to avoid these behaviours. I think both are problem worth addressing and other mechanisms are needed to address sexual assault.
hrmm
I think the awkward thing here is ‘socially awkwards around romance and inclined to listen to you’ is going to correlate pretty well to ‘single , insecure +not terribly sexually experienced’ which is going to correlate with ‘will and maybe should be seeking out a serious relationship anyway’
so I think Owen here is kind of the unusual case as someone in this demographic ’sleeping around’
or something
and I can see lots of ways increasing the ambient level of sex-negativity is going to make these people worse/more socially awkward about approaching people
also for poly guys starting out being a secondary partner seems like a good way to get some experience without being too subject to the gender ratio problem
In many other cases, such as social movement research, we look for historical analogues to inform our priors. Why is that a reasonable strategy in other cases but not this?
And why is it not helpful for people who such a norm would directly affect to say “personally this makes me feel…”, but somehow adding to the conversation for someone uninvolved to say ‘Personally I agree strongly with this post and think it’s a more than reasonable proposal. Also, just seems like common sense. I’d imagine there are quite a few people who feel similarly based on the vote count.’?
Here’s two simple and linked cases: Weird aspie poly people are central to what the community has so far done. Also libertarian anti woke people. A sharp cultural change like the one proposed here will drive us out. Losing my part of the community will probably reduce its ability to act more than losing the part of the community that wants these changes.
The impact on the global portfolio of charitable action is much less clear, because people like me will coalesce elsewhere in communities that try to be actively cringe and have a bit of a right wing reputation to avoid new comers who want to drive us out. But we’ll probably still be worrying about ai, utilitarianism, and trying to make ethical concerns into real world changes.
The same thing will also happen if my group stays in/ regains control of ea culture. The people who bounce or leave will end up doing good things elsewhere in communities that match their preferences better.
EA is a way, not the way, and changes to the culture should be judged in utilitarian terms by how they influence the global portfolio of action, not by how they change the level of useful work directly done through EA.
Second: As a poly EA, I’m more likely to bother to show up for things if I think I might get laid. It increases engagement and community cohesion. A group that is a good place to meet interesting opposite gender people is going to have an intrinsic advantage in pulling in casually interested people over one where that is strictly banned.
The claim that functional groups tend to ban dating within the group seems to me to be simply untrue in general and across cultures.
Of course the bouncing because hit on too often issue points in the other direction. But I don’t think anyone has actually tried to measure the relative magnitudes of these effects. There is just a completely non rigorous statement that clearly the expected value calculation points against making poly people happy.
I upvoted the comment for sharing a relevant point of view, but I personally care most about an EA community where people obsess over ideas and taking action to make the world better. So, anything that attracts people for other reasons is something I see as a risk (dilution of quality). I’m not sure it’s that important to draw in lots of casually interested people (definitely not saying you fit that description – I’m just talking about the part of “increases engagement”).
To be clear, I know some poly people or people who “sleep around” who seem as serious about EA as it gets, so I’m not saying one can’t have both.
That said, the most committed EAs I know who “sleep around” mostly do so outside of EA because they’ve decided doing it within EA has more risks than benefits and they attend EA events for impact rather than socially. (And my guess is that the most committed EAs who are poly pursue more serious poly relationships rather than lots of casual ones – but I don’t actually know.)
So, there’s a sense in which I totally agree with the OP. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to try to do anything about this from top down. One thing we can do from the bottom up is socially encourage people for being highly dedicated and impact-oriented. (People tend to notice when someone has a high opinion of them and finds their attitude impressive.)
Edit: I guess one point that made me much more sympathetic toward the view that casual dating is not in tension with high dedication to (the moral inspiration of) EA is that several commenters mentioned that some of their best long-term relationships started casually. If that’s the case for someone (that pursuing casual relationships is one of the best ways for finding long-term relationship happiness), then that’s of course different!
Hey Tim, just want to say I really appreciate the honest response. We’ve butted heads a couple times on this topic and you rigorously stick to your values which I admire.
I’ll echo what others have said in that the idea of using casual sex as a motivator to get people out to EA events makes me very uncomfortable. I agree that it’s probably a strong motivator when in play, but I’d rather we get people out because they are interested in the ideas presented.
In the interest of intellectual rigor though, I’m fine with softer/different incentives like free food at events, non impact related activities, etc. I suppose sex seems more risky and messy than those other incentives but my thoughts here aren’t clearly formed yet.
Weird aspie and poly people are absolutely central to what EA has done and how far we’ve come. Frankly I also just enjoy talking with them because those types of people tend to have novel ideas that are well thought out. That being said I don’t think that creating a soft norm of separating poly from EA would necessarily drive those people away.
For instance, what if people in EA communities with a lot of poly folks created a separate meetup specifically for poly people? Or joined an existing one?
For one this would make sexual issues in EA less abundant, and two would help people develop their identity/social network outside of EA. Not putting all their eggs in one basket, so to speak.
On the EV side I agree with you that this is something which would be highly problematic and difficult to study rigorously, but I think it’s still worth looking at it from a lens of utility.
My thought is that because casual sex / making people sexually uncomfortable is such a huge issue for the average person, if we can tone down that behavior a bit it will help us convince far more people to join EA. On top of that it would reduce scandals, and hopefully make decision makers more objective when giving grants or hiring.
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.
[emphasis added]
I just want to flag that this makes me pretty uncomfortable. Not all engagement is good, and if a change in policy / culture increases engagement on the margin because it attracts people who want to show up to get laid (who otherwise wouldn’t have been there), I think I’m personally okay with not having this engagement.
It’s also not clear that if EA changes the dynamics of events or the movement such that there are now an extra group of people who are engaging now that there are opportunities to get laid, that this wouldn’t lead to other people disengaging, so I think the extent to which this actually leads to positive engagement and community cohesion is an open question.
I’m not sure if I’m understanding you correctly. Your two claims sound like:
“If people like me are driven out of the EA community, they will coalesce elsewhere, have a cringe + right wing reputation, and continue to do work on AI / try to make ethical concerns into real world changes.”
“Changes to EA culture should take into account all impacts and not just the direct impact done through EA.”
If you assume that more normie / left-leaning EAs[1] won’t continue to do the “EA-equivalent” to the same extent (e.g. they go off and become a campaign coordinator for the median social justice movement), doesn’t this imply EA should actively move away from “cringe + right wing reputation” by your own argument?[2]
i.e. if “cringe right wing” EAs are going to work on AI safety regardless of their involvement in EA, and “normie left wing” EAs will be more impactful in EA than outside of it, this implies the counterfactual loss in impact is asymmetrical, and if you suggest taking into account all impacts and not just the direct impact through EA, then presumably this supports moving in the normie left wing direction.
Fwiw, I’m not the biggest fan of these labels, and I think they risk being more tribal than adding clarity to the conversation. Like I think folks on a wide range on the political spectrum can have meaningful and useful things to contribute to the EA movement. But I am using it just as antonyms to the examples you gave.
Again, just using your words, not necessarily reflective of any personal views of what you might refer to as “weird aspie” / “libertarian anti-woke” EAs. I’m also not necessarily advocating that EA should actually move away from this group, just trying to understand your argument.