This subthread here, with heavy involvement by Kelsey Piper, exemplifies a lot of things wrong with the forum in one place. It is a good note that is relevant for this post.
Kelsey Piper is making a valid point that it’s wrong, evil and bad to try to police individual conduct and impugn her valid choices, but everything else about the thread is cursed:
It’s a high temperature digression (“poly bad/good”) that isn’t substantive to the main point, and people are talking past eachother
E.g., the relevant point would be poly producing a vehicle for predators or not, and how we can solve this
It’s probably only because of Jeff K’s involvement that the thread ends up balanced, Piper’s gravitas and her (justifiably strong) emotional appeal would otherwise carry the thread
Few people in the post show depth about how to solve the root issue or even steer discussion to it: that one community in EA dominates and produces absurd norms:
It’s ridiculous that in this community, it is normal to have sexual relationships between people of different power in EA (much less “senior people pressuring newcomers into poly relationships” !)
There’s a deeper comment here about “rationalism”:
Piper’s appeal is emotional, pulls the discussion into a perceived threat to her values and lifestyle, and uses rationalist jargon (“frame”). As the subsequent comments point out, this isn’t that substantive or helpful.
As a statement calibrated to the baseline/counterfactual of what talented HYPS grad like Piper could think and communicate, I argue that “rationalist” ideas and discussion were bad here—I believe this culture and norms produce long, surface level writing that seems good, but that ultimately fails larger goals and has negative effect in communication and reasoning (sometimes blatantly obvious to everyone outside the forum). This is one example of it (though not particularly severe).
This subthread here, with heavy involvement by Kelsey Piper, exemplifies a lot of things wrong with the forum in one place. It is a good note that is relevant for this post.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=cDnhvShDFhPfFBEpJ
Kelsey Piper is making a valid point that it’s wrong, evil and bad to try to police individual conduct and impugn her valid choices, but everything else about the thread is cursed:
It’s a high temperature digression (“poly bad/good”) that isn’t substantive to the main point, and people are talking past eachother
E.g., the relevant point would be poly producing a vehicle for predators or not, and how we can solve this
It’s probably only because of Jeff K’s involvement that the thread ends up balanced, Piper’s gravitas and her (justifiably strong) emotional appeal would otherwise carry the thread
Few people in the post show depth about how to solve the root issue or even steer discussion to it: that one community in EA dominates and produces absurd norms:
It’s ridiculous that in this community, it is normal to have sexual relationships between people of different power in EA (much less “senior people pressuring newcomers into poly relationships” !)
There’s a deeper comment here about “rationalism”:
Piper’s appeal is emotional, pulls the discussion into a perceived threat to her values and lifestyle, and uses rationalist jargon (“frame”). As the subsequent comments point out, this isn’t that substantive or helpful.
As a statement calibrated to the baseline/counterfactual of what talented HYPS grad like Piper could think and communicate, I argue that “rationalist” ideas and discussion were bad here—I believe this culture and norms produce long, surface level writing that seems good, but that ultimately fails larger goals and has negative effect in communication and reasoning (sometimes blatantly obvious to everyone outside the forum). This is one example of it (though not particularly severe).