Maybe we need a norm of advertising our consent philosophy in prominent places the same way we do with gender, marital status and orientation.
Here is an interesting thread in the slatestarcodex subreddit where some possible problems with this idea were discussed (ctrl-f “public symbol”).
The simplest way to do this would be on the basis of whether a woman wears revealing clothes. Unfortunately, there’s something of a taboo among feminists regarding this approach, because if you say anything about how a woman wore revealing clothes, feminists round that off to victim blaming and condemn you on that basis.
What are your thoughts on what needs to happen?
Thanks for asking! Some brainstorming:
I like your centralized reporting idea. Julia Wise says she has served as a contact point, and CFAR recently added a community disputes council which does this, among other things. (If you’re unable to see the post I linked, you can get in touch with the CFAR people here.) Getting all these people to make entries in a shared database seems good. (BTW, how many people reached out to you since you made this post and shared your anonymous feedback link?)
Try to understand why people don’t want to report sexual assaults. Would they be willing to report them in the context of the EA survey or some other anonymous survey? But also, would allowing for anonymous accusations this way present its own set of problems? Maybe if someone gets more than one anonymous accusation from different sources, then they should get quietly kicked out of the community (“quietly”=in a way that doesn’t harm their reputation, because these anonymous accusations are unverifiable—so we are kicking them out in order to mitigate risk, not because we think they should be condemned).
Instead of doing expensive social norm experimentation ourselves, maybe survey the anthropology literature and try to understand whether some societies have lower rates of rape/sexual assault than others, and what those societies have in common culturally.
I personally don’t really think the EA community should be seen as a place for dating/relationships—the same way workplaces are not seen this way. So I’m happy for the EA community standards to trade off decreased relationship formation in favor of increased safety. If you really want to date other EAs, there’s always reciprocity.io.
However, in society at large, I think it’d be good for feminists and women who create incentives for sexually aggressive behavior—e.g. 50 Shades of Grey fans—to dialogue more and come to some kind of compromise position. Right now the 50 Shades fans are nodding along with the feminists and then quietly rewarding guys who push boundaries.
I also think it’d be good for men to get positive examples of behavior that women consider OK or even appreciated, instead of only hearing about behaviors we shouldn’t do.
I get the impression feminists think they can solve sexual assault by making the threshold for what constitutes sexual assault ever lower. I think this hurts their credibility. Maybe there are some guys who take the feminist guideline and always adjust it some distance towards being more aggressive, but then there are other guys who want a decent-sized safety buffer between what we do and what gets you condemned. Learning that you are a monster if you have any sexual desire for women can also cause suicidality.
So maybe it’d be useful if there was a group that tried to put together a set of common-sense rules by surveying a representative population of women about what bothered them, and having a group of reasonable and fairly randomly sampled men & women engage in dialogue (with an equal number of both men and women in the group, and without penalizing people for saying uncomfortable stuff and expressing “Red Pill” sentiments—maybe by making it an anonymous online discussion or something. BTW in general, I think solving tribalism and helping people who disagree on these issues to engage productively would be good, e.g. you and Marcus in this thread). Then you could release your recommendations, and if someone violated them, it would hopefully create less drama to take action against the violator (because a broader set of people would be able to agree that the guidelines were reasonable and action is therefore justified if someone violates them). And if the level of drama decreased, then maybe women would be more willing to make accusations, and then we’d be able to get rid of the real bad apples more effectively.
The point is that if accusers are always being seen as part of the feminist camp, which lumps them in with some people saying some pretty crazy and unreasonable stuff, then that’s going to make them unpopular whenever they make an accusation, which is going to lead fewer women to be willing to make accusations. So another thing that might work is for more accusers to be explicit about which parts of feminist discourse they disagree with. If they seem like reasonable people, maybe their accusations will be taken more seriously, less drama will be generated, and making an accusation won’t make you unpopular.
I’m also not sure the comparison is fair. Workplaces have specific regulations about how people can interact; an EA meetup is not your workplace and attendees probably shouldn’t be held to the same standard of conduct.
I also know of a number of happy EA relationships. I think it would be a shame if we decreed that they were off-limits.
Here is an interesting thread in the slatestarcodex subreddit where some possible problems with this idea were discussed (ctrl-f “public symbol”).
The simplest way to do this would be on the basis of whether a woman wears revealing clothes. Unfortunately, there’s something of a taboo among feminists regarding this approach, because if you say anything about how a woman wore revealing clothes, feminists round that off to victim blaming and condemn you on that basis.
Thanks for asking! Some brainstorming:
I like your centralized reporting idea. Julia Wise says she has served as a contact point, and CFAR recently added a community disputes council which does this, among other things. (If you’re unable to see the post I linked, you can get in touch with the CFAR people here.) Getting all these people to make entries in a shared database seems good. (BTW, how many people reached out to you since you made this post and shared your anonymous feedback link?)
Try to understand why people don’t want to report sexual assaults. Would they be willing to report them in the context of the EA survey or some other anonymous survey? But also, would allowing for anonymous accusations this way present its own set of problems? Maybe if someone gets more than one anonymous accusation from different sources, then they should get quietly kicked out of the community (“quietly”=in a way that doesn’t harm their reputation, because these anonymous accusations are unverifiable—so we are kicking them out in order to mitigate risk, not because we think they should be condemned).
Instead of doing expensive social norm experimentation ourselves, maybe survey the anthropology literature and try to understand whether some societies have lower rates of rape/sexual assault than others, and what those societies have in common culturally.
I personally don’t really think the EA community should be seen as a place for dating/relationships—the same way workplaces are not seen this way. So I’m happy for the EA community standards to trade off decreased relationship formation in favor of increased safety. If you really want to date other EAs, there’s always reciprocity.io.
However, in society at large, I think it’d be good for feminists and women who create incentives for sexually aggressive behavior—e.g. 50 Shades of Grey fans—to dialogue more and come to some kind of compromise position. Right now the 50 Shades fans are nodding along with the feminists and then quietly rewarding guys who push boundaries.
I also think it’d be good for men to get positive examples of behavior that women consider OK or even appreciated, instead of only hearing about behaviors we shouldn’t do.
I get the impression feminists think they can solve sexual assault by making the threshold for what constitutes sexual assault ever lower. I think this hurts their credibility. Maybe there are some guys who take the feminist guideline and always adjust it some distance towards being more aggressive, but then there are other guys who want a decent-sized safety buffer between what we do and what gets you condemned. Learning that you are a monster if you have any sexual desire for women can also cause suicidality.
So maybe it’d be useful if there was a group that tried to put together a set of common-sense rules by surveying a representative population of women about what bothered them, and having a group of reasonable and fairly randomly sampled men & women engage in dialogue (with an equal number of both men and women in the group, and without penalizing people for saying uncomfortable stuff and expressing “Red Pill” sentiments—maybe by making it an anonymous online discussion or something. BTW in general, I think solving tribalism and helping people who disagree on these issues to engage productively would be good, e.g. you and Marcus in this thread). Then you could release your recommendations, and if someone violated them, it would hopefully create less drama to take action against the violator (because a broader set of people would be able to agree that the guidelines were reasonable and action is therefore justified if someone violates them). And if the level of drama decreased, then maybe women would be more willing to make accusations, and then we’d be able to get rid of the real bad apples more effectively.
The point is that if accusers are always being seen as part of the feminist camp, which lumps them in with some people saying some pretty crazy and unreasonable stuff, then that’s going to make them unpopular whenever they make an accusation, which is going to lead fewer women to be willing to make accusations. So another thing that might work is for more accusers to be explicit about which parts of feminist discourse they disagree with. If they seem like reasonable people, maybe their accusations will be taken more seriously, less drama will be generated, and making an accusation won’t make you unpopular.
15% of Americans met their partner/spouse at work, so I’m not sure your claim about workplaces is correct.
I’m also not sure the comparison is fair. Workplaces have specific regulations about how people can interact; an EA meetup is not your workplace and attendees probably shouldn’t be held to the same standard of conduct.
I also know of a number of happy EA relationships. I think it would be a shame if we decreed that they were off-limits.