What problem are you trying to solve by recommending to not date within EA?
If it’s conflicts of interest, it seems like you’ll get more mileage directly promoting norms of avoiding conflict of interest by disclosing what would bias judgement and avoiding being a decision maker in that situation. As one anecdote, I worked in a typical enough non EA startup in which multiple coworkers had romantic relationships with each other, and multiple coworkers had strong friend relationships with each other. In my experience management decisions were more highly influenced and biased by friend relationships than by romantic relationships. Many companies and institutions have cliques and friend networks that try to gain power together, and I do think it makes sense to have strong norms on disclosing that and reducing those conflicts of interest.
On one hand I agree that avoiding conflicts of interest is important, on the other I think you’re approaching it too narrowly if you focus on romantic/sexual relationships. But I wouldn’t bite the bullet of saying one shouldn’t have friendly or romantic/sexual relationships in the EA community, as that just seems too high a cost to pay.
Conflicts of interests is a way to put it, but I think it massively undersells it.
To me the thing not dating in EA (or at your company) is it upholds an extremely valuable professional norm of preventing your personal and work life from colliding in messy ways. The trouble is that breakups happen, they are messy, people do and say things they will regret, and you want as much separation between the personal and professional parts of your life in such a situation. That way only a part of your life is on fire. If you’re like many people and only really have personal and professional lives (and don’t have, say, a religious life) then you may find your whole world has fallen apart.
The downside risk is high. The upside is low. The world is full of people. Go out and find some of them who aren’t going to put you at risk of wrecking both parts of your life at once.
The upside is huge for a lot of people. And EA is the social life, not professional for a lot of us.
Have you actually tried to quantify either the downside or the upside here, or are you saying that one is small and the other is big based on a general intuition?
As someone who thinks banning dating in EA would be bad, I really, really want to see people on the other side of this issue try harder to make their argument as rigorous as possible.
I’ve not tried to quantify this, but I’ve lived in a bunch of rationalist/EA houses. I’ve seen the dynamics up close. The downsides are very large and massively outweigh the upsides based on what I’ve seen. The only thing that makes people think the upsides outweigh the downsides is, I suspect, that they are desperate.
This isn’t really weird, though. This is just what seems to happen in lots of communities. Dating within a community is usually dangerous to the community, and this holds for lots of communities. This is a fully general phenomenon among humans: exogamy is the strategy most often adopted by societies that grow, expand, progress, and make the world better; endogamy by societies that isolate and rarely change. Given that the goal of EA is to make the world better, we should have a strong prior against endogamy being a successful strategy.
So why do you think dating within a church, or an university community, or maybe a high school, for example, works fine? Or is the argument that my impression that these things are fine is incorrect?
More to the point: It seems like the minimalist approach to dealing with issues of dating other people in a group house is to encourage group houses to form specific rules around that, and not to change the general culture of the community.
This also still isn’t a clear attempt to look at the downsides of making it very clear to everyone that you should not ask anyone out at an EAGx event, and that it is very bad juju if you even think that sleeping with the professional partner you just met at one of them would be a nice thing to do. Phrased in better corporate speak, of course.
Also telling local community organizers to make sure they regularly announce at groups that we don’t want anyone who meets someone here to date someone else here. That would be bad, and Time Magazine might someday find the worst thing that ever happened in such a situation and write about it, and we are now optimizing to avoid that.
I mean I organize a LW/ACX meetup, and if I was told that, I’d ignore it, possibly rename my group to add ‘unofficial’ to the title, and be seriously annoyed with the meetup meta organizer person. And this is despite the point that there is only one woman who regularly shows up at the events.
And if that is not what you think should be done, then what is the specific set of policy changes we are proposing? Or is it just giving people a cultural vibe that dating people who you might interact with professionally can have serious downsides? I mean sure, and we’ve made a general cultural attempt to make a big chunk of the individual upsides illegal at the same time because they are seen as being bad systemically.
But this is completely irrelevant to me, since I have no expectations of being professionally involved with people who I might date in the community.
I suppose what I’m really asking is this: Can you, or someone who agrees with you, tell an expected value story about how a concrete set of changes would really create a positive impact on the bottom line of doing good, all things considered?
Quick side note: I think part of the general difference in priors might be driven by me seeing SBF as evidence that embracing poly people who mix sex with work will do more good and increase total community resources more than pushing them away. Most people seem to have the opposite interpretation.
And EA is the social life, not professional for a lot of us.
I want to say something specifically in response to this.
It’s great that EAs can be friends with each other. But EA has a mission. It’s not a social club. We’re here to do good better. Things that get in the way of doing good better should be dropped if we actually care about the mission.
The trouble is I know lots of people have impoverished social lives. They have maybe one or maybe two communities to build social bonds within. So when you’re in that stance the natural thing is to try to extract as much value from the one community you have, whether or not that is well advised.
The better strategy is to get some more communities!
I’ve seen this a lot within rationalist spaces. People come in and want to make rationality their whole identity. This isn’t a unique phenomenon. People try to do it with religion, hobbies, all kind of stuff. It’s almost always a mistake. We have the common wisdom against putting all your eggs in one basket for a reason.
Be friends with fellow EAs. Have a social life with some of them. But don’t let that be the whole social scene! That’s why we’re in this mess in the first place! We’ve got people who’ve mixed up their only personal and professional settings and now trouble in one means trouble in all of it. People’s whole lives fall apart because one part goes bad and they have no where to turn. And that’s just how it is, there’s nothing unusual about it; would happen anywhere and anytime someone wraps their entire life around a single thing. That’s not the way to have resilient social bonds that enable a person to do the most good in the world. It’s a way to do some good for a while until something goes wrong and then burnout or be ostracized and then do less good.
(I know this is perhaps a bit ranty, but I see people fucking this up all the time in EA and I just want to shake some sense into everyone because this is extremely obvious stuff that nerd-like people mess up all the time.)
“The better strategy is to get some more communities!”
Does this really work for most people?
I think my life over the past year or so has been substantially enriched as I’ve gone from seeing my rationalist group friends in my city from once a month or so to 1-2 times a week, but at the same time, as a reasonably introverted and Aspie person, who also has a three month old who always wants to be carried, this has close to maxed out my social meter. I don’t think normal people can maintain having more than one or two real space communities that they are really deeply involved in.
Though, I do have a group of friends outside of the rationalist group, and I’m connected through my wife to other communities, so I suppose I’m not failing to follow your advice of having other social groups.
As a poly person whose main relationship over the last seven years has been with a non-rationalist non-EA, I want to say:
Ingroup and outgroup people are both great. I think it would impoverish the community, and be a tragic loss of a lot of beautiful friendships and relationships, if people tried hard to avoid dating anyone from one group or the other.
(I’m interested in the counter-argument, and don’t mean to use platitudes to shout down what sounds like a complicated model I don’t yet understand. But I wanted to at least voice my view.
Normally I would feel less need to speak up and note disagreement, but right now I think a lot of EAs are feeling a lot of emotional conflict and shame about various EA-related things, so I’m unusually wary of pushes for people to cut ties with tons of their friends or partners or radically restructure their life based on a high-level theory about what’s good for them.
I think this is a good discussion to have, but I want to encourage EAs to be skeptical of contentful one-size-fits-all arguments about what’s good for them, compared to their own individual-specific sense of what’s helping them flourish in life. I trust individuals to build up self-expertise and steer by their taste more than I trust relationship or sociology experts to give useful advice.)
What problem are you trying to solve by recommending to not date within EA?
If it’s conflicts of interest, it seems like you’ll get more mileage directly promoting norms of avoiding conflict of interest by disclosing what would bias judgement and avoiding being a decision maker in that situation.
As one anecdote, I worked in a typical enough non EA startup in which multiple coworkers had romantic relationships with each other, and multiple coworkers had strong friend relationships with each other. In my experience management decisions were more highly influenced and biased by friend relationships than by romantic relationships. Many companies and institutions have cliques and friend networks that try to gain power together, and I do think it makes sense to have strong norms on disclosing that and reducing those conflicts of interest.
On one hand I agree that avoiding conflicts of interest is important, on the other I think you’re approaching it too narrowly if you focus on romantic/sexual relationships. But I wouldn’t bite the bullet of saying one shouldn’t have friendly or romantic/sexual relationships in the EA community, as that just seems too high a cost to pay.
Conflicts of interests is a way to put it, but I think it massively undersells it.
To me the thing not dating in EA (or at your company) is it upholds an extremely valuable professional norm of preventing your personal and work life from colliding in messy ways. The trouble is that breakups happen, they are messy, people do and say things they will regret, and you want as much separation between the personal and professional parts of your life in such a situation. That way only a part of your life is on fire. If you’re like many people and only really have personal and professional lives (and don’t have, say, a religious life) then you may find your whole world has fallen apart.
The downside risk is high. The upside is low. The world is full of people. Go out and find some of them who aren’t going to put you at risk of wrecking both parts of your life at once.
The upside is huge for a lot of people. And EA is the social life, not professional for a lot of us.
Have you actually tried to quantify either the downside or the upside here, or are you saying that one is small and the other is big based on a general intuition?
As someone who thinks banning dating in EA would be bad, I really, really want to see people on the other side of this issue try harder to make their argument as rigorous as possible.
I’ve not tried to quantify this, but I’ve lived in a bunch of rationalist/EA houses. I’ve seen the dynamics up close. The downsides are very large and massively outweigh the upsides based on what I’ve seen. The only thing that makes people think the upsides outweigh the downsides is, I suspect, that they are desperate.
This isn’t really weird, though. This is just what seems to happen in lots of communities. Dating within a community is usually dangerous to the community, and this holds for lots of communities. This is a fully general phenomenon among humans: exogamy is the strategy most often adopted by societies that grow, expand, progress, and make the world better; endogamy by societies that isolate and rarely change. Given that the goal of EA is to make the world better, we should have a strong prior against endogamy being a successful strategy.
So why do you think dating within a church, or an university community, or maybe a high school, for example, works fine? Or is the argument that my impression that these things are fine is incorrect?
More to the point: It seems like the minimalist approach to dealing with issues of dating other people in a group house is to encourage group houses to form specific rules around that, and not to change the general culture of the community.
This also still isn’t a clear attempt to look at the downsides of making it very clear to everyone that you should not ask anyone out at an EAGx event, and that it is very bad juju if you even think that sleeping with the professional partner you just met at one of them would be a nice thing to do. Phrased in better corporate speak, of course.
Also telling local community organizers to make sure they regularly announce at groups that we don’t want anyone who meets someone here to date someone else here. That would be bad, and Time Magazine might someday find the worst thing that ever happened in such a situation and write about it, and we are now optimizing to avoid that.
I mean I organize a LW/ACX meetup, and if I was told that, I’d ignore it, possibly rename my group to add ‘unofficial’ to the title, and be seriously annoyed with the meetup meta organizer person. And this is despite the point that there is only one woman who regularly shows up at the events.
And if that is not what you think should be done, then what is the specific set of policy changes we are proposing? Or is it just giving people a cultural vibe that dating people who you might interact with professionally can have serious downsides? I mean sure, and we’ve made a general cultural attempt to make a big chunk of the individual upsides illegal at the same time because they are seen as being bad systemically.
But this is completely irrelevant to me, since I have no expectations of being professionally involved with people who I might date in the community.
I suppose what I’m really asking is this: Can you, or someone who agrees with you, tell an expected value story about how a concrete set of changes would really create a positive impact on the bottom line of doing good, all things considered?
Quick side note: I think part of the general difference in priors might be driven by me seeing SBF as evidence that embracing poly people who mix sex with work will do more good and increase total community resources more than pushing them away. Most people seem to have the opposite interpretation.
I want to say something specifically in response to this.
It’s great that EAs can be friends with each other. But EA has a mission. It’s not a social club. We’re here to do good better. Things that get in the way of doing good better should be dropped if we actually care about the mission.
The trouble is I know lots of people have impoverished social lives. They have maybe one or maybe two communities to build social bonds within. So when you’re in that stance the natural thing is to try to extract as much value from the one community you have, whether or not that is well advised.
The better strategy is to get some more communities!
I’ve seen this a lot within rationalist spaces. People come in and want to make rationality their whole identity. This isn’t a unique phenomenon. People try to do it with religion, hobbies, all kind of stuff. It’s almost always a mistake. We have the common wisdom against putting all your eggs in one basket for a reason.
Be friends with fellow EAs. Have a social life with some of them. But don’t let that be the whole social scene! That’s why we’re in this mess in the first place! We’ve got people who’ve mixed up their only personal and professional settings and now trouble in one means trouble in all of it. People’s whole lives fall apart because one part goes bad and they have no where to turn. And that’s just how it is, there’s nothing unusual about it; would happen anywhere and anytime someone wraps their entire life around a single thing. That’s not the way to have resilient social bonds that enable a person to do the most good in the world. It’s a way to do some good for a while until something goes wrong and then burnout or be ostracized and then do less good.
(I know this is perhaps a bit ranty, but I see people fucking this up all the time in EA and I just want to shake some sense into everyone because this is extremely obvious stuff that nerd-like people mess up all the time.)
“The better strategy is to get some more communities!”
Does this really work for most people?
I think my life over the past year or so has been substantially enriched as I’ve gone from seeing my rationalist group friends in my city from once a month or so to 1-2 times a week, but at the same time, as a reasonably introverted and Aspie person, who also has a three month old who always wants to be carried, this has close to maxed out my social meter. I don’t think normal people can maintain having more than one or two real space communities that they are really deeply involved in.
Though, I do have a group of friends outside of the rationalist group, and I’m connected through my wife to other communities, so I suppose I’m not failing to follow your advice of having other social groups.
As a poly person whose main relationship over the last seven years has been with a non-rationalist non-EA, I want to say:
Ingroup and outgroup people are both great. I think it would impoverish the community, and be a tragic loss of a lot of beautiful friendships and relationships, if people tried hard to avoid dating anyone from one group or the other.
(I’m interested in the counter-argument, and don’t mean to use platitudes to shout down what sounds like a complicated model I don’t yet understand. But I wanted to at least voice my view.
Normally I would feel less need to speak up and note disagreement, but right now I think a lot of EAs are feeling a lot of emotional conflict and shame about various EA-related things, so I’m unusually wary of pushes for people to cut ties with tons of their friends or partners or radically restructure their life based on a high-level theory about what’s good for them.
I think this is a good discussion to have, but I want to encourage EAs to be skeptical of contentful one-size-fits-all arguments about what’s good for them, compared to their own individual-specific sense of what’s helping them flourish in life. I trust individuals to build up self-expertise and steer by their taste more than I trust relationship or sociology experts to give useful advice.)