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’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.