Iām worried a lot of this is missing the point, and potentially missing important solutions. Iām going to use EAG for my examples here, as I think it is the strongest case of what Iām describing, but I think my argument generalises to a lot of scenarios and spaces in the EA community.
In my mind, there are two competing things going on here:
At an EAG, you are likely to meet people who are at a similar stage in their life to you, who have similar interests, and who are likely to be both intelligent and altruistic, both attractive qualities. If you meet one of these people, and they feel similarly about you, you could enjoy some flavour of romance together, and it would be mutually fulfilling. Things being mutually fulfilling between parties is self-evidently a good thing.
At an EAG, some people, primarily women, have bad experiences as a result of othersā romantic attention. These experiences can range from uncomfortable to traumatic. I think these negative experiences can then be grouped into two further categories:
Those that are are the result of malicious intent
Those that are the result of power dynamics, and can arise despite positive intentions.
I think your solutions are primarily concerned with the 2a category, and when reading it I was reminded of this comment, which I think puts it better than I could. There are people with malicious intent in every community, and I donāt think EA requires any particularly novel solution to deal with them. I agree with Isabel in that Iām also worried that when these threads come up, people will spend their efforts trying to either gauge the size of the problem, or theorise the optimal solution, rather than take any meaningful action.
I think 2b can be equally as damaging, and more should be done about it. Because EA is such a small, well-resourced community, there are especially strong power dynamics at play between individuals. As discussed in the blog post linked above, the EA community does not have strong boundaries between professional and romantic lives, in fact it seems especially tolerant of this interminglingāI claim this is a strongly negative thing. If someone a prospective future employer/āgrantmaker/āāsenior leaderā starts flirting with me at EAG, even if they are being incredibly respectful and only have good intentions, I am under a lot of pressure to cooperate, even if thatās not what I want at all. If at the start I do genuinely reciprocate that attraction, and we engage in some kind of romantic interaction, and I later change my mind, there is again a huge pressure on me not to leave the arrangement, even though thatās what I want to do.
Iām not suggesting that EAs shouldnāt date one another, but I am suggesting a much stronger acknowledgement of power dynamics at play, both on an individual community level. Due to the lack of community emphasis, I suspect many beneficiaries of power dynamics in these situations do not think of themselves that way, and so may inadvertently do harm (this isnāt aimed at you personallyāI donāt know whether you are or arenāt aware of this). It seems plausible to me that this would also help with 2a, as well as make the community feel more inclusive.
Iām worried your subdivision misses a significant proportion of harms that donāt fall into either category. For instance, interactions that donāt involve malice or power dynamics and are innocuous in isolation but harmful when repeated. This repetition can be made more likely by imbalanced gender ratios.
I think being flirted with during the day at an EAG like Nathan discussed above is a good example of this. If youāre flirted with once over the weekend, perhaps itās fine or even nice, especially if itās from the person you found most interesting. But if youāre flirted with several times, you may start to feel uncomfortable.
Well if a conference has 3x more men than woman and 1-on-1s are matched uniformly at random, then women have 3x more cross-gender 1-on-1s than men. Assuming all people are equally likely to flirt with someone of a different gender than them, itās very possible that the average man receives a comfortable amount of flirting while the average woman receives an uncomfortable amount.
And it probably gets worse when one considers that these are random variables and we donāt care about the average but rather about how many people exceed the uncomfortable threshold and to what degree. And perhaps worse again if certain āattractiveā people are more likely to receive flirting.
Overall, my point is that behaviors and norms that would be fine with balanced gender ratios can be harmful with imbalanced ones. Unfortunately, we have imbalanced ones and we need to adapt accordingly.
My sense is that gauging the size of the problem and thinking of good solutions is a useful thing to do.
Also I link the intermingling of romantic and personal lives, but I donāt like the harm it causes. And I think we can attempt solutions that attack the specific harms without damaging other benefits.
Iām worried a lot of this is missing the point, and potentially missing important solutions. Iām going to use EAG for my examples here, as I think it is the strongest case of what Iām describing, but I think my argument generalises to a lot of scenarios and spaces in the EA community.
In my mind, there are two competing things going on here:
At an EAG, you are likely to meet people who are at a similar stage in their life to you, who have similar interests, and who are likely to be both intelligent and altruistic, both attractive qualities. If you meet one of these people, and they feel similarly about you, you could enjoy some flavour of romance together, and it would be mutually fulfilling. Things being mutually fulfilling between parties is self-evidently a good thing.
At an EAG, some people, primarily women, have bad experiences as a result of othersā romantic attention. These experiences can range from uncomfortable to traumatic. I think these negative experiences can then be grouped into two further categories:
Those that are are the result of malicious intent
Those that are the result of power dynamics, and can arise despite positive intentions.
I think your solutions are primarily concerned with the 2a category, and when reading it I was reminded of this comment, which I think puts it better than I could. There are people with malicious intent in every community, and I donāt think EA requires any particularly novel solution to deal with them. I agree with Isabel in that Iām also worried that when these threads come up, people will spend their efforts trying to either gauge the size of the problem, or theorise the optimal solution, rather than take any meaningful action.
I think 2b can be equally as damaging, and more should be done about it. Because EA is such a small, well-resourced community, there are especially strong power dynamics at play between individuals. As discussed in the blog post linked above, the EA community does not have strong boundaries between professional and romantic lives, in fact it seems especially tolerant of this interminglingāI claim this is a strongly negative thing. If someone a prospective future employer/āgrantmaker/āāsenior leaderā starts flirting with me at EAG, even if they are being incredibly respectful and only have good intentions, I am under a lot of pressure to cooperate, even if thatās not what I want at all. If at the start I do genuinely reciprocate that attraction, and we engage in some kind of romantic interaction, and I later change my mind, there is again a huge pressure on me not to leave the arrangement, even though thatās what I want to do.
Iām not suggesting that EAs shouldnāt date one another, but I am suggesting a much stronger acknowledgement of power dynamics at play, both on an individual community level. Due to the lack of community emphasis, I suspect many beneficiaries of power dynamics in these situations do not think of themselves that way, and so may inadvertently do harm (this isnāt aimed at you personallyāI donāt know whether you are or arenāt aware of this). It seems plausible to me that this would also help with 2a, as well as make the community feel more inclusive.
Iām worried your subdivision misses a significant proportion of harms that donāt fall into either category. For instance, interactions that donāt involve malice or power dynamics and are innocuous in isolation but harmful when repeated. This repetition can be made more likely by imbalanced gender ratios.
I think being flirted with during the day at an EAG like Nathan discussed above is a good example of this. If youāre flirted with once over the weekend, perhaps itās fine or even nice, especially if itās from the person you found most interesting. But if youāre flirted with several times, you may start to feel uncomfortable.
Well if a conference has 3x more men than woman and 1-on-1s are matched uniformly at random, then women have 3x more cross-gender 1-on-1s than men. Assuming all people are equally likely to flirt with someone of a different gender than them, itās very possible that the average man receives a comfortable amount of flirting while the average woman receives an uncomfortable amount.
And it probably gets worse when one considers that these are random variables and we donāt care about the average but rather about how many people exceed the uncomfortable threshold and to what degree. And perhaps worse again if certain āattractiveā people are more likely to receive flirting.
Overall, my point is that behaviors and norms that would be fine with balanced gender ratios can be harmful with imbalanced ones. Unfortunately, we have imbalanced ones and we need to adapt accordingly.
[edit: addressed]
Thanks for pointing this outāIād pasted the wrong link, and have edited my original comment.
My sense is that gauging the size of the problem and thinking of good solutions is a useful thing to do.
Also I link the intermingling of romantic and personal lives, but I donāt like the harm it causes. And I think we can attempt solutions that attack the specific harms without damaging other benefits.