Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I think I actually agree with many of your points.
The strong disagreement with my comment definitely makes me think that I’m likely wrong here. I might have revised my position a bit and I suspect that if I’d be more careful and precise in stating what I tend to believe now, we wouldn’t disagree that much. So let me do that:
1. It seems ~always wrong or inappropriate to ask someone for a EAG 1-on-1 if that’s purely out of sexual attraction. (The “~” is there for weird edge cases)
I’m less sure if its always wrong to accept an invitation for a meeting if you find yourself having these motivations. What if there’s a plausible case for them benefitting from meeting you, but on introspection, you don’t think that’s motivating you to a significant extent?
I think the sexual motivations make this behaviour feel especially aversive and I’m a little less confident about the case where the attraction is purely non-sexual
I’m open to saying that because any of the above is wrong in most cases we should have a norm against doing any of this, but I think that needs more argument than I have seen so far (I feel generally a bit puzzled/worried that people seem to take such strong stances here on the basis of what seem to me like at best moderately strong arguments.)
(Meta-comment: in practice, I would imagine that its almost always a mix of different motives, like at least in my case I think attraction is often partially based on shared intellectual interests, a shared commitment to improve the world etc. )
2. It does not seem generally wrong to me to ask someone for an EAG 1-on-1 if that’s to a significant extent because you find them attractive (in a non-sexual way), but also for various other reasons like shared interest in some cause areas. In fact that seems largely fine to me.
Denying this seems like a strong claim for which I haven’t seen sufficiently compelling arguments. Why is this generally harmful in expectation or what are the overriding non-consequentialist considerations against this?
>> I’ll also mention that you’re arguing for the scenario of asking people for 1-1s at EAGS “only because you find them attractive”. This means it would also allow for messages like, “Hey, I find you attractive and I’d love to meet.” Would you also defend this?
I don’t think one thing straightforwardly implies the other; I think different norms might apply for what kind of motivations are appropriate and what ways of expressing them are. I do think you are pointing to an inconsistency here because I don’t think such a message would be appropriate at all and I also don’t want people to be actively deceptive about their motives for meeting someone. Maybe you’re right and the only way to resolve this is to say that its wrong in general to ask someone when you’re motivations are purely attraction based. I think there might be some edge-cases here, but I’m fine saying that this is roughly right.
Unfortunately I think I’m going to check out of the conversation here. I appreciate the engagement and the real-time updates, but I get the sense that this isn’t going to be a very productive use of time.
Here are some quick thoughts, hastily written:
RE: 1 and 2) generally
Basically I think this is all super susceptible to motivated reasoning, such that you might take actions that feel totally fine to you but still comes across poorly to the person you meet. Exactly what counts as “comes across poorly” is going to vary between individuals and context, and I don’t want to answer on behalf of all women here.
Here are some potentially useful heuristics:
Are you risking pushing any boundaries, or making any requests that you wouldn’t make if the person in question was otherwise identical but unattractive to you?
Are your actions clearly distinguishable from someone like this?
What would happen if everyone justified the same kinds of actions in the way you did? Would this be a safer, more welcoming community?
Imagine you have a 17yo sister going to a conference for the first time, looking to meet people in the field. You care a lot about her and you feel pretty protective. What kind of people would you feel most comfortable with? Are you the kind of person you’d trust her with? It shouldn’t take a hypothetical younger sister to prompt the kind of empathy that’s required here, but some people I know find hypotheticals like this useful.
RE: 2) more specifically
Again, I disagree. Lets say we have already established EAGs as a place for professional interactions and networking, and this is my expectation going in. And lets say I only want to meet people who are interested in me in a purely professional capacity. Let’s say I don’t want to second guess whether these people wanting to talk to me are interested in my work or something else. How do I make sure I don’t receive a message from people who might reach out to me “to a significant extent” because they find me attractive? (say, because I don’t want them to start hitting on me mid 1-1, or make me feel like this isn’t a professional meeting?)
I found this part of the comment slightly frustrating because you’ve basically just repeated the same premise and changed it from requesting 1-1s “only because you find them attractive”, to requesting 1-1s if the reason is “to a significant extent because you find them attractive”.
The same issues clearly still apply, just to a slightly less problematic extent. What’s next, you’re going to come back and ask me “what if the attractive part is just to a moderate extent”? I guess it feels like you’re not actually really engaging with the points I raised, so I’m pretty uncertain about what are you trying to achieve here?
Also, I don’t see how the burden of proof on me to deny a claim that you haven’t justified? You’re the one that’s come along with a new claim and just said “in fact that seems largely fine to me”. Presumably I can just say “Well, in fact that seems largely not fine to me”. You’re the one suggesting the existing norms are overly restrictive in some way, so you’re the one that should justify that claim, but I don’t actually think you’ve done this. So again—what’s the case that it’s the role of CEA and EAG to facilitate new beautiful relationships? Do you apply this standard to other communities and conferences you attend?
End of the day—if you’re asking for 1-1s that you otherwise wouldn’t because you want the potential for a new beautiful relationship (which is the only reason you’ve given so far for endorsing this approach), but the other person doesn’t, then you are going into the conversation with different incentives in mind. I’m not here to tell you how to live your life, but this is definitely well within the kind of behaviour that some women would find uncomfortable. EAGs aren’t about facilitating you to meet people you find attractive, and you might disagree with this, but you haven’t made a case for why you think this would be better on net / in expectation.
I do think you are pointing to an inconsistency here because I don’t think such a message would be appropriate at all and I also don’t want people to be actively deceptive about their motives for meeting someone. Maybe you’re right and the only way to resolve this is to say that its wrong in general to ask someone when you’re motivations are purely attraction based.
Yes, the inconsistency I’m pointing at here is that the position you’re trying to defend does in fact allow the message you don’t find appropriate. My guess to the cause of the inconsistency is probably because the comment you suggested shares more in common with similarly phrased messages that are used in a professional networking context, and is more likely to be misunderstood as something more innocuous or professional. Otherwise, the message you consider inappropriate is less deceptive and is intended to achieve the stated purpose of creating new beautiful relationships, no?
Thanks for the reply. Just one comment, because you said you didn’t want to engage more and I feel similar:
>>Also, I don’t see how the burden of proof on me to deny a claim that you haven’t justified? You’re the one that’s come along with a new claim and just said “in fact that seems largely fine to me”. Presumably I can just say “Well, in fact that seems largely not fine to me”. You’re the one suggesting the existing norms are overly restrictive in some way, so you’re the one that should justify it, but I don’t actually think you’ve done this. So again—what’s the case that it’s the role of CEA and EAG to facilitate new beautiful relationships? Do you apply this standard to other communities and conferences you attend?
I think the burden of proof is clearly on you because denying 2) seems to me like an apriori (to knowing the details of the discussed actions) extremely unlikely claim: take any other kind of action, how often can we really say that literally all actions of that kind are wrong? Not even with lying or stealing is that true. Denying a universal statement of that kind is, I think, a prior extremely likely (at least if the set of actions is large). I think this is clearest if you are sympathetic to some form of consequentialism. That’s why I think 2) doesn’t need much argument in its favor ,but your position needs very strong arguments to be plausible.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I think I actually agree with many of your points.
The strong disagreement with my comment definitely makes me think that I’m likely wrong here. I might have revised my position a bit and I suspect that if I’d be more careful and precise in stating what I tend to believe now, we wouldn’t disagree that much. So let me do that:
1. It seems ~always wrong or inappropriate to ask someone for a EAG 1-on-1 if that’s purely out of sexual attraction. (The “~” is there for weird edge cases)
I’m less sure if its always wrong to accept an invitation for a meeting if you find yourself having these motivations. What if there’s a plausible case for them benefitting from meeting you, but on introspection, you don’t think that’s motivating you to a significant extent?
I think the sexual motivations make this behaviour feel especially aversive and I’m a little less confident about the case where the attraction is purely non-sexual
I’m open to saying that because any of the above is wrong in most cases we should have a norm against doing any of this, but I think that needs more argument than I have seen so far (I feel generally a bit puzzled/worried that people seem to take such strong stances here on the basis of what seem to me like at best moderately strong arguments.)
(Meta-comment: in practice, I would imagine that its almost always a mix of different motives, like at least in my case I think attraction is often partially based on shared intellectual interests, a shared commitment to improve the world etc. )
2. It does not seem generally wrong to me to ask someone for an EAG 1-on-1 if that’s to a significant extent because you find them attractive (in a non-sexual way), but also for various other reasons like shared interest in some cause areas. In fact that seems largely fine to me.
Denying this seems like a strong claim for which I haven’t seen sufficiently compelling arguments. Why is this generally harmful in expectation or what are the overriding non-consequentialist considerations against this?
>> I’ll also mention that you’re arguing for the scenario of asking people for 1-1s at EAGS “only because you find them attractive”. This means it would also allow for messages like, “Hey, I find you attractive and I’d love to meet.” Would you also defend this?
I don’t think one thing straightforwardly implies the other; I think different norms might apply for what kind of motivations are appropriate and what ways of expressing them are. I do think you are pointing to an inconsistency here because I don’t think such a message would be appropriate at all and I also don’t want people to be actively deceptive about their motives for meeting someone. Maybe you’re right and the only way to resolve this is to say that its wrong in general to ask someone when you’re motivations are purely attraction based. I think there might be some edge-cases here, but I’m fine saying that this is roughly right.
Unfortunately I think I’m going to check out of the conversation here. I appreciate the engagement and the real-time updates, but I get the sense that this isn’t going to be a very productive use of time.
Here are some quick thoughts, hastily written:
RE: 1 and 2) generally
Basically I think this is all super susceptible to motivated reasoning, such that you might take actions that feel totally fine to you but still comes across poorly to the person you meet. Exactly what counts as “comes across poorly” is going to vary between individuals and context, and I don’t want to answer on behalf of all women here.
Here are some potentially useful heuristics:
Are you risking pushing any boundaries, or making any requests that you wouldn’t make if the person in question was otherwise identical but unattractive to you?
Are your actions clearly distinguishable from someone like this?
What would happen if everyone justified the same kinds of actions in the way you did? Would this be a safer, more welcoming community?
Imagine you have a 17yo sister going to a conference for the first time, looking to meet people in the field. You care a lot about her and you feel pretty protective. What kind of people would you feel most comfortable with? Are you the kind of person you’d trust her with? It shouldn’t take a hypothetical younger sister to prompt the kind of empathy that’s required here, but some people I know find hypotheticals like this useful.
RE: 2) more specifically
Again, I disagree. Lets say we have already established EAGs as a place for professional interactions and networking, and this is my expectation going in. And lets say I only want to meet people who are interested in me in a purely professional capacity. Let’s say I don’t want to second guess whether these people wanting to talk to me are interested in my work or something else. How do I make sure I don’t receive a message from people who might reach out to me “to a significant extent” because they find me attractive? (say, because I don’t want them to start hitting on me mid 1-1, or make me feel like this isn’t a professional meeting?)
I found this part of the comment slightly frustrating because you’ve basically just repeated the same premise and changed it from requesting 1-1s “only because you find them attractive”, to requesting 1-1s if the reason is “to a significant extent because you find them attractive”.
The same issues clearly still apply, just to a slightly less problematic extent. What’s next, you’re going to come back and ask me “what if the attractive part is just to a moderate extent”? I guess it feels like you’re not actually really engaging with the points I raised, so I’m pretty uncertain about what are you trying to achieve here?
Also, I don’t see how the burden of proof on me to deny a claim that you haven’t justified? You’re the one that’s come along with a new claim and just said “in fact that seems largely fine to me”. Presumably I can just say “Well, in fact that seems largely not fine to me”. You’re the one suggesting the existing norms are overly restrictive in some way, so you’re the one that should justify that claim, but I don’t actually think you’ve done this. So again—what’s the case that it’s the role of CEA and EAG to facilitate new beautiful relationships? Do you apply this standard to other communities and conferences you attend?
End of the day—if you’re asking for 1-1s that you otherwise wouldn’t because you want the potential for a new beautiful relationship (which is the only reason you’ve given so far for endorsing this approach), but the other person doesn’t, then you are going into the conversation with different incentives in mind. I’m not here to tell you how to live your life, but this is definitely well within the kind of behaviour that some women would find uncomfortable. EAGs aren’t about facilitating you to meet people you find attractive, and you might disagree with this, but you haven’t made a case for why you think this would be better on net / in expectation.
Yes, the inconsistency I’m pointing at here is that the position you’re trying to defend does in fact allow the message you don’t find appropriate. My guess to the cause of the inconsistency is probably because the comment you suggested shares more in common with similarly phrased messages that are used in a professional networking context, and is more likely to be misunderstood as something more innocuous or professional. Otherwise, the message you consider inappropriate is less deceptive and is intended to achieve the stated purpose of creating new beautiful relationships, no?
Thanks for the reply. Just one comment, because you said you didn’t want to engage more and I feel similar:
>>Also, I don’t see how the burden of proof on me to deny a claim that you haven’t justified? You’re the one that’s come along with a new claim and just said “in fact that seems largely fine to me”. Presumably I can just say “Well, in fact that seems largely not fine to me”. You’re the one suggesting the existing norms are overly restrictive in some way, so you’re the one that should justify it, but I don’t actually think you’ve done this. So again—what’s the case that it’s the role of CEA and EAG to facilitate new beautiful relationships? Do you apply this standard to other communities and conferences you attend?
I think the burden of proof is clearly on you because denying 2) seems to me like an apriori (to knowing the details of the discussed actions) extremely unlikely claim: take any other kind of action, how often can we really say that literally all actions of that kind are wrong? Not even with lying or stealing is that true. Denying a universal statement of that kind is, I think, a prior extremely likely (at least if the set of actions is large). I think this is clearest if you are sympathetic to some form of consequentialism. That’s why I think 2) doesn’t need much argument in its favor ,but your position needs very strong arguments to be plausible.