As Kirsten mentioned, the context of it being an EA conference is key.
If a woman said âOoh, heâs attractive. I should set up a one-on-one with himâ, you would report that to the community health team?
I would assume it was a joke, if she was serious I would tell her not to, if she did it I would report it.
Why?
Because EAG(x) conferences exist to enable people to do the most good, conference time is very scarce, misusing a 1-1 slot means someone is missing out on a potentially useful 1-1.
Also, these kinds of interactions make it much harder for me to ask extremely talented and motivated people I know to participate in these events, and for me to participate personally. For people that really just want to do the most good, and are not looking for dates, this kind of interaction is very aversive.
This seems like ordinary and harmless behavior.
Thankfully, in my experience, itâs not ordinary, the vast majority of people schedule 1-1s at EAGs to discuss ways to do more good.
Also, as we can see from these posts and my personal reaction, itâs not always harmless.
I really value EAG time! I really donât want to ask my most altruistic and talented friends to come to EAGs and then have them hit on, especially young ones that are choosing careers! There are other conferences and meetups for people that are looking for that.
I donât share your belief that asking people for 1-on-1âČs at EAGs only because you find them attractive is bad in general (although Iâm open to saying its sometimes or even often wrong). I would like to understand your perspective though. Some questions:
1. What fraction of men/âwomen that go to these events would you predict to prefer people not to do this? Iâd be interested to see some data on this and let community norms be influenced by that.
2. How much is deceit the problem for you, where someone asks for a 1-on-1 pretending that they are interested in the other person for professional reasons? For example, what if my message clearly indicates that Iâm not interested in the other person purely for networking or professional reasons, but it says something like:
âHey, you seem cool, I think we share some interests in x,y, z (which arenât professional/âcareer/âimpact-related topics)! Would you be interested to have a quick chat about x,y or z at some point? No worries if youâd prefer to focus exclusively on more focused networking, thatâs totally understandable.â
If I write a message like that because I find someone attractive (in some form), does that seem wrong to you? :) Genuinely curious about your reaction and am open to changing my mind, but this seems currently fine to me. I worry that if such a thing is entirely prohibited, so much value in new beautiful relationships is lost.
If I write a message like that because I find someone attractive (in some form), does that seem wrong to you? :) Genuinely curious about your reaction and am open to changing my mind, but this seems currently fine to me. I worry that if such a thing is entirely prohibited, so much value in new beautiful relationships is lost.
Yes, youâre still contributing to harm (at least probabalistically) because the norm and expectation is currently that EAG /â swapcard shouldnât be used as a speed-dating tool. So if you reaching out only because you find them attractive despite that, you are explicitly going against what other parties are expecting when engaging with swapcard, and they donât have a way to opt-out of receiving your norm-breaking message.
Iâll also mention that youâre arguing for the scenario of asking people for 1-1s at EAGS âonly because you find them attractiveâ. This means it would also allow for messages like, âHey, I find you attractive and Iâd love to meet.â Would you also defend this? If not, what separates the two messages, and why did you choose the example you gave?
Sure, a new beautiful relationship is valuable, but how many non-work swapcard messages lead to a new beautiful relationship? Put yourself in the shoe of an undergrad who is attending EAG for the first time, wishing to learn more about a potential career in biosecurity or animal welfare or AI safety. Now imagine they receive a message from you, and 50 other people who also find them attractive. This doesnât seem like a good conference experience, nor a good introduction to the EA community. It also complicates the situation with people they want to reach out to as it increases uncertainty around whether people they want to meet with are responding in a purely professional sense, or whether they are just opportunistic. Then thereâs an additional layer of complexity when you add in things around power dynamics etc. Having shared professional standards and norms goes some way to reducing this uncertainty, but people need to actually follow them.
If you are worried that youâll lose the opportunity for beautiful relationships at EAGs, then thereâs nothing stopping you from attending something after the conference wraps up for the day, or even organising some kind of speed-dating thing yourself. But note how your organised speed-dating event would be something people choose to opt in to, unlike sending solicitation DMs via an app intended to be used for professional /â networking purposes (or some other purpose explicit on their profileâi.e. if youâre sending that DM to someone whose profile says âDM me if youâre interested in dating meâ, then this doesnât apply. The appropriateness of that is a separate convo though).
Some questions for you:
You say youâre âopen to changing your mindââwhat would this look like? What kind of harm would need to be possible for you to believe that the expected benefit of a new beautiful relationship isnât worth it?
Whatâs the case that itâs the role of CEA and EAG to facilitate new beautiful relationships? Do you apply this standard to other communities and conferences you attend?
Iâll also note Kirstenâs comment above, which already talks about why it could be plausibly be bad âin generalâ: âThe EAG team have repeatedly asked people not to use EAG or the Swapcard app for flirting. 1-1s at EAG are for networking, and if youâre just asking to meet someone because you think theyâre attractive, thereâs a good chance youâre wasting their time. Itâs also sexualizing someone who presumably doesnât want to be because theyâre at a work event.â
And Lorenzoâs comment above: âBecause EAG(x) conferences exist to enable people to do the most good, conference time is very scarce, misusing a 1-1 slot means someone is missing out on a potentially useful 1-1. Also, these kinds of interactions make it much harder for me to ask extremely talented and motivated people I know to participate in these events, and for me to participate personally. For people that really just want to do the most good, and are not looking for dates, this kind of interaction is very aversive.â
Before EAGSF this year, (on Twitter) I mentioned putting this on your SwapCard profile as a way to prevent the scenarios above where people ask others for meetings because they are romantically interested in them. So, instead, they could contact them off-site if interested and EAGs would hopefully have more people just focused on going to it for career reasons. My thought was that if you donât do something like this, people are just going to continue hiding their intentions (though Iâm sure some would still do this regardless).
I was criticized for saying this. Some people said they have an uncomfortable feeling after hearing that suggestion because they now have it in their minds that you might be doing a 1-on-1 with them because you find them attractive. Fair enough! Even if you, letâs say, link to a dating doc off-site or contact info that they can reach after the conference. I hoped that we could make it more explicit the fact that people in the community are obviously looking to date others in the community and are finding that very difficult. Instead, my guess is that we are placed in a situation where people will set-up 1-on-1s because they find someone attractive even if they donât admit it. I do not condone this, and itâs not something Iâve done (for all the reasons listed in this thread).
Personally, I do not plan to ask anyone out from the community at any point. Initially, I had hoped to find someone with similar values, but I just donât think there is any place it seems appropriate. Not even parties. Itâs just not worth the effort to figure out how to ask out an EA lady in a way thatâs considered acceptable. This might sound extreme to some, but I just donât find it worth the mental energy to navigate my way through this and just want to be in career-mode (and, at most, friendship-mode) when engaging with other EAs. And, more importantly, thereâs too much work and fun mixed, and it just leads to uncomfortable situations and posts like this.
Iâm not making a judgement on what others should do, but hopefully whichever way the community goes, it becomes more welcoming for people who want to do good.
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 Iâm likely wrong here. I might have revised my position a bit and I suspect that if Iâd be more careful and precise in stating what I tend to believe now, we wouldnât 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 thatâs purely out of sexual attraction. (The â~â is there for weird edge cases)
Iâm less sure if its always wrong to accept an invitation for a meeting if you find yourself having these motivations. What if thereâs a plausible case for them benefitting from meeting you, but on introspection, you donât think thatâs motivating you to a significant extent?
I think the sexual motivations make this behaviour feel especially aversive and Iâm a little less confident about the case where the attraction is purely non-sexual
Iâm 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/âworried 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 thatâs 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 havenât seen sufficiently compelling arguments. Why is this generally harmful in expectation or what are the overriding non-consequentialist considerations against this?
>> Iâll also mention that youâre arguing for the scenario of asking people for 1-1s at EAGS âonly because you find them attractiveâ. This means it would also allow for messages like, âHey, I find you attractive and Iâd love to meet.â Would you also defend this?
I donât 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 donât think such a message would be appropriate at all and I also donât want people to be actively deceptive about their motives for meeting someone. Maybe youâre right and the only way to resolve this is to say that its wrong in general to ask someone when youâre motivations are purely attraction based. I think there might be some edge-cases here, but Iâm fine saying that this is roughly right.
Unfortunately I think Iâm going to check out of the conversation here. I appreciate the engagement and the real-time updates, but I get the sense that this isnât 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 âcomes across poorlyâ is going to vary between individuals and context, and I donât 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 wouldnât 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 youâd trust her with? It shouldnât take a hypothetical younger sister to prompt the kind of empathy thatâs 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. Letâs say I donât 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 donât receive a message from people who might reach out to me âto a significant extentâ because they find me attractive? (say, because I donât want them to start hitting on me mid 1-1, or make me feel like this isnât a professional meeting?)
I found this part of the comment slightly frustrating because youâve basically just repeated the same premise and changed it from requesting 1-1s âonly because you find them attractiveâ, to requesting 1-1s if the reason is âto a significant extent because you find them attractiveâ.
The same issues clearly still apply, just to a slightly less problematic extent. Whatâs next, youâre going to come back and ask me âwhat if the attractive part is just to a moderate extentâ? I guess it feels like youâre not actually really engaging with the points I raised, so Iâm pretty uncertain about what are you trying to achieve here?
Also, I donât see how the burden of proof on me to deny a claim that you havenât justified? Youâre the one thatâs come along with a new claim and just said âin fact that seems largely fine to meâ. Presumably I can just say âWell, in fact that seems largely not fine to meâ. Youâre the one suggesting the existing norms are overly restrictive in some way, so youâre the one that should justify that claim, but I donât actually think youâve done this. So againâwhatâs the case that itâs 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 dayâif youâre asking for 1-1s that you otherwise wouldnât because you want the potential for a new beautiful relationship (which is the only reason youâve given so far for endorsing this approach), but the other person doesnât, then you are going into the conversation with different incentives in mind. Iâm 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 arenât about facilitating you to meet people you find attractive, and you might disagree with this, but you havenât made a case for why you think this would be better on net /â in expectation.
I do think you are pointing to an inconsistency here because I donât think such a message would be appropriate at all and I also donât want people to be actively deceptive about their motives for meeting someone. Maybe youâre right and the only way to resolve this is to say that its wrong in general to ask someone when youâre motivations are purely attraction based.
Yes, the inconsistency Iâm pointing at here is that the position youâre trying to defend does in fact allow the message you donât 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 didnât want to engage more and I feel similar:
>>Also, I donât see how the burden of proof on me to deny a claim that you havenât justified? Youâre the one thatâs come along with a new claim and just said âin fact that seems largely fine to meâ. Presumably I can just say âWell, in fact that seems largely not fine to meâ. Youâre the one suggesting the existing norms are overly restrictive in some way, so youâre the one that should justify it, but I donât actually think youâve done this. So againâwhatâs the case that itâs 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. Thatâs why I think 2) doesnât need much argument in its favor ,but your position needs very strong arguments to be plausible.
As Kirsten mentioned, the context of it being an EA conference is key.
I would assume it was a joke, if she was serious I would tell her not to, if she did it I would report it.
Because EAG(x) conferences exist to enable people to do the most good, conference time is very scarce, misusing a 1-1 slot means someone is missing out on a potentially useful 1-1. Also, these kinds of interactions make it much harder for me to ask extremely talented and motivated people I know to participate in these events, and for me to participate personally. For people that really just want to do the most good, and are not looking for dates, this kind of interaction is very aversive.
Thankfully, in my experience, itâs not ordinary, the vast majority of people schedule 1-1s at EAGs to discuss ways to do more good. Also, as we can see from these posts and my personal reaction, itâs not always harmless. I really value EAG time! I really donât want to ask my most altruistic and talented friends to come to EAGs and then have them hit on, especially young ones that are choosing careers! There are other conferences and meetups for people that are looking for that.
I donât share your belief that asking people for 1-on-1âČs at EAGs only because you find them attractive is bad in general (although Iâm open to saying its sometimes or even often wrong). I would like to understand your perspective though. Some questions:
1. What fraction of men/âwomen that go to these events would you predict to prefer people not to do this? Iâd be interested to see some data on this and let community norms be influenced by that.
2. How much is deceit the problem for you, where someone asks for a 1-on-1 pretending that they are interested in the other person for professional reasons? For example, what if my message clearly indicates that Iâm not interested in the other person purely for networking or professional reasons, but it says something like:
âHey, you seem cool, I think we share some interests in x,y, z (which arenât professional/âcareer/âimpact-related topics)! Would you be interested to have a quick chat about x,y or z at some point? No worries if youâd prefer to focus exclusively on more focused networking, thatâs totally understandable.â
If I write a message like that because I find someone attractive (in some form), does that seem wrong to you? :) Genuinely curious about your reaction and am open to changing my mind, but this seems currently fine to me. I worry that if such a thing is entirely prohibited, so much value in new beautiful relationships is lost.
Yes, youâre still contributing to harm (at least probabalistically) because the norm and expectation is currently that EAG /â swapcard shouldnât be used as a speed-dating tool. So if you reaching out only because you find them attractive despite that, you are explicitly going against what other parties are expecting when engaging with swapcard, and they donât have a way to opt-out of receiving your norm-breaking message.
Iâll also mention that youâre arguing for the scenario of asking people for 1-1s at EAGS âonly because you find them attractiveâ. This means it would also allow for messages like, âHey, I find you attractive and Iâd love to meet.â Would you also defend this? If not, what separates the two messages, and why did you choose the example you gave?
Sure, a new beautiful relationship is valuable, but how many non-work swapcard messages lead to a new beautiful relationship? Put yourself in the shoe of an undergrad who is attending EAG for the first time, wishing to learn more about a potential career in biosecurity or animal welfare or AI safety. Now imagine they receive a message from you, and 50 other people who also find them attractive. This doesnât seem like a good conference experience, nor a good introduction to the EA community. It also complicates the situation with people they want to reach out to as it increases uncertainty around whether people they want to meet with are responding in a purely professional sense, or whether they are just opportunistic. Then thereâs an additional layer of complexity when you add in things around power dynamics etc. Having shared professional standards and norms goes some way to reducing this uncertainty, but people need to actually follow them.
If you are worried that youâll lose the opportunity for beautiful relationships at EAGs, then thereâs nothing stopping you from attending something after the conference wraps up for the day, or even organising some kind of speed-dating thing yourself. But note how your organised speed-dating event would be something people choose to opt in to, unlike sending solicitation DMs via an app intended to be used for professional /â networking purposes (or some other purpose explicit on their profileâi.e. if youâre sending that DM to someone whose profile says âDM me if youâre interested in dating meâ, then this doesnât apply. The appropriateness of that is a separate convo though).
Some questions for you:
You say youâre âopen to changing your mindââwhat would this look like? What kind of harm would need to be possible for you to believe that the expected benefit of a new beautiful relationship isnât worth it?
Whatâs the case that itâs the role of CEA and EAG to facilitate new beautiful relationships? Do you apply this standard to other communities and conferences you attend?
Iâll also note Kirstenâs comment above, which already talks about why it could be plausibly be bad âin generalâ:
âThe EAG team have repeatedly asked people not to use EAG or the Swapcard app for flirting. 1-1s at EAG are for networking, and if youâre just asking to meet someone because you think theyâre attractive, thereâs a good chance youâre wasting their time. Itâs also sexualizing someone who presumably doesnât want to be because theyâre at a work event.â
And Lorenzoâs comment above:
âBecause EAG(x) conferences exist to enable people to do the most good, conference time is very scarce, misusing a 1-1 slot means someone is missing out on a potentially useful 1-1. Also, these kinds of interactions make it much harder for me to ask extremely talented and motivated people I know to participate in these events, and for me to participate personally. For people that really just want to do the most good, and are not looking for dates, this kind of interaction is very aversive.â
Before EAGSF this year, (on Twitter) I mentioned putting this on your SwapCard profile as a way to prevent the scenarios above where people ask others for meetings because they are romantically interested in them. So, instead, they could contact them off-site if interested and EAGs would hopefully have more people just focused on going to it for career reasons. My thought was that if you donât do something like this, people are just going to continue hiding their intentions (though Iâm sure some would still do this regardless).
I was criticized for saying this. Some people said they have an uncomfortable feeling after hearing that suggestion because they now have it in their minds that you might be doing a 1-on-1 with them because you find them attractive. Fair enough! Even if you, letâs say, link to a dating doc off-site or contact info that they can reach after the conference. I hoped that we could make it more explicit the fact that people in the community are obviously looking to date others in the community and are finding that very difficult. Instead, my guess is that we are placed in a situation where people will set-up 1-on-1s because they find someone attractive even if they donât admit it. I do not condone this, and itâs not something Iâve done (for all the reasons listed in this thread).
Personally, I do not plan to ask anyone out from the community at any point. Initially, I had hoped to find someone with similar values, but I just donât think there is any place it seems appropriate. Not even parties. Itâs just not worth the effort to figure out how to ask out an EA lady in a way thatâs considered acceptable. This might sound extreme to some, but I just donât find it worth the mental energy to navigate my way through this and just want to be in career-mode (and, at most, friendship-mode) when engaging with other EAs. And, more importantly, thereâs too much work and fun mixed, and it just leads to uncomfortable situations and posts like this.
Iâm not making a judgement on what others should do, but hopefully whichever way the community goes, it becomes more welcoming for people who want to do good.
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 Iâm likely wrong here. I might have revised my position a bit and I suspect that if Iâd be more careful and precise in stating what I tend to believe now, we wouldnât 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 thatâs purely out of sexual attraction. (The â~â is there for weird edge cases)
Iâm less sure if its always wrong to accept an invitation for a meeting if you find yourself having these motivations. What if thereâs a plausible case for them benefitting from meeting you, but on introspection, you donât think thatâs motivating you to a significant extent?
I think the sexual motivations make this behaviour feel especially aversive and Iâm a little less confident about the case where the attraction is purely non-sexual
Iâm 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/âworried 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 thatâs 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 havenât seen sufficiently compelling arguments. Why is this generally harmful in expectation or what are the overriding non-consequentialist considerations against this?
>> Iâll also mention that youâre arguing for the scenario of asking people for 1-1s at EAGS âonly because you find them attractiveâ. This means it would also allow for messages like, âHey, I find you attractive and Iâd love to meet.â Would you also defend this?
I donât 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 donât think such a message would be appropriate at all and I also donât want people to be actively deceptive about their motives for meeting someone. Maybe youâre right and the only way to resolve this is to say that its wrong in general to ask someone when youâre motivations are purely attraction based. I think there might be some edge-cases here, but Iâm fine saying that this is roughly right.
Unfortunately I think Iâm going to check out of the conversation here. I appreciate the engagement and the real-time updates, but I get the sense that this isnât 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 âcomes across poorlyâ is going to vary between individuals and context, and I donât 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 wouldnât 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 youâd trust her with? It shouldnât take a hypothetical younger sister to prompt the kind of empathy thatâs 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. Letâs say I donât 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 donât receive a message from people who might reach out to me âto a significant extentâ because they find me attractive? (say, because I donât want them to start hitting on me mid 1-1, or make me feel like this isnât a professional meeting?)
I found this part of the comment slightly frustrating because youâve basically just repeated the same premise and changed it from requesting 1-1s âonly because you find them attractiveâ, to requesting 1-1s if the reason is âto a significant extent because you find them attractiveâ.
The same issues clearly still apply, just to a slightly less problematic extent. Whatâs next, youâre going to come back and ask me âwhat if the attractive part is just to a moderate extentâ? I guess it feels like youâre not actually really engaging with the points I raised, so Iâm pretty uncertain about what are you trying to achieve here?
Also, I donât see how the burden of proof on me to deny a claim that you havenât justified? Youâre the one thatâs come along with a new claim and just said âin fact that seems largely fine to meâ. Presumably I can just say âWell, in fact that seems largely not fine to meâ. Youâre the one suggesting the existing norms are overly restrictive in some way, so youâre the one that should justify that claim, but I donât actually think youâve done this. So againâwhatâs the case that itâs 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 dayâif youâre asking for 1-1s that you otherwise wouldnât because you want the potential for a new beautiful relationship (which is the only reason youâve given so far for endorsing this approach), but the other person doesnât, then you are going into the conversation with different incentives in mind. Iâm 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 arenât about facilitating you to meet people you find attractive, and you might disagree with this, but you havenât made a case for why you think this would be better on net /â in expectation.
Yes, the inconsistency Iâm pointing at here is that the position youâre trying to defend does in fact allow the message you donât 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 didnât want to engage more and I feel similar:
>>Also, I donât see how the burden of proof on me to deny a claim that you havenât justified? Youâre the one thatâs come along with a new claim and just said âin fact that seems largely fine to meâ. Presumably I can just say âWell, in fact that seems largely not fine to meâ. Youâre the one suggesting the existing norms are overly restrictive in some way, so youâre the one that should justify it, but I donât actually think youâve done this. So againâwhatâs the case that itâs 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. Thatâs why I think 2) doesnât need much argument in its favor ,but your position needs very strong arguments to be plausible.