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, you’re still contributing to harm (at least probabalistically) because the norm and expectation is currently that EAG / swapcard shouldn’t 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 don’t have a way to opt-out of receiving your norm-breaking message.
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? 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 doesn’t 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 there’s 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 you’ll lose the opportunity for beautiful relationships at EAGs, then there’s 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 / networking purposes (or some other purpose explicit on their profile—i.e. if you’re sending that DM to someone whose profile says “DM me if you’re interested in dating me”, then this doesn’t apply. The appropriateness of that is a separate convo though).
Some questions for you:
You say you’re “open to changing your mind”—what 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 isn’t worth it?
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’ll also note Kirsten’s comment above, which already talks about why it could be plausibly be bad “in general”: ”The 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 you’re just asking to meet someone because you think they’re attractive, there’s a good chance you’re wasting their time. It’s also sexualizing someone who presumably doesn’t want to be because they’re at a work event.”
And Lorenzo’s comment above: ”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.”
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 don’t do something like this, people are just going to continue hiding their intentions (though I’m 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, let’s 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 don’t admit it. I do not condone this, and it’s not something I’ve 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 don’t think there is any place it seems appropriate. Not even parties. It’s just not worth the effort to figure out how to ask out an EA lady in a way that’s considered acceptable. This might sound extreme to some, but I just don’t 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, there’s too much work and fun mixed, and it just leads to uncomfortable situations and posts like this.
I’m 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 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.
Yes, you’re still contributing to harm (at least probabalistically) because the norm and expectation is currently that EAG / swapcard shouldn’t 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 don’t have a way to opt-out of receiving your norm-breaking message.
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? 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 doesn’t 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 there’s 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 you’ll lose the opportunity for beautiful relationships at EAGs, then there’s 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 / networking purposes (or some other purpose explicit on their profile—i.e. if you’re sending that DM to someone whose profile says “DM me if you’re interested in dating me”, then this doesn’t apply. The appropriateness of that is a separate convo though).
Some questions for you:
You say you’re “open to changing your mind”—what 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 isn’t worth it?
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’ll also note Kirsten’s comment above, which already talks about why it could be plausibly be bad “in general”:
”The 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 you’re just asking to meet someone because you think they’re attractive, there’s a good chance you’re wasting their time. It’s also sexualizing someone who presumably doesn’t want to be because they’re at a work event.”
And Lorenzo’s comment above:
”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.”
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 don’t do something like this, people are just going to continue hiding their intentions (though I’m 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, let’s 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 don’t admit it. I do not condone this, and it’s not something I’ve 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 don’t think there is any place it seems appropriate. Not even parties. It’s just not worth the effort to figure out how to ask out an EA lady in a way that’s considered acceptable. This might sound extreme to some, but I just don’t 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, there’s too much work and fun mixed, and it just leads to uncomfortable situations and posts like this.
I’m 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 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.