I’d feel a lot more comfortable about this post if it were “EAs having ~casual relationships with other EAs is a good thing generally but here’s how we can limit the worse spillover effects” than like, “please be less horny”
agunning
Karma: 440
yeah
I mean, empirically women do choose to go on dates, so I’m going to trust the revealed preferences here...
tbh I think the dichotomy of “EA/rat culture should stick to the tried and true” and “EA should decide to create a sexually libertine culture for first principles” is dumb, people have tried more things than you think
uh, not quite a guy but I credit the more sexually relaxed parts of the community for solving ~most of my “socially inept around this” problems in a way I think is not easily replaceable, so I’m personally also pretty defensive about this
yeah I had a “excuse me but I will continue to be an asshole libertine” reaction to this
I feel like there’s an implicit prediction of something like [communities with intelligent people which have lots of causal sex are going to be worse at dealing with sexual assualt/harrassment] and I kind of want to note my reaction being ‘given my personal experience i dont really believe this and all else equal I would feel safer in such communities’
like, if i had to point to an exact mechanism:
- you only really have so many dumb mistakes to make and I would prefer it if, unlike Owen, people could get these out of their system while young and not yet in leadership positions.-there’s a benefit of like, better gossip networks and more accumulated wisdom that could be passed on to the next generation, so they can make fewer dumb mistakes.
but mostly I’m going off empirical experience
I’ll agree that there are tough problems around seniority (maybe err on the side of, the less senior person should initiate) and gender balance (this seems hard to me, although I think poly-within-the-community helps on the margin?)
I feel by those numbers EAs shouldn’t be dating each other at all?
yeah this was mostly in the spirit of “are there broader cultural issues we need to work on/ how to we prevent people falling into the same traps”
I think for this kind of sentiment you should … make it clear that you don’t expect to hear from everyone who’s felt uncomfortable and this is fine? you’d just appreciate feedback?
(I feel slightly weird about the sentence you wrote above in a “the optimal amount of making women uncomfortable is not zero” kind of a way. Like, in this case there should be clearly much less of it on the current margin, just… as the sort of person some women are going to be occasionally uncomfortable about for dumb reasons)
(tbc my perspective then was “I feel like I’m being overly paranoid/unfair here but I’d just been exposed to n=1 anecdata of this sort of spidey sense being correct from a friend, so”
and my perspective now is “I now have a very precise model of how this particular train could get derailed and I am … uncertain, but concerned”)
hmmm
my feeling is
-in general I’m pro erring on the side of deferring to the people affected, there’s likely a lot of information missing
- i feel like there’s a benefit to a norm of ’if people are obeying the letter of the law/widely agreed community norms and acting in good faith we should try to make them feel assured they’ll be left to their private lives and can work through their dumb mistakes on their own’
if we’re deciding this merits an intervention we should decide what the community norm violated should be, because this does seem to be good faith
Re: circling/radical honesty
I remember being on a circling retreat a number of years ago (indeed, I think it was one Owen was on/ CEA people did sometime Nov/Dec 2019) and I remember, for whatever dumb stupid reason my system 1 freaked the fuck out at the instructor and said “do not trust this person”and you can hang as many ‘radical honesty’ signs on the door as you want, it is very difficult to tell someone ‘hey for whatever dumb reason my gut is freaking the fuck out at you, probably not anything personal’ when you feel like this
and this did not help with my system 1 flipping out, it just felt like there were uncomfortable truths other people could tell and I couldn’t tell uncomfortable truths back
apparently the guy also hosts these things but more for sexuality? I guess this seems like a reasonable idea in theory given what circling is about but you’d certainly need to make explicitly sure feelings like these are welcome/encouraged? like even when stuff goes well dealing with anxiety around this is an important cost of doing business. (I don’t feel reassured that this was likely to be the case, but I may be mistaken)
not saying circling/radical honesty is bad, i do see a lot of value in these practices
just
be careful with this shit mk.
So, also speaking as a poly person:
I feel like the heuristic missing here is “in situations where people are this sexually open it should always be possible for one person to run away screaming”
like, this should generally rarely happen if you’re not an asshole but it being part of the payoff matrix makes people feel a lot safer.
The thing is, I’m not sure how I’d have internalised this deeply without accidentally polyhacking myself?like
”Q: aren’t you worried your partner is going to leave you for them?
A: that sounds like it would be a me problem”
I suppose monogamous people manage this by feeling more comfortable hewing to societal expectations?
[eta: in this particular case I took this as “the only person I will date in the immediate future is my wife” which is fair enough under the circumstances]
current working model is the community health team seems good at what they do once they talk to people face to face (source: mostly word of mouth, people might have other experiences), some members are maybe temperamentally somewhat conflict averse and in general they are used to ~rat culture levels of charitability when it comes to public communications
regrettably this means that people who are less temperamentally charitable/newer to the movement might find it more difficult to trust them.
seems important to distinguish ‘are people happy with the results of talking to them/are they worthy of trust’ to ‘are they good at comms’
I read this with the knowledge that “we don’t do smartass trolley problem calculations when it comes to shit like this, it never helps” is something reasonably well ingrained in the community, but this might be a good moment to make this clear to people who may perhaps be newer
there’s a thing of like
in the current environment there’s a lot of discourse that goes like “EA needs to be less tolerant of weird people especially people who do things like poly and kink, in order for EA to feel more safe for women”
given that the omission of homophobia, transphobia, etc especially since these people are v overrepresented here seems … notable?
in general I model poly/kink communities as unusually sane about this stuff compared to the culture at large and I think trying to discourage these practices is honestly likely to hurt EAs/rats on the margin rather than help
tbh I feel like too much exposure to the bottom 50% of outgroup content is the main thing driving polarisation on twitter and it seems to me that EAs are the sort of people to upvote/promote the outgroup content that’s actually good
in general I feel like worries about social media bubbles are overstated. if people on the EA forum split into factions which think little enough of each other that people end up in bubbles I feel like this means we should split up into different movements.
if I’m going to be nervous about anything it’s doing things like poly and kink when you don’t have a good sense of how these things ~typically look.
fortunately there is plenty of cultural infrastructure for fixing this in EA/rat circles.
I guess of the three conjunctions here “socially awkward men” is the one I’m least concerned about—or at the very least I suspect a lot of people reading this underestimate the level of social competency they can get away with, and I suspect it’s already a pretty self-punishing state of affairs
(I guess there’s also the thing where probably a lot of socially awkward men would make people more comfortable if they were more direct about romantic/sexual interest, and I kind of worry we’ll accidentally end up discouraging that)