tbh I suspect that “stuck in a long term abusive relationship” is a more important tail risk than sexual assault and “sleeping around” helps people defend against it (by developing reasonable expectations of what relationships should be like)
agunning
I feel by those numbers EAs shouldn’t be dating each other at all?
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?)
yeah
I mean, empirically women do choose to go on dates, so I’m going to trust the revealed preferences here...
In my personal experience a good deal of sexual assault/harassment etc. goes unreported (especially at universities) because especially if you personally know the perpetrator as a friend or romantic partner you often have pretty complicated feelings about escalating things.
I think making clear the default outcome of reporting is “you have a conversation with someone a good deal more experience than you about what steps tend to be taken in these cases and if they’ve heard anything else and you get agency around the result” rather than “you set in motion a process against this person you have a very hazy understanding of” helps a lot. (the health team’s policy around confidentiality seems good for this reason).
i feel like the “what if you replace poly with gay” thing is saying, like
empirically something (some kind of instinctual conservatism towards sexual norms) caused people to say the same things about gay people.so something like instinctual-conservatism-towards-sexual-norms when it’s ~adults doing consensual things is a heuristic that failed in the past and is probably not reliable
if you want to interfere with my private life to that extent there’s a very strong burden of proof upon you
also happier EAs are EAs that are better at doing EA work, generally speaking
yeah from my experience there are at least two clusters of incidents of
people who talk about dark secret psychological/sociological hacks the normies don’t want you to know (these people tend to lean more rationalisty and are going to be an extremely tiny percentage of people who comment on this forum)
(usually much less severe) possibly autistic people who are socially oblivious of how they are throwing their weight around but well meaning
i think there’s probably quite a lot of value in warning people to be cautious around people who seem like they’re in the first cluster (and I’d mostly associate poly/kink types with the second)
if you are mostly talking about the first cluster I think we are to a very real extent talking past each other—especially in the bay area ea/rat circles are extremely ideologically heterogeneous
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”