The guy in the panda hat at EAG.
Cornelis Dirk Haupt
Karma: 604
I think another useful question to ask could be something like, “what is your fantasy partner/complement organization?”
This part here is where my eyes widened. Adding this as standard question on EA grants is, in hindsight, so obviously a good idea to me that I am kinda in shock we don’t do so already.Creating a group of EA free agents that can be allocated/rented to EA-aligned non-profits?
Actually, this already exists I believe! I know there is a website called “EA Services” that allows you to sign up to basically be allocated around EA/EA-aligned orgs. Can anyone link the website? I’ve lost the URL.
I’d like to note that it is totally possible for someone to sincerely be talking about “cause-first EA” and simultaneously believe longtermism and AI safety should be the cause EA should prioritize.
As a community organizer I’ve lost track of how many times people I’ve introduced to EA initially get excited, but then disappointed that all we seem to talk about are effective charities and animals instead of… mental health or political action or climate change or world war 3 or <insert favourite cause here>.
And when this happens I try to take a member-first approach and ensure they understand what led to these priorities so that the new member can be armed to either change their own mind or argue with us or apply EA principles in their own work regardless of where it makes sense to do so.
A member-first approach wouldn’t ensure we have diversity of causes. We could in theory have a very members-first movement that only prioritizes AI Alignment. This is totally possible. The difference is that a members-first AI alignment focused movement would focus on ensuring its members properly understand cause agnostic EA principles—something they can derive value from regardless of their ability to contribute to AI Alignment—and based on that understand why AI Alignment just happens to be the thing the community mostly talks about at this point in time.
Our current cause-first approach is less concerned with teaching EA principles that are cause agnostic and more concerned with just getting skilled people of any kind, whether they care about EA principles or not, to work on AI Alignment or other important things. Teaching EA principles being mostly instrumental to said end goal.
I believe this is more the cause of the tension you describe in the “cause-first” model. It has less to do with only one cause being focused on. It has more to do with the fact that humans are tribalistic.
If you’re not going to put effort into making sure someone new is part of the tribe (in this case giving them the cause-agnostic EA principle groundwork they can take home and feel good about) then they’re not going to feel like they’re part of your cause-first movement if they don’t feel like they can contribute to said cause.
I think if we were more members-first we would see far more people who have nothing to offer to AI Safety research still nonetheless feel like “EA is my tribe.” Ergo, less tension.
A “cause first” movement has similar risks in vesting too much authority into a small elite, not much unlike a cult that comes together and supports each other and believes in some common goal and makes major strides to get closer to said goal, but ultimately burns out as cults often do due to treating their members too instrumentally as objects for the good of the cause. Fast and furious without the staying power of a religion.
That said, I’m also partial to the cause first approach, but man, stuff we have learnt like Oli Habryka’s podcast here made me strongly update more towards a member-first mindset which I think would have more firmly pushed against such revelations as being antithetical to caring for one’s members. Less deference and more thinking for yourself like Oli did seems like a better long-term strategy for any community’s long-term flourishing. EA’s recent wins don’t seem to counteract this intuition of mine strongly enough when you think decades or even generations into the future.That said, if AI timelines really are really short, maybe we just need a fast and furious approach for now.
But we have the same uncertainty with retail meat-based cat food, which I’ve highlighted is quite distinct from what cats evolved on.
Actually, I think we don’t have the same uncertainty. Those products have been iterated on for a far longer time than vegan cat food—including multiple FDA recalls as you pointed out. We’ve had much more of a “trial-by-fire” of retail meat-based cat food over a longer period of time.Though in the other comment you pointed out Ami, which given it has existed for 20 years, I imagine has gone through the same trial-by-fire. A new post that does nothing but focus on the evidence that Ami is fine for your cat would probably convince a ton more people. As I mentioned in my other comment I’m very confused why Ami wasn’t used in the Domínguez-Oliva et al. Study instead.
I don’t understand the obeisance to molecularly-exact meat.
I’m not interested in molecularly-exact meat. I’m interested in what—via strong empirical evidence—we know wont harm my cat.
Our goals with domestic cats are different than what evolution optimized for.
Couldn’t agree more, which is why, if we get enough empirical evidence that some particular vegan meal will be ay-ok for cats I’m all aboard.
It is worth adding that I do think we have enough empirical evidence to place dogs on a vegan diet without issue. But my read of the study is we’re not there with cats yet. I really don’t understand why the study authors make the same conclusion for both cats and dogs. The evidence appears to clearly be vastly stronger for dogs than it is for cats.
We should not put meat on a pedestal and beeline for that.
We should put empirical evidence on a pedestal and while truth-seeking be neutral about whether that includes or excludes meat.
Based on what? I don’t intuit this at all.
For me: I agreed with you and felt like my mind was being changed to being pro-vegan-cat—until I read Elizabeth’s comment pointed out the issues in the study. So for me it is mostly because you haven’t engaged with that specific comment and pointed out why the concerns that are highlighted in her screenshots (from the actual study!) are not something that I need to worry about.
Convince Elizabeth and you, by proxy, convince me I’m pretty sure.
The most parsimonious explanation is that the lack of supplements was the problem, not the “vegan”-ness.
Sounds reasonable to me. I didn’t say that a lack of supplementation wouldn’t solve it. I argued that meat would. Arguing for X doesn’t mean I argued for ~Y.
The study came out January of this year. That’s pretty recent.
Does a nutritionally complete vegan cat food exist yet that takes everything learnt from this study and all the studies it references into account without need for additional supplementation? If yes, I’d want to see a study where cats are fed it first before I place my own cats exclusively on it. Till then I’d probably be too paranoid to feed them a fully vegan diet.Why is that diet representative of for example nutritionally complete Ami, which has been around for years? Isn’t it much better to just defer to AAFCO’s and FDA’s standards, which Ami meets?
I’m confused. By “that diet” you mean to say the diet that was tested in the actual study you use as support for your claims should not be taken as an example of something nutritionally complete?
Ok, after trying to figure out what “Ami” was I see in your post you refer to it as vegan cat food that exists on the market.
Apparently it has also been around for 20 years after a quick Google search. Now I’m just hyper-confused why Ami wasn’t used in the Domínguez-Oliva et al. Study instead.
- EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem by (LessWrong; Sep 28, 2023, 11:30 PM; 317 points)
- EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem by (Sep 29, 2023, 4:04 AM; 124 points)
- 's comment on Getting Cats Vegan is Possible and Imperative by (May 12, 2023, 11:28 PM; 7 points)
I think when she said “natural diet” she didn’t mean to invoke the naturalistic fallacy.
She meant the diet that we have the most empirical evidence doesn’t harm/kill them. We have some empirical evidence that vegan diets appear to quckly give cats major bad health outcomes without supplementation? The first comment in this thread by Elizabeth pointed this out.
We don’t have empirical evidence of the same happening with meat-based diets. So modern nutritionally complete meat-based diets presently have a 100%-wont-cause-major-adverse-health-outcomes rate. Is this not what the studies seem to show?What’s “natural” isn’t more equivalent to what’s healthy. Is a diseased bird corpse more “natural” than nutritionally-complete vegan cat food? Probably. Healthier? Hmmmm.
No, but consider statistical averages rather than semantic absolutes. If you were to consider all possible meals a cat could reaonably be fed today. On average, it seems reasonable to suspect that they would be healthier if more of those meals were meat-based than plant-based. This is an empirical question, not a semantic one. The nutritionally-complete vegan cat food might be better than the diseased corpose (one single comparison). But having nothing but the nutritionally-complete vegan cat food might be far worse than nothing but meat (statistical average across many samples).
Given how nascent the field is and how we’re only just finding out what supplementation we might have to give cats, it seems like if we were to tell everyone to feed their cat vegan food that we’d probably get a lot of cats with bad health outcomes.
And this would be pretty bad optics-wise for the vegan movement.
(A) There would have to be essential molecules—nutrients—that cannot be sourced anywhere else OR (B) the meat would have to be digestible in a way that’s not possible with plant matter.
Nutrition is hella complicated. As someone who drinks a ton of Soylent, I am often surprised by how my own view of “it shouldn’t matter as long as the molecules—when you break it down—are the same” is overly simplistic. If you have food substance A and food substance B and their molecules are organized differently, then even if you were to break them down and get the same base nutrients, this does not mean they are equally healthy for you. This is because their different initial arrangement can lead to different biochemical cascades. I recently learnt that antimicrobial mouthwash might influence your mouth bacteria to such a degree that is leads to a decrease in NO production to the point that your blood veins don’t dilate as much = causally linked to increased arteriosclerosis. There is an entire scientific journal just dedicated to this pathway. See here.
I would never have intuitively thought this could happen. I can increase my risk of heart disease by nuking the bacteria in my mouth? Lol… wat?
It really is not a stretch to imagine that even if meat and vegan food appears to be nutritionally complete and—if broken down -they yield similar macronutrients—that still because the vegan food has a different composition before being broken down that different biochemical pathways are kicked off leading to harm that the meat-based one does not lead to. Something weird and unexpected like the NO pathway could explain why cats on vegan diets still get health issues as the pro-vegan study Elizabeth linked to shows.
An escape hatch from this would of course be lab grown meat that is to the molecule identical to meat. In that case it wouldn’t make sense for one to be any different from the other because they are not only to the molecule identical, but also to the molecules are arranged the same way before being broken down.
So my read is you haven’t considered option C: There could be an essential arrangement of molecules in meat before they are broken down, that currently cannot be sourced elsewhere (not until we get lab grown meat anyway).
I’m confused why the study both says this as you’ve highlighted, but then in the discussion and conclusion it says:
Discussion
The finding of this study suggests, on the face of it, that there is very little evidence of major adverse effects resulting from the feeding of vegan diets in dogs or cats. The majority of the animal-based parameters were within normal reference ranges and when there were deviations from normal reference ranges, there were rarely clinical signs reported alongside the finding. In addition, whilst the broad literature in this area commonly makes reference to concerns around nutrient deficiencies, such as that of taurine, folate, and cobalamin, there were a limited number of studies that measured these outcomes (generally, only two studies for key outcomes), with limited evidence of these deficiencies arising (with some of the alterations likely being attributable to confounding; for example, as a result of secondary disease, e.g., giardiasis in a dog). These conclusions should, however, be interpreted cautiously, given the breadth and quality of the evidence presented as described below
Conclusion
This review has found that there is no convincing evidence of major impacts of vegan diets on dog or cat health. There is, however, a limited number of studies investigating this question and those studies available often use small sample sizes or short feeding durations. There was also evidence of benefits for animals arising as a result of feeding them vegan diets. Much of these data were acquired from guardians via survey-type studies, but these can be subject to selection biases, as well as subjectivity around the outcomes.
Except, as you pointed out, convincing evidence of major adverse effects resulting from feeding cats vegan diets appear to have actually been observed as stated by the same authors saying it has not been observed. I notice I am confused given I do not think the paper is authored by bad actors.
Part I want to highlight in image below: Cats were supplemented. So the adverse affects you highlighted it sounds like you could prevent with supplements. Is this the only reason the authors conclude cats can be fed a vegan diet? But then it sounds like a better and more responsible conclusion by the authors would have been: it seems theoretically possible that a vegan cat food could exist with correct supplementation, but no healthy vegan diet for cats exists yet (all studies show specific supplementation thus far is neccesarry for existing vegan foods otherwise your cats might very quickly develop major adverse health outcomes—am I wrong?).
They also highlight they didn’t review the suitability of the supplements? What does this mean—“suitability”? Cant find an answer for that.
I had one that we would observe stalking their prey. And then before getting closer they would move the bell such that it was behind their head, tucked so that it couldn’t make noise anymore.
Clever girl.
Having observed a cat play with a bib on outside, I have a hard time thinking most cats would be very sad with one on.
Consider also the power of operant conditioning to positively affect the valenced experience of having a bib/collar on for said cat. Our family got new cats that hated their cat harnesses at first (used to go on walks with them since we’re concerned they’ll run into the highway nearby). However, they REALLY like going outside. Having the harnesses on became associated with interesting walks outside, so now when I pick up the harnesses they come towards me and don’t fight when I put it on.
Granted, this clearly varies by cat. I remember one cat we had that just absolutely hated his collar. Try as we might, he always fought it and was clearly constantly trying to get it off. So we gave up.
Consider buying an anti-hunting colar or bib in case you don’t know these are options! Make sure whenever they are let out to play you put the bib/colar on first.
All the joy of playing with your cat outside and feeling like a cool cat dad giving your cat-kids what they want, with none of the guilt!
EA Software Engineers’ Office Hours (option 1)
I’m making a credible accusation of harassment at the cost of my reputation, time and mental energy and you’re strawman attacking me for two words in the whole excerpt based on a subjective definition of “heavily downvoted” to call me overall dishonest? Dude.
Yea so we are talking about those two words and not the rest of what you have to say. I prefaced my whole comment as much. If you want to criticize me for not engaging with your other points my response is mostly “I’m not a woman” and I know Ivy is busy writing up a response anyway better than I could.
In the meantime, I’m allowed to only focus on a single point where I have 2 cents to share.
And those 2 cents remain that I think it is uncontroversial for someone to be accused of being dishonest if they obfuscate the support they have from a community they’ve criticized of being unsupportive.
If you feel that me having this take additionally also invalidates your entire harassment accusation, I can only say it doesn’t, that is not my intent, and I could make additional recommendations that I could DM you that don’t feel appropriate in public.
I make it very clear where I can that the Time article was a good thing for the EA community and happily bonk any would-be downplayers. And in doing so happily defend you speaking out.
Feel free to disagree with my exact framing but be more careful before accusing someone of intentional fabrication/lying and puncturing the overall credibility of people who are already taking much personal and reputational risk to talk about their truths.
I don’t think it is a good norm to tell others they shouldn’t accuse you of something they genuinly think/feel might be going on just because doing so—you feel—will hurt your overall credibility and reputation.
I also seriously doubt your personal and reputational risk is really taking a hit from my one point. I don’t doubt you feel that it is and I’m sorry you have to feel that, but I don’t think that it actually is taking a hit.
Dishonesty implies intention. One day, when it’s your turn to tell your story, others may dismiss you as well based on small disagreements in adjective use
The thing is, I feel like, when that happens, I’ll thank people for pointing out something that seems like a reasonable objection. Maybe I had a blindspot and they were pointing something out, out of concern for that blindspot.
I’ll tell them their feeling that I did something dishonest is valid. That’s their valid experience.
Then I’ll kindly reassure them for reasons x,y,z I am an honest person they can trust. If I made a mistake and missed some detail, I’d add their information to my story.The intention of my statement was to convey that there was heavy backlash against my post, which I believe is accurate.
I think what a lot of people are trying to say is that your statement would have been much stronger and this intention of yours would actually be met more, if you additionally talked about the support you got from the EA community—and hey maybe this is absolutely nothing—but I don’t recall this being a claim you ever made.
When a scientist runs an experiment and additionally points out all the ways their empirical claims could be wrong or have been misinterpreted, it strengthens their claim since it highlights they have considered other viewpoints before reaching their conclusion.
strawman attacking me
I don’t understand how my conservative politician example is a strawman attack. Happy to have it pointed out and change my mind.
You’re using the word sexually liberal / open-minded /interesting interchangeably. Catholic nuns can be interesting, monogamous people can be open minded. Private sexual preferences have nothing to do with interestingness or open minded ness.
A valuable point I am glad you brought up so I can clarify that of course I believe Catholic nuns can be interesting and open minded and even sexually liberal in beliefs without practising. I’d hate to make anyone feel otherwise. I’m not using them interchangeably. I said “sexually liberal and less open-minded” indicating two separate things, not two synonymous things. Private sexual preferences can totally be related to someone’s interestingness, sexually liberal mindset and open-mindedness and there is nothing wrong with that. Some things correlate and this is hardly controversial. And just because I acknowledge they correlate for me (interestingness is subjective after all) does not mean I’m saying other groups cannot be interesting, sexually liberal or open-minded. Likewise poly people can be dull and closed-minded as well.
People just aren’t black-and-white enough to be easily categorized.
I kinda also just want to stop here and point out that it is a private relationship preferences, not sexual preferences. A lot of polyamorous people aren’t even sexual. There are poly people that just sleep together cuddling, yet have full blown loving relationship polycules complete with horrendously messy breakups like any monogamous relationship.I met a a poly man this year that—to my shock—is asexual. Mostly shocking because he presented to me as interested in sex like me but when I talked to one of the (many) women he is or has dated I found out he doesn’t care much for sex.
And there is nothing wrong with me being more interested in this asexual poly man with multiple girlfriends (some of said girlfriends whom I might add are interested in sex) as a direct consequence of his relationship dynamics. Me assigning him more status in my social circles is no more a moral problem than traditionally monogamous people giving status to people who are traditionally married. Different social groups have different social status hierarchies. Both are as valid as any preference you might have where everyone is consenting to be a part of a social dynamic.
I am not just talking about professional relationships. I’m also talking about what the community should value. Treating women differently as higher/lower status based on their sexuality is simply wrong.
You cannot police people’s preferences when nobody is being harmed. That is wrong. If there are zero problematic power dynamics (e.g. no professional relationships), consenting adults can do as they please. A woman, just like any man, has every right to assign status to different people based on whatever reasons they choose. We all do this instinctively and automatically. The problem is not that that treating women differently as higher/lower status based on whatever preference you might have is wrong—it is that doing so insensitively can hurt someone and that hurting others is wrong.
In eras long forgotten I’ve had brief but magical “poly-heaven” moments where I’m dating multiple people and everyone is happy and it is sheer bliss, but I don’t go loudly proclaiming it all to all my friends who aren’t happy with their dating lives. That would be incredibly insensitive of me. Just because someone is lower status on some subjective metric doesn’t mean I want them to viscerally feel it. We should all be kindly helping lift each other up.
A lot of people are intentionally monogamous ( like me). Assigning them default lower status due to their private relationship preference is an awful practice that shouldn’t be adopted community wide.
So I’ll start by saying it is absolutely awful you feel like the EA community is assigning you lower status for being a monogamous woman. I have to ask though, isn’t this something where you can look at the individuals who were this insensitive towards you and call them assholes without calling the EA community as a whole asshole-ish?
When I, as a poly person, hang out with my more conservative mono friends, they don’t make me feel lower status. I’m their friend. However, I am lower status around them relative to their status hierarchy, especially when it comes to my viability as a mate. I accept and respect that I’m lower status around them.
A perhaps better example (“more conservative mono” is a bit too vague) is that when I a hang out with my death metal friends who have crazy tats and know everything about metal music and playing instruments I likewise have lower relative social status. And perhaps an illustrative example here is that yes, some in the death metal community do put more status on tattoos while some do not—which, like polyamory to EA, is wholly separate from what the core of the community is actually focused on, namely death metal music. I accept and respect that to some people within the metal community I’m lower status due to not having tattoos. They aren’t being mean to me by assigning me lower status.
However, if a particular strictly monogamous person or death metal friend went out of their way to highlight or was insensitive about my relative low status, I’d call them an asshole. I would not however call the death metal community as a whole asshole-ish for assigning me lower status due to my private preference of not wanting to have tattoos. And I wouldn’t say they are wrong to value tattoos and should only appraise my social status based on my love of death metal.
Assigning people status based on their private relationship preference is not something that is adopted community-wide in EA. Assigning status based on your tattoos is not something adopted community-wide in the death metal community. In both cases though there might be an epiphenomenon where the people you hang out within the EA/Death Metal community just happen to also be into polyamory/tattoos, but that doesn’t mean their personal preference and the status hierarchies you experience because of those preferences are a community-wide practice.
You might immediately want to counter-argue that “the sum aggregate of statuses being assigned is what takes something from individuals practising it to it being a community-wide practice.” In anticipating this counter-argument, let’s look at my death metal analogy and see how it can come crashing down:
Let’s assume that women with tattoos disproportionately find themselves in favourable career positions in the death metal community which is not relative to their actual career skill. Women without tattoos do not see this advantage. Let’s assume this is a result of increased professional networking opportunities afforded to women with tattoos as a direct result of many high in power and status in the death metal community disproportionately giving social status to women with tattoos (And it is only due to this and NOT due to problematic romantic relationships with problematic power dynamics). Consequently we enter vicious feedback loop of women without tattoos feeling dis-empowered and unfair pressure to get tattoos to get ahead. And those that wont put up with this obvious bullshit just decide to leave the Death Metal Community altogether despite their talent.I think we are now looking dead in the eye at something much more like what you’re afraid of is happening in the EA community. You’re saying that even absent problematic power dynamics and the appearance of nobody is being harmed, actually women are still being harmed.
So I think there are a few further steps we need to take before we start calling out the entire Death Metal community:
Women with tattoos actually have to be less competent than women without that aren’t getting said career positions. It’s totally possible that actually there are just more competent Death Metal women with tattoos and their tattoos are completely unrelated to their getting their positions
Women who feel pressured to get tattoos might just be pattern-matching on something that isn’t actually relevant to their professional success in the Death Metal Community
In the EA community I have not seen broad evidence of poly women being treated preferentially professionally because they are poly
It has to be broadly systemic and not just a feature of some subset of the community
It shouldn’t be something like Sonia points out appears to occur mostly in The Bay Area which appears to have features conducive to abusive dynamics
If there was some city where a scandal took place in the Death Metal community where some women appeared to have gotten preferential treatment due to their tattoos, it would be pretty unthinkable for anyone to conclude “The Death Metal Community is abusive” instead of “The Death Metal Community in this city is abusive”
Nobody caring to course correct, no action being taken.
I really doubt I need to make a case that concerns of women are being taken seriously. If they weren’t the number of women in EA wouldn’t be growing.
If things were true, however, we are no longer talking about individuals who are assholes but an entire community that has a deep rot.
But for sub-points I added I don’t think any of them hold for the EA community.
Ergo, I think the correct response is to call out individuals. Which has happened in the EA community a bunch of times leading to said individuals being banned from the EA community (or other punishments that make sense)
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc
May be you’re struggling to understand my point, so let me try to demonstrate why this sort of language is troubling. If you substitute the word “poly” with “white” ( ethnicity)/”male” (gender)/ “homosexual”(orientation) or other equivalents, this sentence sounds so wrong. I don’t think that my choice / programming of sexuality is something that needs work, I love being monogamous, just like how I don’t feel lesser because of my gender or ethnicity. All other things being equal, I want to be given equal status as someone else with a different sexuality, just like how I want the same status as a man / white person / a person of different nationality. That’s all.
Thank you for trying to make your point clearer. I appreciate this a lot. I’m beginning to think we have an unusually high inferential distance between us, but actually at the object-level we don’t disagree on a lot at all.
So, actually, all those do occur and frequently. Certain black (ethnicity), women (gendar), homosexual (orientation) people have interesting stories to tell because of their experience tied to their ethnicity/gendar/orientation and get invited to podcasts because of it. So the sentence doesn’t strike me as “wrong” per se. It strikes me as feeling wrong.
But, if it isn’t just because of some protected characteristic, it is totally ok for people to assign others more social status, in part, because of protected characteristics. People assign people who are women/black/homosexual <insert-reason-here> more status because their experience as a <insert-category-here> is essential to whatever they have to share—e.g. it is something where they are oppressed
Likewise, polyamory is quite stigmatised and we don’t really have many role-models or representation. So, when someone is speaking for us and they do so eloquently, it is only natural that we assign this person more status because they can do so—and doing so is intricately tied to their identity in being poly. Someone who isn’t poly that can still “talk as well” wouldn’t get the status. This would be problematic for the same reason that we don’t assign status to a white man who can “talk as well” about the experience of being black as someone who is black.
I guess the question then is, if you possibly don’t feel it wrong to assign a women more social status for being a good role-model for women as a woman, why do you feel uncomfortable when poly people are assigned more status for being a good role-model for poly people as a poly person themselves? This, like AI Alignment in the EA community, is status working in the right way and incentivising good and worthwhile behaviour in the poly community.
I might feel bad or left out due to this, but that is not really that different from a woman feeling bad and left out when they compare themselves to other women who have gained social status in part for sharing their experiences as women.
Also I just want to explicitly state I didn’t mean for anything I wrote to imply I think your programming of sexuality is something that needs work. I’ll also add, in case you’re worrying whether you’ve offended me, nothing you’ve written thus far has made me feel like you think my programming of sexuality is something I need to work on.
This is actually status working the right way. Status can be used as an incentive to promote behaviors we want from people because humans are great incentive maximizers. We want alignment researchers to gain status by producing high quality alignment work, because EA thinks this work is of high impact. Conversely, we want more people to aspire to become alignment researchers because this work is highly regarded / high status in EA. Unlike promoting certain type of technical AI work over others in EA, the community should not promote a certain type of sexuality over others. Let EA be about doing good alone, and decoupled from sexuality / race / ethnicity / orientation.
And some people want to meet more people who have cool tattoos or more people who are polyamorous. Humans are going to throw out incentives to get what they want. The answer is not to quash it, it is to teach people to do so maturely, tactfully and with kindness. I like big-tent EA so people with near any preference might also like doing EA stuff. They might even be EA leaders. But we shouldn’t let their preferences automatically lead us to conclude that is the preference of the community as a whole.
And maybe I’m too woke but I’d caution against trying to decouple doing good from sexuality / race / ethnicity / orientation completely. A full understanding of people’s identities, I think, is important to doing good better. A sex-race-ethnic-orientation blind approach might invalidate people’s experiences, especially those that are marginalized.
For anyone that actually read this whole damn comment, if you are in the Bay Area for the next month I’d love to meet you at the EA Taco Tuesday meetup and give you an appreciative high five, lol, even if you disagree with me. I’ll be highly talkative excitable guy in the panda hat.
EA might want to hire competent women but competent women might not want to stick around if they’re lower status due to factors outside of their control such as sexuality/race/etc.
I fully agree with this point, but I have a hard time drawing the line from what my and Ivy’s topic of conversation is and this. What I think you’re talking about is a problem where power dynamics is involved including mentor/mentee relationships and coworkers etc etc. This is a separate topic from the social status increase and feeling-dejected by it that Ivy and I are talking about.
I’ll try an illustrate why with an example:
When I was at an EA party the other night a woman I had just met brought up the topic of orgies. I immediately found her more interesting and it opened the span of conversation to many other varied topics not even related to sexuality. She didn’t break any norms, she didn’t try to make people feel uncomfortable, she brought the topic up in a funny socially intelligent way. Her social status in the group in this setting increased. EAs trend towards being open-minded enough to talk about anything. Nothing wrong with this. Another pertinent example: When I met one of my closest EA-adjacent friends in the world for the first time: within 5 minutes we were both talking about the topic of suicide and our own personal struggles. Naturally I also immediately found her more interesting and it opened the span of conversation to many other varied topics not even related to suicide. Her openness increased her social status at said party where people were EAs and EA-adjacent open-minded types.
If these women had been at a conservative catholic social gathering their social status would have decreased with this behaviour. And there is nothing wrong with a different social setting having different status hierarchies.I bring up this example because your comment begs the question: do you think it is problematic these women brought up these topics and that status hierarchies should be different in EA as a community, as a whole? Because we don’t allow this kind of talk at EA conferences and it has finally come down (as it should) that where power dynamics are concerned this kind of talk between coworkers is likely to be problematic. But if what you’re saying is that absent any professional setting, absent any coworker or mentee/mentor relationship, people who identify as “EAs” should still not grant anyone any social status for being interesting when the topic of sexuality is brought up… what you’re effectively demanding is for thousands of people around the world to change their personality and become less sexually liberal and less open-minded.
Now mind you, when I was in my early twenties, I would have felt left out and dejected at these EA parties where people are freely talking about said sexual topics where I don’t have any status because of factors outside of my control. I certainly would have felt like my dating life is some sort of proxy for not being good enough to be part of EA and that it was locking opportunities away from me. But how I feel and how things are are two different things.
It would have been wrong for me to make the leap from “I feel like I’m not high status and not good enough at this EA party” to “EAs wont hire me because I’m not high status enough and sexually liberal enough at their EA parties.” I think this is the mistake you are making when you say “Status and success are fairly related in many ways in the real world, because status opens doors and signals greater opportunity.” This is an obviously true statement in some contexts (e.g. mentor/mentee or grant/grantee relationships etc) and an obviously false statement in the context that Ivy and I are talking about.
That said, an obvious crux here that would convince me that we have a problem that requires action is if the number of women in EA does indeed dwindle or show a downward trend. I don’t see that happening.
If anything the EA Community’s gendar ratio over the years (including at EA casual socials) is trending towards becoming more women-heavy suggesting to me that women are feeling more comfortable as a whole in the movement rather than less so.
This doesn’t mean that there haven’t been incidents that have made some women feel unwelcome or unsafe. These are serious and need to be dealt with. But I’m unconvinced this is indicative of a larger trend. I talk about this view of mine more in this comment on a post by Maya saying they are sad, disappointed and scared of the EA community.
And guess what: she updated her initial negative view towards the EA community after considering the full context of things as you can see in her comment here:
Thanks for your comment—for all who are interested, I did reach out to Scott and he provided me with an in-depth explanation of some of the context behind Kathy’s accusations and suicide. His explanation provided me with a deeper understanding of the situation and helped me realize that action was taken to check the validity of some of Kathy claims and that there was a more involved and nuanced response to the situation than I realized initially.
Final quick point:Status in EA should be a function of doing good and should be sexuality-neutral, period.
I believe sexuality can be a means of doing good. I think healthy sexuality and specifically talking about it has liberated thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, across history. It’s as valid something to talk about as mental health as an EA cause area. If some are better at talking about it—even if it makes me feel uncomfortable and left out—it’s ok for them to get social status for it.
This is not really entirely different from how when EAs talk about AI Alignment and get status for it that I also feel uncomfortable and left out for not being smart enough. Let their social status increase. It’s my problem for feeling insecure, not theirs.
Likewise it is my problem for feeling like I “need to be better at being poly to be EA.” This is something I genuinely feel. But I know I don’t have to be poly to be fully welcome and I know the feeling is my own problem, not something that is a provably strong indictment against the EA community.
“They’re not offered a seat on the fast boats, not because they’re not smart/hard working but because they’re rejecting sex/ have different relationship preference. ”
I think you’ve completely misunderstood what Ivy means by “fast boats.” She is talking about fulfillment through intimate human connection. Not fulfillment through professional success. Makes more sense? By boats being “sped up” Ivy means that sexual positivity is allowing many people to experience a level of fulfilling human connection much sooner in their life than they otherwise might have. Ivy isn’t talking about money and professional power here at all.
^ Moved this paragraph to top of comment because I thought it more important than the rest of my comment below:
I think you have a much higher burden of proof you haven’t met yet to show your comment isn’t a slippery slope fallacy you’re invoking. I can go into why I think this looks like a slippery slope if you like or can you see why I’d see it that way?
“If success is not just a function of impact / work but also a function of sexual liaisons / sexuality”
Success and status are not synonymous. You can be high social status with everyone wanting to hear about your interesting polyamorous life, but at the same time you can be completely unsuccessful professionally. I can think of at least one EA woman off the top of my head who has been poly with multiple prominent EAs, who has social status because of this, and whose professional career hasn’t benefited at all. If anything it hindered her professional life’s growth because God knows being polyamorous means being an unpaid therapist to multiple people, which takes time and energy away from other endeavors.
Just because someone gains social status from something in some group that said group thinks is cool doesn’t mean that this increased status translates into easier professional success in any meaningful way we need to be worried about.
People gain status in LGBTQ social circles if they come out as gay, especially if the coming out story makes for a compelling story (hell, in any social setting where you can tell a compelling story you gain status). I don’t think this means we need to be worried that—for sake of argument—queer theatre productions are preferentially hiring actors with compelling stories to tell about their own private sexual history instead of hiring the most competent actors. They’ll hire the most competent actors—they have tickets to sell. The EA community will hire the most competent women—they have a world to save.
I don’t think we’re anywhere close to needing to be concerned that the social status some in EA gain from talking about poly in a compelling way leads to preferential career treatment.
Because social status and professional success aren’t synonymous and one isn’t causally linked to the other, and because you appear to have misunderstood what is meant by “fast boats” I think all the chain of connections you’ve drawn aren’t connected to anything I or Ivy have said at all.
Strongly agree with you on everything you wrote.
Fun-fact: even though I’ve been in multi-year poly relationships even I don’t know if poly is right for me. I nominally identify as polyskeptic. This loosely means I believe more people than not are trying to be poly without realising that poly is sub-optimal for reaching their goals (whatever their goals are). I acknowledge I might be projecting here, because my dating life really only “took off” the way I wanted after I stopped trying to be poly and was nothing else other than “single.”That said, I do also have some empirical backing for my belief: I’ve spoken or know of at least 2-3 long-time poly EAs (i.e. poly for most of their dating life) that have since gone mono. I think the interesting thing was one of them saying they were shocked by how much more fulfilling mono was than they expected it would be given “poly-metaphysics” is what they strongly subscribed to before.
Which also speaks to a broader point: if you’re poly you’re interesting and get invited to speak on the Clearer Thinking podcasts etc etc. You gain status just due to your private relationship preference in EA, or such is my perception. Nobody cares if you’re mono.
But, this is getting to a point where I need to go to work and I’d like to talk with you over video chat instead to continue—perhaps on EA Gather.town to make it public. DM’d you :)
So as a poly/poly-adjacent EA of many years I’ll start by saying I strong upvoted your post and that insofar as a vision for a better tomorrow is concerned, your comment was poetry to my ears. I am very much aligned. Beautiful stuff.
However, this little nugget just keeps coming back to me and it irks me:
“On the other hand, we do poly and flexible sexual connections and those of us who are engaged in those things will even try and help you figure out if it’s for you. Poly is fun. Sex is fun. Play and curiosity are fun. These are some of the major fun things our community does have going for it when comes to hedonism [and utopian way of life, over the rest of society.]”
I think you’re making the poly-part of the community sound way more accessible than it actually is. You possibly have a blindspot here because you don’t know what it is like to be on the outside trying to get in (?).
So here’s the thing. If poly for you in the community is this fantastically amazing, then it is a tragedy of a vastly worse degree than many EAs might even realize that they can’t be part of it.
I’m reminded of some study I read about years ago that showed that the mental health of people in third world countries decreased markedly when they were shown just how much better off people in first world countries are. Those in the control group that showed clear ignorance over how Europeans lived were… Happier.
Honestly, after reading so much poly-discourse on the forum lately I’m very surprised this point hasn’t been raised. An obvious model for what is going on, in my head, is that the poly-backlash is part of a larger backlash against the “moral fulfillment and life fulfillment and career fulfillment and hedonism fulfillment and just-everything-important fulfillment” that is perceived to be held and disproportionately concentrated among few in EA.
Fwiw, I think your view that a leftward shift in EA would increase popularity is probably Americocentric. I doubt it is true if you were to consider EA as a global movement rather than just a western one.
Also, fwiw, I’ve lost track of how many people I’ve seen dismiss EA as “dumb left-wing social justice”. EAs also tend to think the consequence of saying something is what matters. So we tend to be disliked both by free speech absolutists and by people who will never concede that properly discussing some controversial topics might be more net positive than the harm caused by talking about them. Some also see EA as tech-phobic. Steven Pinker famously dismissed EA concerns about AI Alignment. If you spend time outside of EA in tech-optimism-liberal circles you see a clear divide. It isn’t culturally the same. Despite this, I think I’ve also lost count of how many people I’ve seen dismiss EA as ” right-leaning libertarian tech-utopia make-billionaires-rich nonsense”
We can’t please everyone and it is a fool’s errand to try.
One person’s “steven pinker style techno-liberalism, with a free speech absolutist stance and a vague unease about social justice activism” is another person’s “Ludite free speech blocking SJW”
If following principles does not clearly push EA one way or the other, also then so be it.
Meta-note as a casual lurker in this thread: This comment being down-voted to oblivion while Jason’s comment is not, is pretty bizarre to me. The only explanation I can think of is that people who have provided criticism think Michael is saying they shouldn’t criticise? It is blatantly obvious to me that this is not what he is saying and is simply agreeing with Jason that specific actionable-criticism is better.
Fun meta-meta note I just realized after writing the above: This does mean I am potentially criticising some critics who are critical of how Micheal is criticising their criticism.
Okkkk, that’s enough internet for me. Peace and love, y’all.