Thanks for posting this. I think giving detailed reflections and “lessons learned” like this can be really helpful in these sorts of situations, but I also recognize it can be tough to do in public. Positive reinforcement for this openness and frank discussion!
Davis_Kingsley
Karma: 888
Historical note: If EA had emerged in the 1970s era of the gay rights movement rather than the 2010s, I can imagine an alternative history in which some EAs were utterly outraged and offended that gay or lesbian EAs had dared to invite them to a gay or lesbian event. The EA community could have leveraged the latent homophobia of the time to portray such an invitation as bizarrely unprofessional, and a big problem that needs addressing. Why are we treating polyamory and kink in 2023 with the same reactive outrage that people would have treated gay/lesbian sexuality fifty years ago?
This comparison seems quite misleading to me because it glosses over the type of “event” in question. The OP was calling for people to avoid casually inviting coworkers to sex parties, not just “events”. I certainly hope that casually inviting a coworker to to attend a sex party -- whether that be gay, lesbian, straight, or whatever—would be considered inappropriate and grossly unprofessional even today!
Side-note: the OP says “Wildly unusual social practices like polyamory”, but I think poly is fairly common in the Bay Area outside of EA/rat circles.
I suspect it’s fairly common in other young, blue-tribe, urban contexts in the US too? (Especially if we treat “polyamorous”, “non-monogamous”, and many “monogamish” relationship styles as more-or-less the same phenomenon.)
I’ve heard this argument before but I think it’s quite overstated. I grew up in the SF Bay Area and still am in touch with many friends from childhood. They are generally young, blue-tribe, urban/suburban, etc.
Of that group, I think zero of them are polyamorous, with perhaps one exception (though I’m not sure if this person actually practices polyamory or has merely thought about doing so/been attracted to the idea) -- and that one exception is also the one member of the group, other than myself, with by far the most contact with the Bay Area rationality/EA scene.
(Of course, it’s possible and perhaps indeed somewhat likely that some people I knew in childhood are now polyamorous but I haven’t learned about this, as they keep it quiet or we’ve fallen out of contact or whatever? But it certainly does not seem to be a big mainstream thing.)
It’s also worth noting that I am an adult convert to Catholicism and was involved with the Bay Area rationalist and EA community (and uncomfortable with the “polyamory pressure” in that community) for years before joining the Church, including some time when I didn’t take religion seriously much at all. Claiming or implying that I hold my views (or faced backlash against them) just because I’m Catholic does me a disservice.
I note also that others in the community who are not (as far as I know) Catholic have faced backlash for their views against polyamory or the related pressure, that as I understand it there are several who are afraid to speak up publicly even now, and so on.As such, ozymandias’s comment feels like a really unfair way to summarize the situation.
No, but if you say “polyamory has been a problem in the EA (and rationalist) communities for a long time” and people know that you do in fact believe polyamory to be immoral, it’s completely reasonable for them to respond as Kelsey did?
Most people don’t know that and I wasn’t asserting it here—that would be much more controversial and much more of a debate than I wanted to have, and further one that I don’t think is very appropriate for the EA Forum! My hope is (was?) that even people who quite disagree with me—including many polyamorous people—would have common cause in opposing the pressure to be polyamorous that has been prevalent.
I am a Catholic—though I would not call myself a traditionalist—and I believe what the Church teaches, including on matters of sexuality. Bringing my religion up in this way feels like a character attack that ought to be below the standards of the EA Forum though, and I’m grieved to see it.
My posts here are not saying “Polyamory is a sin, convert to Catholicism.” They are not saying “you should be pressured into monogamy.” Those things seem much more contentious than what I’m going for here. Instead, I am saying that there has long been in fact the exact opposite pressure in at least parts of the EA community, with people being pressured away from monogamy and towards polyamory, and this has had negative consequences.
I don’t think this is an issue that requires people to accept Catholic teaching on sexual morality to see as an issue—and indeed the TIME article critical of EA norms here certainly does not seem to have been written from a traditionalist Catholic perspective!
Yes, I’m not sure this needs to be said but just to be clear—I also don’t think CEA or whatever should have a “talking people out of polyamorous relationships” department, and this would seem like a bizarre overreach to me.
I’m thinking of things much more along the lines of “discourage the idea of polyamory as ‘more rational’ and especially polyamory pressure in particular”, not “make EA institutions formally try to deconvert people from polyamory” or whatever.
To be clear, the thing I was wishing we had resolved internally was much more the widespread pressure to be polyamorous in (at least some parts of?) EA rather than individual people’s relationships; as you say, it would not be appropriate for the EA community to have a discussion about how to “resolve” your personal relationships. What would that even mean?
However, I think that this is far from the first time that major cultural issues with polyamory and unwelcome pressure to be polyamorous have been brought up, and it does seem to me that that’s the kind of thing that could have been handled earlier if we were more on the ball. In the article, Gopalakrishnan mentions having raised her concerns earlier only to be dismissed and attacked, told that she was “bigoted” against polyamorous people, etc. -- and she is not the first one to have raised such issues either!
Ideally, I’d like to see an EA culture that doesn’t promote polyamory over monogamy or use it to pressure people into unwanted romantic or sexual relationships, and I think that can be accomplished without community organizations overstepping their bounds.
I think polyamory has been a problem in the EA (and rationalist) communities for a long time and led to both some really uncomfortable and concerning community dynamics and also just a lot of drama and problems. Multiple high-profile women have told me that they felt pressured to be polyamorous by men in the community and/or felt that polyamory was bad but they didn’t feel comfortable speaking up against it, and I’ve faced some degree of community social backlash myself for speaking out (even informally!) against polyamory.
In general I think this has been kind of an ongoing issue for quite some time, and I wish we had resolved it “internally” rather than it being something exposed by outside investigators.
You say :
Whenever someone in your life asks you half-jokingly asks “how can I become smart like you?”, you no longer need to answer “Have you ever read Harry Potter?” because Projectlawful.com does not have Harry Potter in it.
On the contrary, this is a work I strongly wouldn’t recommend, and especially not to newcomers. It’s highly sexualized, contains descriptions of awful torture and various other forms of extreme misconduct, has a bunch of weird fetish material that more or less immediately disqualifies it as an intro rec in my opinion (far more so than Harry Potter), is very difficult to get into thanks to the formatting, and also just… generally isn’t all that good? I like some of Eliezer’s writing, but I think this is very much not him at his finest.
Further, I very seriously doubt the idea that reading about a fictional government ruled by hell is meaningfully providing any real policy experience at all.
I recognize this comment may not be received well here, but I think things like this are quite bad for EA to support—there are very substantial political skew issues in the movement already, and running political candidates as a EA intervention seems like another step down a road I think the movement needs to quickly depart.
The “Organizations vs. Getting Stuff Done” post is about anarchist political activism. This is a rather unusual area—under normal circumstances organizations are a relevant tool to aid in getting things done, not an obstacle to it.
To me this seems like essentially a “cheap shot”—you could write basically this story in support of very many positions. Imagine a story that’s like “wow, this guy was a utilitarian, even back then people knew utilitarianism could lead to unacceptable conclusions, we’re getting rid of his statue” or whatever. In fact, you could probably write a story like this against certain ideas in EA animal thought.
One relevant concept might be that of the feedback loop, where the output of a process affects the input. For instance, if you survey only people who are already attending your events as to how to improve them, you might wind up missing ways to improve it for those who didn’t attend. After several cycles of this you might wind up with an event that is very appealing for the “in crowd” but which doesn’t much appeal to newcomers.
Note that Torres was banned from the forum for a year following a previous discussion here where he repeatedly called another member a liar and implied that member should be fired from his job.
Good point re: Charity Entrepreneurship.
I’m somewhat more skeptical of the grantmaking thing though because there are few enough positions that it is not very legible who is good at it, whether others currently outside the field could do better, etc.
I could be wrong—I can point to specific things from some grantmakers that I thought were particularly good, for instance—but it doesn’t feel to me that it’s the most amenable field for such a program.
(Note that this is low-confidence and I could be wrong—if there are more objective grantmaking skill metrics somewhere I’d be very interested to see more!)
My impression is that the people who end up working in EA organizations are not on the same tier of discipline, work ethic, commitment, etc. as elite military forces and are not really even very close?
I don’t say that to disparage EA direct workers, I’m involved in direct work myself -- but my sense is that much more is possible. That said, as you mention the amount of discipline needed may simply not be as high.
For some reason I can’t see the draft, when I click on the notification I received for it it says “Error: app.operation_not_allowed” and kind of glitches out the interface until I refresh. Apologies!
(edit: fixed now, thanks!)
Thanks, I’m impressed by this reply and your willingness to go out there and do a survey. I will have more substantive feedback later as I want to consult with someone else before making a further statement—ping me if I haven’t replied by Friday.
Thanks for posting this! I appreciate the legibility and insight into the process here, especially during a stressful time in EA/on the Forum.