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.
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.