Here’s two simple and linked cases: Weird aspie poly people are central to what the community has so far done. Also libertarian anti woke people. A sharp cultural change like the one proposed here will drive us out. Losing my part of the community will probably reduce its ability to act more than losing the part of the community that wants these changes.
The impact on the global portfolio of charitable action is much less clear, because people like me will coalesce elsewhere in communities that try to be actively cringe and have a bit of a right wing reputation to avoid new comers who want to drive us out. But we’ll probably still be worrying about ai, utilitarianism, and trying to make ethical concerns into real world changes.
The same thing will also happen if my group stays in/ regains control of ea culture. The people who bounce or leave will end up doing good things elsewhere in communities that match their preferences better.
EA is a way, not the way, and changes to the culture should be judged in utilitarian terms by how they influence the global portfolio of action, not by how they change the level of useful work directly done through EA.
Second: As a poly EA, I’m more likely to bother to show up for things if I think I might get laid. It increases engagement and community cohesion. A group that is a good place to meet interesting opposite gender people is going to have an intrinsic advantage in pulling in casually interested people over one where that is strictly banned.
The claim that functional groups tend to ban dating within the group seems to me to be simply untrue in general and across cultures.
Of course the bouncing because hit on too often issue points in the other direction. But I don’t think anyone has actually tried to measure the relative magnitudes of these effects. There is just a completely non rigorous statement that clearly the expected value calculation points against making poly people happy.
I think what I said about getting laid as an incentive to showing up was rather misunderstood. I’m not actually good at being precise, and this issue makes it harder for me to speak carefully.
I’m drawing here on two core sets of background ideas, one is the ssc essay about the Fabian society, where it seems like one of the things that made them extremely effective was that the group meetings were an excellent place for people to meet a large set of their social needs (including finding marriage partners), and not just a place where they talked about socialism.
The second is that I grew up in a church where one of the things everyone knew was that one reason young people went to church meetings was to meet other young Christians to date. This was part of why it worked as a cohesive community.
Based on these models I expect communities where people form romantic relationships inside the community to end up more cohesive, more successful, and more functional in terms of their mission than communities where this is disallowed.
Of course nothing here disagrees directly with the idea that ‘sleeping around is bad.’
I suppose I get to disliking that as a statement of a norm because it sounds (to me) sex puritanical, and because it is saying (in my head) that the members of our community are not adults who can make their own choices about how to live their lives and who to sleep with. And, frankly because of the whole context that makes me interpret things unchraritably.
A norm of generally don’t hit on newbies until they’ve been around for a while is probably good (though details in implementation matter!) .
I think there is also a distinction between people like me who see EA primarily as a social organization built around a set of ideas, rather than those who see it as a professional network. The rules for a social network are, and should be different. But part of the strength of EA is that it is both, and unfortunately the two seem to be in tension (and not just around this issue—the whole who gets to go to EA global is another example of the same problem).
I also suspect that EA without a social cloud around the professionals is dead in the long run, because the just here to hang out and talk people are where the money for those jobs come from (and if that view is correct, the way to make EA strongest in the long run is to make it a good social group, and hanging out with cool people where there is a chance you might meet someone to date really is almost always strictly better than the same social group where there is no chance of that).
One last point: The current scandals are caused by visibility and maybe sbf. People out there are trying to attack EA by actively looking for the worst sort of true things they can say about the community. Taking what those attacks say as representative of the community is a serious mistake.