I appreciate this post. But one mistake this post makes, which I think is an extremely common mistake, is assuming that there can exist a community without (soft) norms.
Every community has norms. It is impossible to get out of having norms. And so I don’t think we should be averse to trying to consciously choose them.
For example, in American society it is a norm to eat meat. Sometimes this is in fact because people actively are trying to get you to eat meat. But mostly, nobody is telling other people what to eat -- people are allowed to exercise their free choice (though animals aren’t). But this norm, while freeing for some, is constricting for others. If I go to a restaurant in many places, there won’t be much good vegetarian food. In some places, there is a norm to have vegetarian food. But there is no place where there is no norm: in some places, there is a norm to have it, and in others, there is a norm not to have it. The norms can be stronger or weaker but there is no place without norms.
Currently, there is the non-coercive but “soft” norm in EA that young people interested in AI safety research will go to Berkeley. The post you link is an example of that. People are being actively encouraged to go to Berkeley. They are being paid specifically to go to Berkeley in some cases. For the reasons you give, this could potentially be really good, but the comments on that post also give reasons why it might not be!
You gave the following reason why norms are often not so good:
they prevent people from doing harmless things that they want to do.
This is true. But one could just as easily say of other norms:
they encourage people to do slightly harmful things they wouldn’t otherwise want to do.
Or perhaps:
they fail to discourage people from doing harmful things that they want to do.
The “default norm” is what the community happened to settle on. But it is a norm as much as any other. And it isn’t necessarily the best one.
Yes, I think it’s impossible not to have norms about personal relationships (or really, anything socially important). I should perhaps have provided an example of this. Here is one:
If you move to a new place with a lot of EAs, you will likely at some point be asked if you want to live in a large group house with other EAs. These group houses are a norm, and a lot of people live in them. This is not a norm outside of EA (though it is in maybe some other communities), so it’s certainly a positive norm that has been created.
Even if EAs tended to live overwhelmingly in smaller houses, or lived with people who weren’t EAs, then that would just be another norm. So I really don’t think there is a way to escape norms.