I think it’s worth keeping in mind that every functioning culture includes a vast list of taboos which people enforce on others. In both regular Western culture, and EA culture, all of the following are considered inappropriate:
- Making sexist jokes
- Not being sympathetic when someone else experiences a personal tragedy
- Nuidity in the workplace
- Answering somebody else’s phone
- Smoking weed in the office
- Bragging about money
- Chewing with your mouth open
- Refusing to shake somebody’s hand when you’re introduced
- Making prolonged, intense eye contact with people
- Not saying “pardon me” after farting or burping loudly
- Over-sharing personal information with someone you don’t know very well
- Asking an employee to carry out a duty that is far outside their normal role (e.g. “For the second half of your shift, can you please go to my parent’s house and change the bedsheets”)
- Giving people unsolicited gifts which are too expensive
- Swearing—
Having sex with somebody much younger than you even if they’re above legal age of consent
- Offering to buy somebody’s pet from them
Some of these taboos are hard to justify on the spot, but very few people seriously want to eliminate them all.
Perhaps we want EA culture to lean slightly more towards personal autonomy than normal Western culture does, but there’s never going to be a cohesive collection of humans who can productively interact together without seriously regulating each other’s behaviour.
Xavier_ORourke
Great point! As well as “focus on the norms that are causing the most harm” I’d want to also add “focus on the norms that promise the least benefit”.
Doing weird things like giving away 10% of your income, or talking about shrimp welfare, or raising the alarm about the dangers of AGI are all very weird, but there are credible worldviews in which it’s really important to do them anyway.
Whereas weird things like having sex with multiple people within your professional network on a regular basis promise mild benefits at best, even according to worldviews which endorse them.
Another important difference with monogomy is that it’s taboo to make a proposition to somebody who’s already married or already in a serious relationship, so people don’t make them as often.
Pollyamory is not necessarily a bad thing in all contexts and all implementations, and I’m not claiming that everyone who practices is an abuser—but on its face it seems intuitive that the prevalance of polly in a community would interact with frequency of sexual harrasment/assult (especially when layered on top of other things like high prevalance of aspergers+mood dissorders+professional relationships between members of the community).
I’m not advocating this entirely, but just to illustrate the point—imagine if most people in EA had cultural attitudes such that:
- It’s taboo to have sex or cuddle with somebody who you’re not in a serious committed relationship with
- Propositioning someone who already has a partner was considered a vile thing to do, and could lead to serious humiliation for the proposer
- Being in a long term, stable, exclusive partnership was seen as a very high-status signal, and having many sexual partners was considered low-status
If the culture in EA was more like this, (for better or worse), the frequency of unwanted physical advances would certianly be lower, right?
For what it’s worth, I’m on the 1 year “try giving” pledge atm. Even though I currently donate to “EA approved” orgs, I would never make the life-long commitment if I thought it meant giving up the right to use my own discretion when deciding which causes/organisations to give to.
That’s true, but before the brand “Effective Altruism” existed, there was no reason why starting an organisation using that name should have made the founders beholden to the will of every single participant in this community—you’d need to conjecture a pretty unreasonable amount of foresight and scheming to think that even back then the founders were trying to structure these orgs in a manner designed to maintain central control over the movement.
If you or me or anyone else wanted to start our own organisation under a new brand with similar goals to CEA or GWWC I don’t think anyone would try to stop us!
I encourage readers to consider whether they are the correct audience for this advice. As I understand it, this advice is directed at those for whom all of the following apply:
- Making a large impact on the world is overwhelmingly more important to you than other things people often want in their lives (such as spending lot of time with friends/family, raising children, etc.)
- You have already experienced a normal workload of ~38h per week for at least a couple of years, and found this pretty easy/comfortable to maintain
- You generally consider yourself to be happy, highly composed and emotionally stable. You have no history of depression or other mood-related dissorders.
If any of these things do not apply, this post is not for you! And it would probably be a huge mistake to seek out an adderall prescription.
Sorry Sophia but I still don’t completely understand how what we’re talking about maps on to actual decisions community builders are making. I’m still suspicious that many of us are sensing a vibe problem but misdiagnosing it as a messaging/cause prioritization problem.
I would find it really helpful if you could an example of how you percieve the big tent / small tent abstraction could map on to a concrete action which a community organiser takes.
Let’s say someone was starting up a new a EA group at an Australian university—what’s an example of a mistake you worry this person might make if they’re too directly focused on chasing the “tails”?
Thanks Holden and Luke for answering so many questions <3
Thinking in terms of broad generalisations/approximations—if you had to draw a graph depicting the value provided to OP by a new research analyst over time, what kind of shape would this graph have?
Or to ask the question in a different way: Are your efforts to hire for new OP roles motivated more by a desire to make better grants in the next couple of years, or by an intention to have a strong team in place several years from now which does high quality work in the future?
I agree that if all the concerns about relationship norms in EA culture were comming from small minority, then this would not justify changing them (but the minority are still entitled to try and advocate/persuade).
But when it comes to culture/status, I think the dynamics mean majority rule is pretty much baked in by default anyway! So we might not have to worry much about that.
Interestingly, we might have different impressions about what the median attitude is in the community when it comes to questions like—
“Is it a bad idea to have sex with your manager?”
- “Is it a red flag when a local university group organiser is regularly hooking up with newcommers?”
- “Do long term, stable, committed relationships generally lead to better community health overall?”
Maybe this depends on how big/small you draw the boundary for who counts as part of the EA community, but most people I know who engage with EA would answer “yes” to those questions. (I’m in Australia, perhaps Bay Area is very different)