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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34540 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Elevatorgate: Effective Altruism version?Effective Altruism Promises to Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse

Does anyone remember Elevatorgate? Long story short: the atheist "movement" had gotten going, many books were published and cons were attended. At one a figure in the community "Skepchick"- Rebecca Watson- was propositioned by a man who'd attended her talk in an elevator and made a video stating - in understated tones given the conflagration it started tbh - that she didn't like it and it made her feel unsafe.

Because this was pre-#MeToo and the Great Awokening and atheists at the time kind of prided themselves on being assholes truth-tellers , figures like Dawkins jumped in, criticizing or mocking her for complaining about such an anodyne event. Dawkins wrote a notorious letter titled "Dear Muslima", mockingly comparing the suffering of a hypothetical circumcised Muslim woman with Watson in the sort of move that wouldn't even begin to fly today.

Well...that led to an absolute shitstorm that split the atheist community with some using it to create "Atheism+": basically atheism that was sufficiently woke, after insisting atheism had a racism/sexism/whatever problem. As foreshadowing for a now pervasive social tendency, it then ate itself with circular firing squads and purity spirals.

At the time, there was enough pushback that Watson and her defenders didn't outright win but she probably won the moral victory. Years down the line most of the leftover "100% atheist" communities were pretty woke, see the banning of RationalityRules for arguing against trans-identified males in women's sports.

Now...

But as Gopalakrishnan got further into the movement, she realized that “the advertised reality of EA is very different from the actual reality of EA,” she says. She noticed that EA members in the Bay Area seemed to work together, live together, and sleep together, often in polyamorous sexual relationships with complex professional dynamics. Three times in one year, she says, men at informal EA gatherings tried to convince her to join these so-called “polycules.” When Gopalakrishnan said she wasn’t interested, she recalls, they would “shame” her or try to pressure her, casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach.

After a particularly troubling incident of sexual harassment, Gopalakrishnan wrote a post on an online forum for EAs in Nov. 2022. While she declined to publicly describe details of the incident, she argued that EA’s culture was hostile toward women. “It puts your safety at risk,” she wrote, adding that most of the access to funding and opportunities within the movement was controlled by men. Gopalakrishnan was alarmed at some of the responses. One commenter wrote that her post was “bigoted” against polyamorous people. Another said it would “pollute the epistemic environment,” and argued it was “net-negative for solving the problem.”

...

Gopalakrishnan is one of seven women connected to effective altruism who tell TIME they experienced misconduct ranging from harassment and coercion to sexual assault within the community. The women allege EA itself is partly to blame. They say that effective altruism’s overwhelming maleness, its professional incestuousness, its subculture of polyamory and its overlap with tech-bro dominated “rationalist” groups have combined to create an environment in which sexual misconduct can be tolerated, excused, or rationalized away. Several described EA as having a “cult-like” dynamic.

...

One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”

I'm torn.

On the one hand, I recognize the same tactics (and, tbh, it doesn't escape my notice that the first victim seems to have social competition with males for funding on her mind) that ripped the Atheist community apart. I also find most of the examples of harassment to be of the all-too-common nebulous and vague variety that allow people to claim victimhood. I honestly don't know if people are this fragile nowadays, or are exaggerating their fragility for points, but it is a bit absurd. If you're an adult, I don't want to hear about you being groomed. A "22f-44m" relationship is one where one party is twice as old but it'd be absurd to act like one party didn't have agency.

A lot of the complaints also seem to be that alleged rationalists and effective altruists - for some reason - don't just take people at their word.

On the other hand: some of these (e.g. the final one I quoted, the one about a male jumping into a woman's bed at night) are more egregious and the quokka point is well-applied here for those "good" EAs who still encouraged people not to go to the cops. It's exactly the sort of problematic math I can see some people doing. Hell, people did it all the time in churches, schools and so on. It's not a particular foible of EAs.

Also:

Several of the women who spoke to TIME said that the popularity of polyamory within EA fosters an environment in which men—often men who control career opportunities–feel empowered to recruit younger women into uncomfortable sexual relationships. Many EAs embrace nontraditional living arrangements and question established taboos, and plenty of people, including many women, enthusiastically consent to sharing partners with others.

I have to say I find this funny. People discovering that looser social and sexual norms allow bad actors - or merely "people with more status than me who don't want to treat me as I think I deserve" - to accrue sexual and social benefits and blur the lines. Quelle surprise.

I find poly evangelicals just as annoying as the next guy and don't think it's a good lifestyle for most but what movement exactly do these people think they're joining? Yes, it's mostly weirdos, quite a bit of whom are on the spectrum who are interested in weird ideas. Where are these advertisements where it's pretending to be something else? All of the rest of society follows your moral beliefs. Yes, EA has control over some funding and useful roles, but they created them and it's theirs you have no right to it without putting up with the weird community that made it possible.

what movement exactly do these people think they're joining? Yes, it's mostly weirdos

Which we know because at least by second- and third-hand accounts of the Bay Area bubble and the general community around EA and rationalism (I know a lot more than I wanted or needed to know about accusations of sexual abuse and harassment in the rationalist circles due to the trickling out of information via various blogs and references to the scandals on other blogs, all because of being on here and via SSC/ACX). But if you only learn about EA by things like this, when you go off to college, and you think "This sounds great, I want to make a positive contribution to changing the world", then you don't know about the poly and the non-conventional attitudes and all the rest of it.

So yeah, normie goes to conference and is shocked to be propositioned to join polycules and when refusing gets the lecture on compersion and the rather holier-than-thou attitude the poly evangelists within rationalism adopt about "we don't get jealous, we're so much better than you monogamous types" which I am, sorry to say, glad to see coming back to bite them in the backside even if it is in the context of a TIME article which isn't going to be the greatest in the world.

This reminds me. About ten years ago I asked a girlfriend who was an advertising exec if there was a cool edgy counterculture left that hasn't been co-opted by the mainstream and completely hollowed out yet. Without missing a beat she replied "polyamory". Adding "it's just too weird".

With that in mind, the obvious enlightenment of polyamory aside, I do wonder if it's kind of poison pill that's meant to keep out normies.

Everyone's on-board with being part of a smart do-gooder club until they're introduced to some metamours.

I do wonder if it's kind of poison pill that's meant to keep out normies.

It wasn't meant to keep out normies; the poly stuff was there long before EA had to worry about the general public becoming aware of them. I wish it worked better at keeping the mainstream away, though. There are a lot of "effective altruists" these days who don't seem to care about effectiveness, just evaluate charities based on vibes, and don't even know what "on the margin" means. (REEE!)

if there was a cool edgy counterculture left that hasn't been co-opted by the mainstream and completely hollowed out yet

There have been several trial balloons over the recent years with pieces in the 'respectable' news media, but yeah: we normies are just too stuck-in-the-mud to realise that this is poly which is a cool new original novel thing, not adultery and cheating and all the other old ways of having your cake and eating it too.

Poly helps keep love alive!

Here are the facts!

Poly is the future!

But we still obstinately stick to this view of it 😁

Or, as W.H. Auden put it:

To the man-in-the-street,

Who, I'm sorry to say

Is a keen observer of life,

The word ''Intellectual''

Suggests straight away

A man who's untrue to his wife.

refusing gets the lecture on compersion

I remember once talking to a woman at a (non-EA) conference whose big fetish was basically her partners having sex with other people. She was a bright, attractive, and charming young woman, but her self-esteem was painfully low.

That's the cuckold fetish, isn't it? Women can have it too. I think there's a lot of old stuff that gets dressed up with new names. For those who can make it work, good luck, but my impression is that it's a young person's notion and eventually they'll either partner up and marry/pick one person as their main partner, or it'll be well-off/high status older guys with a set of younger female partners (but that's totally not the same thing as mistresses or a harem or whatever that people did before the new enlightened days).

Thank you for linking that page on compersion, I got a great laugh out of that.

Oh man, I had to look up the Kerista Group who coined the term "compersion" as mentioned in that article, and dear oh dear. I think "cult" is the kindest word I can find. It started up in 1956 and lasted until 1991, which is pretty impressive, but it wasn't all free love and frolicking through the daisies by any means:

Kerista was founded by John Presmont after an auditory hallucination telling him that he was the founder of the next great religion of the world. After time spent in New York in the 1950s, and several island experiments in Dominica, Honduras, and Belize in the 1960s, Jud settled in San Francisco at the end of the 1960s

(Always Honduras! Same with Prospéra and for probably the same reasons: loose government regulations/amenable to bribery so you can set up and do what you damn well like so long as you grease the right palms).

From 1971 until 1991, the community was centered at the Kerista Commune (not a single physical building), founded in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, California. The Keristans maintained a very high profile that included publication of a popular free newspaper and several national media appearances.

Entrance to the commune was extremely selective. Potential members were expected to attend the Growth Coop for several months, interact with other Keristans at potluck volleyball and during newspaper distribution, and socialize with various BFIC families. This intense mutual-selection process included months of transitional celibacy. Starting in Fall 1986, it included screening for AIDS/HIV before joining a sleeping schedule. By 1987 there was no celibacy period, but three months of transitional safer sex and quarterly HIV testing for the duration. A more controversial policy was men being required to undergo a vasectomy in order to join. That policy was overturned a year before the New Tribe ended.

Being 'unresolved-on-the-lifestyle', even momentarily or temporarily, warranted immediate gestalt and possible expulsion from the family or commune. Practically, a member could be "called out" on any standards violation or non-utopian thought or action by anyone at any time.

And the techie element was strong with this one, and naturally they went for Apple:

The Keristans shared income and could choose whether to have outside paying jobs or work within the community (which operated several businesses, a legally incorporated church, and an educational non-profit organization).

The most successful of the businesses was Abacus, Inc., an early Macintosh computer vendor in San Francisco, which eventually offered a variety of computer hardware, training, and services. At its height, Abacus had over 250 employees, offices in five cities, and revenues in excess of $25 million a year. It was voted the 33rd and 42nd fastest-growing privately held company in America by Inc. Magazine in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and was the top reseller of Macintosh computers in the Bay Area in 1991.

Is this sounding like a cult yet? Because it's sounding sort of like a cult to me.

In 1979 and 1980, two children were born in the community. Beginning in 1983, the adult male Keristans underwent vasectomies to deal with birth control and address global population issues. All male members subsequently had the requirement of having a vasectomy within a set period of time after joining the community.

The family structure of Kerista was composed of fidelitous groups called B-FICs (Best-Friend Identity Clusters). Keristans practiced non-preferential polyfidelity, which required consensus to accept a new person into the group.

Non-preferentiality was an important concept of Keristan polyfidelity, and had lofty goals but was more intended to keep people from coupling up. Keristans had a transitional celibacy period after joining a group of three months, sometimes waived.

A single B-FIC was composed of men and women who rotated sleeping with all of the opposite-sex members on a balanced rotational sleeping schedule. The sleeping schedule assigned each family member to sleep with a different opposite-sex partner each night. Since the BFICs were rarely balanced between men and women (typically more women than men), on any given night several family-members would have no partner to sleep with and were assigned a 'Zero-Night' when they slept alone. In addition to the programmed sleeping schedule, it was permitted to sleep with any opposite-sex family member at any time, which was termed a 'freebie'.

Oh yeah, way better than boring old monogamy and all its jealousy and conditions and restrictions on sexual and emotional freedom! 😁

I wonder how many other trendy terms or ideas have histories like this, if you actually go digging into their backstories. Somehow the sex/gender split in modern English has been laundered from its origins with John Money and his uh... unorthodox practices, and nobody remembers that the trans pride flag was invented by a man who stole his female colleagues' underwear and wrote stories about an adult man marrying a teen girl who doesn't age.

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