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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
assholestruth-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...
...
...
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:
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.
There's an idea that I've seen a lot in these kind of articles that I find quite odd. It's the idea that attempting to convince someone that they should date you (or otherwise change their sexual preference/behavior) is inherently wrong and abusive.
Note that what is absent from this anecdote is any sort of actual coercion. It seems that, "casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach," is interpreted as "shame" or "pressure". Now, I don't agree with that argument in favor of polyamory, but it's a perfectly valid argument one can make. If, as Gopalakrishnan and TIME seem to think, that no flirting or discussion of sexuality should be allowed at even informal gatherings, it begs the question, where and how should people try to meet partners? I'm not going to take the establishment media perspective on sexual ethics seriously until it answers that basic question.
I believe their answer to ‘how should people meet partners’ is ‘at contexts specifically designed for that’, by which they mean nightclubs, dating apps, that sort of thing.
The fact that this idea has obvious drawbacks doesn’t mean they don’t have one.
And, tbh, ‘attempting to convince women to change their boundaries and entire lifestyle in order to sleep with you’ is maybe not the sort of thing that should be illegal, but it’s a very central example of the sort of thing that should come with the label of ‘pushy and kind of a creep’.
I mean, that's kind of what dating/flirting is. Going from single to living together, having intimate emotional connections, having regular sex, starting a family together, ect. is very much a radical change in boundaries and lifestyle. There's no polite way to ask for that which is compliant with any standard HR policy. Yet it is a bedrock assumption of our social policy that you can just put men and women in the same society and they will spontaneously rearrange themselves from "single" to "married"(or whatever the PC equivalent with minor variations is).
But this is in the context of polyamory. It's not Guy A flirting with Girl B and wanting to date and maybe have a relationship in the conventional sense, it's Guy A wanting to date and maybe have a relationship within the context of "oh and I'm poly and in a relationship with three other people".
If Girl B is not interested in being a side-piece, keeping on insisting that poly is the superior rationalist thing instead of monogamy which is yucky is creepy. Guys A, C and D may well have believed that they could present the Superior Rationalist argument for poly and have Girl B be immediately convinced because she too is a rationalist, but it's entirely possible for Girl B to go "Yes, your argument is good but I still prefer monogamy so I'm not going to join your polycule".
And if Girl B has to have the same song-and-dance with guys C and D after guy A, can you see why she finds it more and more like some kind of creepy cult rather than "I thought we were here to discuss ways of helping the world?"
This is probably the right analysis in regards to polyamory in 99% of normal situations. The curveball is that this is an effective altruism event, and the whole point of effective altruism is to apply rationality and scientific argument to charity in order to maximize happiness and minimize suffering.
So some guy comes along and says, "You know what generates a lot of happiness? sex. Yet most people don't have nearly as much sex as they could be having. If more people were poly and didn't let jealousy or embarrassment get in the way of having more sex, then there would be much more happiness in the world." This is a very basic utilitarian argument. The kind of argument that EA is full of.
Now, our heroine has three options here. She can:
Accept the argument, become poly, and have easy sex.
Have a principled consequentialist reason why the above argument isn't valid, or at the very least does not apply to her.
Say, "Yes, your argument is good but I still prefer monogamy so I'm not going to join your polycule".
Options 1 or 2 are acceptable. Option 3 simply doesn't fit in an EA framework. You're surrounded by people who dedicate their lives, pick jobs based on EA criteria, or become vegetarian even though they love eating meat, and yet you are admitting to selfishly leaving utility on the ground.
Frankly, the argument isn't that hard to refute. I'd argue that anyone that doesn't accept it who can't (or doesn't want to) refute it should not have any decision-making power at any EA organization at all. The bar needs to be higher than that.
Being nasty here, there's also Option 4:
"Yes, your argument is good, people don't have as much sex as they could be having, and if I were poly and didn't let jealousy or embarassment get in the way of having more sex then I would be happier. So I will now go and offer to be poly with that hot, rich, high-status guy over there, thanks for convincing me!"
If she ain't into you, bro, all the rational argument in the world won't convince her. As to leaving utility on the ground, the counter-argument is weighing up the utility, if any, of having sex with Polycule Guy versus not having sex with him and having it with someone else, and if the utility of "someone else" seems higher, then not joining his polycule is the right decision. Which is better: a quarter share in him or the whole of a different relationship? Is he that hot, clever, rich and high-status that being one of a harem is better than being the monogamous partner of someone else? Is sex that important to her that it does make her happier than some other activity? Would sex with Polycule Guy make her happier?
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"The happiness I gain from exclusivity far outweighs the happiness I gain from lots of crap sex."?
Because that's... all it is, isn't it?
I take it that's what he was getting at with the last paragraph, the one starting "Frankly, the argument isn't that hard to refute".
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Or just "You don't appeal to me sexually, and since your argument would equally apply to me having random sex with any person at all I met on the street, and I do not agree that would make me happier, then I reject your premises".
'yes more sex might make me happier but only if it's with someone I find attractive and I don't find you attractive' is, I think, the underlying reason and why the guys tried arguing her into being poly, because nobody wants to think they're not attractive.
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Isn't it valid to say "I get jealous and it makes me feel bad and I don't think it's something I need to work on. Thanks"?
No, because then you're opening yourself up to needling and further evangelising about why feeling jealousy is sub-optimal and blah blah blah.
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Rephrase option 3 as "Sorry, I'm narrowmantic." Now it sounds logical and scientific and pushing further would make you a bigot.
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