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Notes -
Update to @Quantumfreakonomics 's post about EA Drama downthread.
For context:
Basically, a major EA figure was outed as having sexually harassed at least five women, some he had plausible professional power over. The community health team in EA knew about it and essentially did nothing until the TIME article outed it.
Even now, he's getting the kid glove treatment - temporarily resigning and not taking on new mentorships, but continuing all his other duties. Realistically he'll probably still function as an informal board member.
In addition there have been two other major updates, and I cannot overstate the importance here. Both of the heads of the two biggest EA organizations, Holden Karnofsky at Open Philanthropy and Max Dalton at the Centre for Effective Altruism are stepping down. In Holden's case, temporarily to work on AI risk.
Max Dalton at CEA
Holden at Open Phil
If you haven't been following Effective Altruism this may just seem like another set of scandals - it's not. The past 6 months or so have been a constant barrage of issues, starting with SBF's massive fraud and the collapse of FTX, the issues with Nick Bostrom being outed as a racist/HBD enthusiast, the TIME article mentioned above, and finally both of these central figures resigning. There have been many more petty dramas playing out as well.
This is the crucible, the defining moment for Effective Altruism. Whether the movement lives or dies will likely be determined in the next year.
Whoever takes over the reigns of the movement, it's clear that shifts are happening and power is up for grabs. With AGI likely around the corner, this realignment of power in the EA sphere has the potential to determine the singleton who controls the future.
Expect a bloodbath either way.
Is the whole point of Effective Altruism to be a place for nerds to meet women? I’ll be honest, I never really “got” EA, but once I applied the “rationalist nerd dating scene” lens, everything suddenly made sense. No one actually cares about the mental wellbeing of shrimp. It’s just an excuse to show girls how nice and empathetic and smart and well-connected you are. The tone of this comments section is very much, “you’ll have to pry the polyamory from my cold dead hands.” Empirically, I see lots and lots of married couples and casual sex, but very little global improvement. By their fruits you shall know them etc.
Yeh probably. No reason for polyamory to be a thing for EA at all.
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I think it's the other way round. EA arose out of the "dating for nerds" culture, and that's the problem they've now run into. The cultural assumptions are still those of the nerd-dating scene, but the movement itself is now moving towards being a mainstream academic/philosophical/charitable foundation entity, and is adjusting to the cultural assumptions of those scenes. Hence the problems with "Oh hi, new member? Would you like to meet the rest of my polycule? We're open to taking on a new partner right now!" approach at conferences, which was perfectly fine when it was all the Bay Area kids (or people who moved to the Bay Area because they heard about the whole scene and wanted to be part of it, like the gays moving to San Francisco to be part of the scene there) but isn't workable in today's "I went to Oxford to do a degree in PPE and then upon graduation get a job in an NGO" environment, which is increasingly the one they're operating in.
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If it is, I missed the memo. I've been donating to EA charities for years, and haven't been involved in the movement proper.
I think your way of phrasing it is a bit too cynical and direct in any case. The two places people are most likely to meet their partner offline are work and school, right? Well, movement EA is a job for a lot of people involved, so it's not surprising if a lot of people also keep an eye out for datable prospects there as well.
Think about ballroom dancing classes. I remember an old Reddit thread where a very shy guy talked about using ballroom dancing as a way to get more comfortable around women, and not be so worried about the touch barrier. But for every introverted guy very consciously using ballroom dancing as a tool to get more comfortable socializing, there's probably dozens of people who have a more ambiguous mix of reasons they like ballroom dancing. It would be overly simplistic to read that guy's account and say, "Is the whole point of ballroom dancing for nerds to meet women?" Sure, that's one of the reasons people go - but for most people their reasons for going are probably an ineffable mix of psychological pushes and pulls that average out to the decision to go. Sexuality is just one factor, even if a major one, but some people do just like dancing for the sake of it.
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Replying to myself with a literal shower thought: From first principles, you wouldn't expect the existential risk/AI people to be in the same movement as the animal welfare/bednets people, but you would expect the existential risk/AI people to have more tech billionaire funding, and you would expect the animal welfare/bednets people to have a higher proportion of women. Putting them in the same movement allows the AI people to get dates from the bednets people, and gives the bednets people access to tech billionaire funding. Aesthetically, such an arrangement seems deformed and ugly, but it could plausibly be mutually beneficial to the causes themselves as well as the people within them. The AI funding lost to bednets and animal welfare could easily be made up for if working on AI alignment provided a much easier way to get sex/dates/married than a higher-paid job in AI capabilities, allowing the field to attract better talent than it would even if all of the available EA funding went to alignment.
I'm not sure I agree. The first principals of EA are more or less utilitarianism, and the thing uniting the EA grab bag of areas of concern is that they have high potential to affect overall utility of humans and other beings capable of suffering.
I also think that, for all the attention it gets, the existential risk/AI part is just a loud but marginal part of EA. Most people associated with EA donate to the more tangible "bednets to prevent malaria" or animal welfare stuff, and not the more esoteric causes, if I remember polling from a while back.
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Based on many of the frothing defendants of polyamory on the EA forum - seems like that is a major driver. Check out this comment where a relatively connected EA directly says:
This dude got a grant for tens of thousands of dollars to write a fantasy book for EA. Go figure.
I have been involved in EA for a while outside of the Bay Area / UK sections, and damn I had no idea the rot went this deep. It's wild to see these poly folks mask off.
To be honest, that guy just sounds like a .... guy. "I'm more inclined to go to events where there is the possibility of hot chicks who want to bang me" isn't confined to polyamorists or EA or rationalists. 😁
Quick look at his fantasy novels, they look awful. If this is how they want to waste their money, even as an avid reader I'd tell them "Look. Everybody wants to be the next Tolkien or Martin (even Martin) or Rowling. Very few will do it. Your generic fantasy novel with a preachy message is out there competing with hundreds of the same. Unless you have a major publishing company willing to push you with all the marketing power at their disposal, you are going nowhere. You'll get the same benefit of that money by making a bonfire of it, if this is how you spend it".
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So what exactly is the problem here? He says that he is motivated to engage socially by opportunities to get laid (which I suspect is true for many people, even as it is generally considered very antisocial to admit), and arguing that a community is strengthened by providing the opportunity (which is hardly a new or outlandish viewpoint; trads say basically as much about trad church-centered communities too). This does not imply that it is the point; both positions are consistent with the point of EA, and even most people in it, being exactly what it is claimed to be.
What does the "frothing" add here, apart from conveying your own anger (which you could have done in more detached terms) and aggrieving any reader who might imagine themselves as being targeted by the description?
I'm at best neutral towards poly (and manifestly not pro-A, E or otherwise; I find globally-oriented altruism to be a deleterious meme that breeds moral imperialism and personal misery), but seeing them come under this sort of ostentatious attack just makes me want to make a show of donating some money, both in order to defend the ability of these people to live under a different set of norms and to penalize the attempt to shame them for it with vague "can you believe this?" pointing.
Your movement is in danger of collapse from MeToo style takedowns and very bad optics. I’m kind of amazed you can’t see the potential problems with a free-for-all sex mixed with workplace business atmosphere.
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He shows up to a meet-up. A young Indian woman interested in EA also shows up. He invites her try out his polycule. She complains that this was creepy to a news publication.
"EA =creepers" gets further cemented in the general conscience. Anyone bothering to look into this will find statements from poly evangelists on EA groups.
Conventionally pretty Indian woman shows up at EA event, gets propositioned by weird guy with weird sexual practices. Complains. Why should anyone in EA care, given that they tend to be more aligned with the weird guy than the woman? The only thing they can do by taking that seriously is turn their movement over to the conventional people, and then where are they?
Optimistically a group more narrowly focused on mosquito nets and less focused on irrelevant off-putting poly evangelism and funding fantasy novels. There's mission creep and then there's this irrelevant stuff. Having boundaries can be desirable. Especially if you want to interact with new people who have boundaries. Such as young Indian women who will later complain to the media if their boundaries get pushed.
But more realistically not. The weird people get booted, and the shell of the organization no longer actually cares about mosquito nets or other EA stuff, it becomes more or less a social club for normies funding the same sort of normie things all the others do.
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I’ll be honest, it just gives me a sort of deep disgust reaction. I run a meetup myself and thinking of a dude showing up trying to get laid pisses me off.
I also think that EA is at risk of being destroyed by cultural tides of wokeism, and behavior like this is why. It’s 70% male, and many high status males are constantly looking to sleep with any woman in the community. Creates awful social dynamics.
Wokism has an easier time destroying those who are in some way ashamed of men looking to sleep with women, because they don't fight back.
Yeah that’s a hell of a look for a movement “our community lets it’s men paw at any pretty girl working as a secretary, what of it?”
Yeah, good luck with that defence, just fight back!
The context here is a meetup, not an employer. And the complaint is about propositions, not pawing. What kind of "community" forbids romantic and sexual entanglements between its members? Monasteries and nunneries?
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I suspect there's a nonzero amount of women who are ok with that as long as there's no assault. If every individual legal entity has 14 or less employees they'll be fine.*
* Probably doesn't apply in like, California, but no way I'm looking up state sexual harassment laws
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A great deal of things that dudes in their 20s do, consciously or unconsciously, are about getting laid. Whether you want a culture where members of the meet up is acceptable or frowned upon depends on what you're aiming for, but I think there are a number of cases, e.g recruiting more casual members, where you'd want it to be acceptable.
While this is not untrue, thinking of it like it is either acceptable or frowned upon sounds a bit too binary. What they should strive for is an environment where as far as cultural expectations of romantic and sexual shenanigans go, what happens (if it happens) is classy. The memetic "be attractive, don't be unattractive" is surprisingly apt if you add in a time dimension, too: "as far as anyone is concerned, you continue to be attractive and remain not unattractive afterwards, too".
Should EA take in to account the "dudes in their 20s consciously or subconsciously" effect or take advantage of it for recruitment and yet keep their eyes on the nominal target (longtermism and other grand causes), they should develop adequate cultural antibodies. Dudes who make attempts at romance need to those who can dance successfully, that those who can't, do not. Those who dance, should dance in a way that mitigates the reputational risk.
There are also the practical adaptations: Do not admit that it is a factor, nor do not create a situation where people would have to notice it is a factor, at least not any more than in any other high status well-respected professional endeavor. Doing one thing while not admitting doing it to avoid not-spoken thing to become too prominent is not maybe 101 level social skills, more like 201 or 301, but a successful organization may need to operate above the 101 level.
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I consider myself EA adjacent. Ethically, I've considered myself a utilitarian/consequentialist for more than a decade now, and when I discovered EA it slotted in very nicely as a tangible addition to my practice.
(I used to be a classical utilitarian, but now I'm closer to a eudaimonic motive/habit utilitarian. I think we should evaluate our own motives and habits based on their tendency to increase the number of individuals who achieve eudaimonia in society and decrease the number of meaningless lives of unnecessary suffering and toil, and that we should generally try to cultivate a moral character with as many good motives and habits as possible. It's a consequentialist form of virtue ethics, but I am happy enough to fall back onto classical utilitarian reasoning to inform my decisions.)
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I like the philosophy but I'm not part of the movement, nor do I really like it, so I don't think I count. That's part of the issue with their "community"--there are lots of strong benefits to having a tight-knit community, but go too far and you will also exclude plenty of people who would otherwise have been willing to contribute. I want to help with the whole "help lots of people thing" without helping with the whole "have sex with lots of people" thing.
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It’s a lonely time being an EA on the Motte. That being said there are definitely a few others, I’ve seen at least five people directly or indirectly out themselves.
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The problem is that the entire point of EA is to stop making decisions using base human impulses and think for a second or two about what's actually going to do the most good. Hence bednets, hence deworming, hence "I care about the suffering of shrimp", hence "annihilate all existence so there's no possibility of suffering", etc. This is a movement that via memes such as "80,000 hours", "the giving what we can pledge", and "earning to give" asks people to redirect nontrivial chunks of their lifetime earning capacity, which those people could have instead used to improve their own lives, or the lives of their families, friends and local communities.
Any redirection of the movement away from this mission is waste by its own definition. That its elites have decided to screw around with polyamory instead of doing the maximally-effective thing in the world reminds me more of a new-age religious sex cult than a movement genuinely interested in improving the world.
Needs a website not a movement. And maybe stop before the annihilate everybody bit.
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Yeah, but ordinary people can see the benefit of bednets or deworming programmes, while worrying about the mental agonies of the shrimp equivalent of Camus is too out there.
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I'm not sure the two are as in tension as you say here.
You need psychological levers to get people to do things. If a poly EA makes himself more datable by supporting the mission of the organization, then isn't that a good thing for the mission?
It's a bit unsurprising to me that humans are not 100% rational utility-maximizers. Of course we didn't evolve that way, so at best you're throwing the goals of utility maximization on top of a bunch of pre-programmed survival and reproduction protocols.
Maybe it's a little sad if EA doesn't function on the backs of enlightened utilitarian saints, but if it's fulfilling its mission, getting money and resources where they need to go on the backs of nerdy, horny guys trying to show how virtuous they are, I don't actually see that as a dramatic take down of the movement. Many people in this thread seem to have a weird assumption that if people are trying to get laid, the actual work isn't getting done, but if the social structure is based around showing proof or good work, conscientiousness and lives saved/changed then I don't see how the two goals are in tension at all. Guys do good, get laid, and everyone is happy, right?
The only problem is the optics at that point.
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There is a certain irony in "deny base human impulses: apply rationality" quickly falling into "have as much sex as possible," which is probably the most base human impulse. But then again I've long recommended that actions be constantly scrutinized against lofty, if laudable, mission statements. Individual humans, even in groups, are quite fallible creatures, which is something that I respect religion for recognizing: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
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As Eric Cartman put it in a slightly different context: "Hippies! They're everywhere! They wanna save Earth, but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad."
Hippies, at least, had no problem endorsing sex. Even heterosexual sex. With people who smell bad and perhaps weren't in the best physical condition.
Ironically, I suppose Charles Manson would be a dark example of someone who lured followers of a cause in with the promise of sex and then managed to leverage them towards a non-sex goal. Maybe it's not such a bad thing that EA ended up being the opposite.
SBF needs to get a peace sign tattooed on the back of his head in prison, for symmetry.
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Is it bad if I’m kind of on their side? Technological progress, left-wing feminism, and right-wing Puritanism all coming together to destroy what little authentic social interaction we have left, and they’re the only ones fighting back.
I’m reminded of Jordan Peterson Vice interview where the interview is just aghast when he questions whether men and women can actually work together in a shared environment. He’s looking more and more correct by the day. Maybe we can’t.
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Interesting take. I'm sympathetic to both sides tbh. It's definitely a fraught situation!
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