Suggestion: A workable romantic non-escalation policy for EA community builders

FWIW, I think this post makes progress and could work in the contexts of some groups. As a concrete example, it would probably work for me as an organiser of one-off courses, and probably for organisers of one-off retreats or internships.

I appreciate the thrust of comments pointing out imperfections in e.g. local group settings, but I just want to be careful that we don't throw out the proposal just because it doesn't work for everyone in all contexts; I think it's better to start with an an imperfect starting point and to iterate on that where it doesn't work in specific contexts, rather than to try to come up with the perfect policy in-theory and get paralysed when we can't achieve that.

Thanks for highlighting this!

When I think "community builder", I think of someone who's running an EA group longterm, potentially for years. I think this policy works for one-off events but how does it work for longterm community builders?

Attendees should focus on getting as much ea-related value as possible out of EA events, and we as organizers should focus on generating as much value as possible. Thinking about which hot community builder you can get with later distracts from that. And, thinking about which hot participant you can get with later on can lead to decisions way more costly than just lost opportunities to provide more value.

Strongly agree. Moreover, I think it's worth us all keeping in mind that the only real purpose of the EA community is to do the most good. An EA community in which members view, for example, EA Globals as facilitating afterparties at which to find hook ups, is an EA community which is likely to spend more {time, money, attention} on EAGs and other events than achieves the most good.

If the current resource level going toward EA community events does the most good,
I desire to believe that the current resource level going toward EA community events does the most good;
If less {time, money, attention} spent on EA community events does the most good,
I desire to believe that less {time, money, attention} spent on EA community events does the most good;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

I'm unclear on the proposal here. I've taken your bit in italics and adapted it to the EA context:

For three months after an EAG(x) or EA retreat, and for one month after an evening event, community organisers who organised the event, or speakers/organisers at the conference/retreat are prohibited from engaging romantically, or even hinting at engaging romantically, with attendees. The only exception is when a particular attendee and the facilitator already dated beforehand.

Is this what you had in mind? This would mean:

• If an organiser of a local community organises monthly events, they wouldn't be able to date any regular attendee of those events
• People who were organising an EAG in a low-key, not-visible way would be forbidden from dating an attendee, or we would need to define a bar for visibility
• Conference attendees are not prohibited from hitting on other attendees (at least not according to this specific rule)

Overall, I'd find it much easier to work out whether this is a useful proposal if I were clearer on what is being proposed.

Severin -- I think this might sound reasonable at first glance. However, it seems to be based on a model of human motivation that is very dubious, empirically false, and deeply sex-negative.

You claim that "Status is sexy. Predatorily-minded people know this. Thus, they are incentivized to climb the social EA ladder for the wrong reasons. If we set norms that make it harder for people to leverage their social status for romantic purposes, we can correct for this."

Well, you're right that signaling intelligence, creativity, wisdom, and moral virtues is sexually and romantically attractive. Indeed, what we evolutionary psychologists call 'mating effort' (investing in difficult, challenging behaviors to attract mates) seems to be a major driver of human innovation, insight, and moral progress. (I've spent the last 35 years of my academic  career studying this, and published 5 books on it.)

So, it's not just 'predatorily-minded people' who invest mating effort in giving good talks, writing good EA Forum posts, running podcasts, doing public outreach, offering helpful insights, doing social networking, refining their moral virtues, and defending against existential threats to their group. It is, to a first approximation, all of us. 

Is trying to be romantically attractive the "wrong reason" for doing excellent intellectual work, displaying genuine moral virtues, and being friendly at meetings? Well, if they're wrong, what would count as the "right reasons" for doing these things? Should we rely instead on careerism? Economic ambition? Intellectual vanity? Pure curiosity? A totally dispassionate, disinterested commitment to maximizing ultra-long-term cosmic sentient welfare? 

People generally do good stuff because they're motivated to get some kind of survival benefit or reproductive benefit from doing good stuff. Mating effort is one of the most powerful and effective motivations -- if it's harnessed in productive ways.

My concern is that if we sexually neuter all EA groups, meetings, and interactions, and sever the deep human motivational links between our mating effort and our intellectual and moral work, we'll be taking the wind out of EA's sails. We'll end up as lonely, dispirited incels rowing our little boats around in circles, afraid to reach out, afraid to fall in love.

Put another way, human intellectual and moral culture has already spent centuries figuring out effective ways to tame and channel our mate-seeking, status-seeking, and validation-seeking into positive-sum, socially-beneficial work -- rather than into zero-sum competition, aggression, and warfare. This is basically the story of civilization: sublimating our sexual motivations into doing work for the greater good. (This is one of those rare occasions when Sigmund Freud got something right.)

The social costs of overt sexual harassment, stalking, and coercion are obvious. So there's a temptation to clamp down on all sex and romance within any subculture that values mutual respect, consent, and professionalism. However, there may be hidden motivational costs and relationship costs to going too far in that sex-negative, romance-deterring directions.  

(Disclosure: I fell in love with my wife Diana Fleischman partly because we were both passionate about EA. I admired her work. She admired my work. If EA had been a more sex-negative, romance-negative subculture, we might not have formed a relationship, gotten married, or had our daughter. I would hate for other EAs not to be able to find like-minded mates within the EA community.)

Really good to see some concrete suggestions and experiences, thank you for sharing

Thanks for sharing this relevant experience from another community! I think there's probably something we can learn from this, though I'm less convinced about applying it directly.

In the AR community it seems to me like "facilitator" vs "attendee" is a good proxy for power differentials and the differential fades as time since the event passes. This seems much less applicable here: someone influential in a field (org leader, senior researcher, community builder, etc) in that people listen to their views on what work should be done, who is good, where funding should go, etc, has most of their influence/power independent of any specific event or interaction.

This seems most applicable to small intensive workshops: if A leads a weekend retreat for fifteen people then I think this rule is great. But if A speaks on a panel at a small session at a 1,000 person conference or is influential without any specific event, then I think we mostly need to handle this with different norms?

I like the suggestion of new mechanisms for handling this well (don't do X within Y time period). I don't know what the perfect answer is (and I'm not even sure it's worth our effort to find it, we could just use typical norms and get on with our work) but I think that if we do find something better it will be with nuanced solutions like this. 

Anyone got any other sophisticated solutions?

There are different concerns when it comes to Authentic Revolution and the EA community. Authentic Revolution hosts events where people become emotionally vulnerable which calls for rules that prevent that vulnerable state from being abused by people leading the events.

In the EA community, a lot of concerns about power abuse are about helping with professional connections. Waiting three months reduces the emotional impact of an Authentic Revolution event but it changes little about the power a person in a leadership role has to help a person to get a job at an EA org. 

I think there’s a distinction between people you meet at EA events and people you’ve already connected with outside. Otherwise, this could very easily become unworkable where you connect with people outside EA, you mention the you’re interested in EA and so they come to an event, then any dating momentum is broken because you’re not supposed to flirt with them for a while. If it happens enough, this could easily stifle someone’s dating life.

(It’s worth noting that AR events are a lot more intense than EA, where this policy might make more sense)

I'm confused about whether this is proposing "non escalation" or "non participation". From the body of the post I was guessing the latter ("facilitators are prohibited from engaging romantically, or even hinting at engaging romantically, with attendees"), but the title had the former?

If an attendee attempts to escalate with a facilitator is that allowed if the attendee makes all of the advances and the facilitator only responds by indicating whether those advances are welcome? Or does the facilitator reject the advances, perhaps citing the policy?

TLDR: Agree with the risks, unsure if it's better to restrict flirting for "x weeks" or for "however long there's a power dynamic and/or vulnerability etc"

Thanks for sharing! Good to be reminded that this is a risk in any community (especially communities with both personal and professional relationships) and that others may have thought more about this and found better solutions. 

This seems most risky in situations in which: 
- Alice is new to EA (still in the "orientation phase") and looking for jobs. 
- Bob is an experienced (paid or volunteer) EA group organiser, could help Alice professionally (knows people who might have jobs for Alice etc) and also finds Alice attractive. 

The risk seems to come from a perceived ^[1]or actual power dynamic, and this is exacerbated if one person is somehow "vulnerable", like when they're new to the community and don't yet know the norms, or do not yet feel comfortable expressing boundaries or reaching out to other community members to ask for advice or support. @Severin Would you agree? 

If that's the case, would it make sense to discourage/ban flirting not for x amount of weeks but for however long there's a (perceived or actual) power dynamic and/or "vulnerability"? This might then vary between one week (?) and forever. 
 

1. ^{^}

   Note that a perceived power difference is sufficient - if Alice thinks that Bob has the power to help or hinder her career (maybe because he mentioned he knows influential person x personally), that will make her hesitant to express boundaries when she receives unwanted attention from Bob, even if it's not actually true. 

This is an interesting idea and I'd be in favour of at least some version of it. 

A distinction I think about often is: who is initiating? Where there is a power dynamic, it seems more risky if the more powerful person initiates romance, and less risky if the less-powerful person does and the more-powerful one just reciprocates. So I might be in favour of versions of these rules which say 'the more-powerful person shouldn't initiate for X time (maybe never, in cases where the power relationship is particularly pronounced), but if the less-powerful person initiates, they may reciprocate'. 

There are some complications here: e.g., maybe it would encourage more-powerful people to kind of 'fish' for interest from the other. But still: 'this powerful person is into me and is sort-of flirting with me, but in a plausibly-deniable way I can ignore' seems a lot better than 'this powerful person asked me out and now I have to turn them down'. 

Fwiw, I don't viscerally feel like there's a strong power dynamic between me and my local community builders - or at least, no more than the dynamic between me and other people who have more general 'EA community status' than me (e.g., people who work at 80k). I don't think I'd find being hit on by a community builder massively fraught.  I'm not claiming that others should or do feel this way - just adding my data point. 

"prohibited from engaging romantically, or even hinting at engaging romantically"

is there a clear definition of romance in this context? my experience is, that there are many different ones out there...

Interesting idea. Any evidence/anecdotes on how (far) this rule has been endorsed, and how it has worked out in authentic relating community? 

Full disclosure, because without it, this post would be a bit phony: I haven't always followed this policy within EA or outside, and took just one or two weeks from first thinking it might be good to implement it in EA to writing this post.

In general, if I write about community dynamics, assume that I think about them this thoroughly not because I'm extraordinary virtuous and clear-sighted in regards to people stuff, but because I'm sometimes socially a bit clumsy and all these models and methods help me function at a level that just comes naturally to others. The question guiding my posts on community dynamics is generally something like: "What would I-from-ten-years-ago have needed to know to not make the same mistakes I did?"

Since writing this, I've done a bunch more debating and thinking about how to handle romantic attraction in communities I'm actively involved in responsibly. So, here's the rule I want to commit to from now on:

In any community I'm involved in, I won't be the one driving romantic escalation (or hinting at it) with anyone lower in the institutional hierarchy than me. This applies within 1 month after low-intensity interactions like a 90min workshop and 3 months after high-intensity interactions like a retreat where I was in a lead facilitator role.

Some specifications:

1. Both formal and informal hierarchies count. For example, attendees of workshops I facilitate pro bono or during unconferences still count as "lower in the hierarchy".

2. Responding to advances people lower in hierarchies make towards me is fine. (Unless other reasons make that seem unethical.)

3. Escalation can only happen if and only if the other person signals at least an obvious 6 on the Decide10 scale. I.e., a lack of proactiveness counts as a "no".

4. Galaxy brain slytherining a la "I'll just make friends for now and set things up so that they are more likely to propose to me later on." or "You knoooow, I committed to a certain rule because I'm SUCH an ethical person, so if you were to have interest in me, you'd have to be the one to make the first step *wink wink*" is prohibited.

5. I might adjust this rule over time as evidence accumulates, but only *after* consulting with people I trust in these matters.

6. I think a version of this might help us handle EA's gender imbalance better: It might be good if if heterosexual men in general would just accept/decline advances from women, and not proactively flirt themselves.