Consent Isn't Always Enough

EA is my community, most of my friends are in EA, and it is so much fun. But if I had to choose between EA as "professional" or "fun," I would choose professional in a heart beat. What has brought us together is a commitment to doing good, and doing good in the world, not personal enjoyment, should be the guiding star for choices we make in regard to the EA community.

If a norm is important for a professional community to have, even if it means that community might end up being less fun for me, we should absolutely institute that norm.

If you take this as your point of departure, I think that’s worth highlighting that the boundaries between community and organizations can become very blurry in EA. Projects pop up all the time and innocuous situations might turn controversial over time. I think those examples with second-order partners of polyamorous relationships being (more or less directly) involved in funding decisions are a prime example. There is probably no intent or planning behind this but conflicts of interest are bound to arise if the community is tight knit and highly “interconnected”.

While I think that you have a good starting point for a discussion here, I would expect the whole situation to be not as clear cut and easy as your argument suggests. So, I really agree with the post that getting to a state most people are happy with will require some muddling through.

Somewhat related, I really liked these two posts:

• The Craft is Not The Community
• Community vs Network

I feel like there's also an ambiguity in the term "community" being used to both mean: 

• A relatively small and tightly knit social group of people in specific areas who know each-other in real life; 
• And a larger global community of people who are involved in EA to varying levels, but it doesn't make up the majority of their social life. 

A lot of the posts about EA community issues seems to be implicitly about the stereotypical "people who go to Bay Area house parties" community. Which is not representative of the wider community of people who might attend EA conferences, work/volunteer in EA orgs or donate. 

I think a power dynamic between grant-maker and grantee is quite different from the one which applies to university EA group leader and group's member.

I don't think that's fair as a general rule. EA group leaders have access to opportunities that they can deny to group members, such as recommending who attends paid retreats with EA funders, or who has leadership opportunities in coming years. They may not actually abuse the power, and I expect such abuse to be rare, even if subconscious bias is very likely - but either way, it's impossible for the group leaders to fairly evaluate the perception of other members or potential members. It's also probably not the right place to have 21 year old students make judgement calls.

So what should the rules be? Banning relationships?  Requiring people to leave leadership positions? Disclosure? And before I answer, I want to ask how it feels for these to be proposed.

I think that the reflection is a critical issue. Because my answer is that any of these would go much too far. I suspect that simply adding a few cautions to handbooks and ensuring that everyone has access to an external ombudsman to register concerns would be enough. But I worry that instead of viewing it as a tradeoff,  where discussion of rules is warranted, and and instead of seeing relationships as a place where we need caution and norms, it's instead viewed from a lens of meddling versus personal freedom, and  so it feels unreasonable to have any rules about what consenting adults should do. But that lens seems far worse for community health than openly acknowledging that consent is only one part of the question.

I think so, specifically related to this point from the OP (but would be interested to hear if people don't really think there's any COI in either of these cases):

Consider a case of someone whose job it is to direct funding for a foundation sleeping with one of the people who runs an organization they might recommend funding. And let's further imagine that the grantmaker and grantee both have a sophisticated understanding of power dynamics, great communication, solid introspection, strong self-confidence, and the best of intentions. Even then, this has corrosive effects on the community

 

See this comment and this comment (below- use rot13) from this post. 

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Thanks for your input! From my perspective as one of the people talking about "establishing norms," I can definitely do better to add nuance here.

As others have mentioned the issue is the blended lines between the professional roles and personal community is tough to navigate. I generally am in favor of classical liberal approaches to personal morality, but I do think that, as Jeff points out, these sorts of things can be other people's business in a professional setting.

Imagine you rely on an EA grant for your job/livelihood, or work at an EA organization. You work extremely hard but don't manage to get you grant renewed or get fired. Then you find out that someone else in a similar role slept with a grantmaker or a grantmaker's friend, and won the grant over you. 

How would that make you feel? Would you still feel it isn't your business?

People in the EA community can and should try to influence organizations when we think they could be doing better; we don't just consider it "their business" what they do. For example, StrongMinds should not be a top-rated charity (yet) was trying to convince GWWC to change an endorsement, and I've written some and myself. Approaches to interpersonal relationships have effects outside specific organizations, and individual organizations are often too small to put lots of time into carefully coming up with the ideal policies around these issues.

We do need to be careful not to flood organizations with nosy feedback, but if after talking on the Forum and elsewhere in the community it becomes clear that there's wide support for a norm I think it's pretty reasonable to try to make that case to organizations we think could benefit from it.

I still fail to see where the rest of us have standing to "establish norms" about this matter.

I took part of Jeff's point to be that other people are affected when, e.g., a grantmaker sleeps with a grantee. The fact that we're affected is what gives us standing to establish norms (and by "establish norms" we're talking "politely discuss" not "create a norm-enforcing militia").

 We'd have standing to establish norms even if we weren't part of a community; if the people renting the Airbnb next door throw a rager at 3am, I have standing to ask them to be quiet because their behavior affects me. When you add to this that EA is a social movement—a community of people working in concert with one another to achieve certain goals—we have even more standing (and arguably a responsibility) to help establish norms that facilitate the realization of these goals.