A Description Of Effective Altruist Dating Norms That May Relate To Sexual Harassment

A description of things that are happening so people can debate them in a more informed fashion.

I have given up on finding a sensitive and relevant picture for this post. Have a kitten.

In the wake of the Time magazine article about sexual harassment in effective altruism, there has been a community-wide discussion about how much sexual harassment there is in effective altruism, which norms encourage sexual harassment, how we can combat it, and whether it is all caused by people being polyamorous.

In this discussion, I observe a lot of people rounding off the issues to the nearest legible problem. The thorny issues of power dynamics and conflicts of interest in effective altruism become “don’t have sex with your coworkers” and “polyamory: pro or con?” These discussions are less complicated, but they also fail to address the real problems. I note that Owen Cotton-Barrett, the highest-profile sexual harasser in effective altruism, didn’t sexually harass a coworker and was monogamous the entire time.

In this post, I’m trying to be as neutral as possible. I’m not neutral, of course. I think some of these dynamics are good on net; others, I think are bad on net; still others, I’m conflicted about. But I think this post will be the most useful for everyone if I try to describe what I see without getting my opinions into it.

I have a limited perspective. I have only lived in the Bay Area, not in any other effective altruism hubs. My social group is disproportionately polyamorous and queer. They tend to prioritize existential risk, especially from artificial intelligence. It’s always difficult to separate “effective altruists do X” from “me and my six friends do X.” I have asked a few friends to look it over and point out errors, but my perspective is limited. I welcome new insights from my readers.

Conflict of Interest Hell

Many, perhaps most, effective altruists want to be friends with other effective altruists.

There are many reasons for this. Effective altruists might be particularly likely to have traits someone values: altruism, anti-authoritarianism, agency, and that’s just the A’s. Some people want friends who have context on the things they spend all their time obsessing about. Some people are worried about not living up to their moral values and want friends who will push them to their best (and who agree on what “their best” is). Some people just want to get dinner at a place that has vegetarian food other than a salad without it being a huge fight.

Effective altruists have also put an unusual amount of effort into creating a community. Some of the effort is institutional.¹ But I think the most important effort is individual. I’m writing this on the couch at the microschool my son attends, which was founded by effective altruists.² I know people who host weekly dinner parties or game nights, let near-strangers crash on their couches, or buy houses next to their friends. Pretty often, at least some of their movation is "I want to live in a real community, not just a loose network of friends. A community where people know each other and take care of each other.”

And, you know, it’s often worked pretty well.³

I think a lot of what people are talking about when they talk about “pressure to be poly” is actually pressure to be part of the effective altruist community. A lot of effective altruists are poly, of course. But it’s not just about sex and romance. It’s about sex and romance and cohabitating and very emotionally intimate platonic friendships and doing hobbies together and your children being friends and your relationship with an acquaintance who spent a thousand dollars buying you a computer that one time and and and

There’s a reason I called this section “conflict of interest hell.” You live with your direct report and you’re thinking about how he never cleans his fucking beard hairs out of the sink while you’re supposed to be giving him feedback on his programming. You’re trying to decide whether to work at an organization, and it’s really complicating your Puella Magi Madoka Magica rewatch with a member of their leadership team. A lot of people think that everyone being monogamous would improve conflict-of-interest hell, but I’m not sure that’s really true. Is “my grantmaker is my metamour” actually more of a conflict of interest than “my grantmaker plays D&D for five hours every week with my best friend of ten years,” or is it just more legibly so?

Being part of the effective altruist community makes it much easier to get jobs at effective altruist organizations. I don’t think there’s any kind of malicious nepotism here: people sincerely want to hire the best person for the job. But Alice hears that her friend is looking to hire and says “you should definitely take a look at Bob, I know his resume’s all over the place, but I know him and he’d be a perfect fit for the position.” Carol is struggling with the deep learning textbook she’s working through, but fortunately her friend David is happy to tutor her for free. Eve asks her friend Frank to beta-read her research, and Frank is so impressed he tells all his friends they have to read it. And of course it’s hard to overestimate the value of just being up to date on the latest conversations happening in the effective altruist community.

All communities have particular social norms that fit some people well and other people poorly. Normally, that isn’t a problem—the people who don’t fit in with one community can just find a different one. But people really really want jobs at effective altruist organizations. Of course they do: jobs at effective altruism organizations are well-paid and high status, and many people believe they’re the best way to improve the world.

Therefore, effective altruist jobs are very competitive. And it’s obvious that you can improve your odds by becoming a community member—especially if your resume is, shall we say, a bit strange. So for a lot of people it’s very important to join the effective altruist community, whether or not the community’s norms are actually a particularly good fit for their personalities.

Sexual Openness

Until relatively recently, effective altruism drew primarily from intelligent but very strange Internet people who spend a lot of time reading blogs about philosophy and/or weird fanfiction, and then moved to San Francisco. In recent years, effective altruism has started reaching out to high-achieving college students with excellent resumes who attend Ivy League schools or Oxbridge.

These two groups have, uh, different norms. It’s expected that we’re experiencing a little friction.

The difference most relevant to sexual harassment is openness about sexuality. For strange Internet people who read fanfiction and live in San Francisco, many ways of talking about sex are both socially acceptable in many contexts and not necessarily hitting on the person you’re talking to:

• “I have this weird sexual dysfunction, does anyone else have it and know what I should do about it?”

• “I’m especially attracted to werewolves.”

• “You should read my favorite fanfiction! About a fifth of it is BDSM porn.”

• “I can’t believe that the Erogamer stopped updating.”

• “Let’s play Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe this weekend!”

• “You should talk to Janice, she knows a lot about self-suspension, maybe she can show you the ropes.”⁴

• “Discussion of AI risk is banned at orgies.”

• [warning: link is NSFW] “Are you going to Folsom this year? Can we meet up?”

These are, as I understand it, less often considered appropriate conversation topics among high-achieving college students who aren’t weird Internet people.

Neither of these sets of norms is wrong, to be clear. The weird Internet people have their own norms about what qualifies as sexual harassment. They have the same range of responses to sexual harassment as every other group. They know that you shouldn’t have these conversations in front of people who would be made uncomfortable. There are some conversation topics that are off-limits. And, of course, the debate about whether people who like vampires truly count as monsterfuckers⁵ should be held after work.

But on non-weird-Internet-person norms a lot of these conversations are not just sexual harassment. They’re violations of social norms that you don’t have a script for. You know how to respond if your coworker asks you out and you’d rather she not—but how do you respond if the group you’re part of at a party starts avidly discussing the Erogamer? This isn’t part of your script of things that people do. The rules are shifting under your feet. Someone who’s predatory in a way you understand is one thing, but someone who breaks the rules in ways you don’t understand is quite another. You have no sense of what other kind of things they might do.

I also think weird Internet person norms are poorly adapted to situations with power dynamics larger than “Discord server mod”, “Big Name Fan”, or “guy who organizes really cool parties”—because those were all the power dynamics that existed in the context in which they evolved. I think it’s possible to change the norms to be more sensitive to power dynamics, but weird Internet people are very different stages in the transition.

Problematic Relationships

Some effective altruists wind up in romantic relationships with quite large age gaps (where both parties are adults) or where one person is much more successful and central in the community than the other.

Many younger or less powerful people are genuinely attracted to older or more powerful people. Successful researchers, charity founders, or bloggers are cool, and being attracted to cool people is the human condition. If your partner has a lot of friends, that can make you feel more connected in the community; you can piggyback off them to get friends of your own. Older people have more life experience: they’ve had more time to read good books they can recommend to you and find good restaurants they can take you to; they can give you advice on your romantic problems and unclogging your toilet. In a monogamous relationship, it matters that you’re not at the same life stage, but that matters less in secondary relationships.

The other way around isn’t necessarily predatory either. For one thing, sometimes there are genuine misunderstandings. Effective altruists tend to give people respect and responsibilities based on their competence, not based on their age. A number of quite young people are doing very well at important jobs. Many others are getting the esteem they deserve for their intellectual contributions without people dismissing them for being young. This means that it’s very possible to assume from how other people treat someone that they’re, you know, in your general age range, and only discover differently on the fourth date when they mention not remembering 9/11.

There are more non-powerful people than powerful people, so powerful people are going to mostly date non-powerful people just by the numbers. Non-powerful people often have more free time and are less stressed, which makes it easier to fit in a relationship around your demanding work schedule. And… it feels a bit weird to explicitly say this, but younger and less successful people are often really neat people? It’s not like your coolness grows in when you’re 25, or like the effective altruism community has an infallible Coolness Indicator.

However, these relationships can often wind up unhealthy, if not abusive. Of course, there are the normal ways any such relationship can turn bad, which I don’t think I need to outline in detail. Sadly, people can identify as effective altruists and still be thoughtless or predatory.

There are, however, two situations I’d like to describe more specifically.

First, some people see dating more established effective altruists as their ticket to get into the community. Let’s say Ivan, a new effective altruist, is considering dating Heidi, who is more established. Heidi can get Ivan invites to cool parties that not everyone gets invited to. He can hang out at her house, where the interesting and high-status people hang out and have neat conversations. She can introduce him to people, and those people will maybe date him or give him jobs or invite him to parties. It’s not that Ivan doesn’t want to date Heidi, necessarily. It’s that “opens these doors for me” is in the “pros” column, and they might not be as interested in their partner if their partner had a different social position.

These relationships often work out well and end with the Ivan securely ensconced in his own, independent social group. But they can go bad. If Ivan’s and Heidi’s relationship is unhealthy, Ivan might hesitate to end it because he’s afraid that if they break up all of his other friendships will evaporate. If Heidi is predatory, she might imply or even explicitly state that his community membership is reliant on dating her.

Second, conflict of interest hell makes handling sexual harassment difficult. In an atomized individualist society, if someone you’re not working with sexually harasses you, you just stop talking to them. In the effective altruist community, this is… significantly harder. If you’re lucky you just run into them at social events and in Discord servers. If you’re unlucky, they live with your best friend or they want to have a one-on-one with you at EA Global.

Some people experience pressure (internal or external) to just shrug it off, so that they don’t create drama, make cool people they want to impress think that they’re making a big deal about nothing, or make their friends have to pick sides. Even if you trust your friends to take sexual harassment seriously, a proportionate response can be difficult to obtain. “X misread my signals when they were flirting with me in a way I found uncomfortable” can ricochet around the gossip network to become “X sexually assaulted someone.” Even if stories don’t get exaggerated in the retelling, sometimes it seems like there’s no middle ground between “nothing” and “complete social ostracism”—which makes it difficult if you are unhappy with how someone treated you but don’t want them expelled.

Lack of Scripts For Polyamory

For many people, the effective altruist community is the first time they’ve ever met a poly person, much less dated polyamorously. Our mononormative culture doesn’t have scripts for polyamory. And the advice books are mostly, uh, bad.

This leads to two problems. First, a lot of people aren’t really prepared for what polyamory actually is, and they can feel taken advantage of. They might intellectually be aware that their partner is seeing other people, but they might feel startled or unprepared about having to schedule their dates around their partner’s other dates, seeing their partner do PDA with others, or similar. Many people subconsciously expect their relationships to climb the relationship escalator and feel mistreated when that isn’t the case. Effective altruists’ explicit communication norms don’t help as much as you’d think: even people who in theory have agreed to a particular shape of relationship can carry implicit expectations they’re not quite aware of; “the state of our relationship is explicitly negotiated” is itself a script that isn’t widely shared.

Second, people who are predatory or merely bad partners can easily take advantage. We have a general sense that it’s bad news if someone demands all your passwords, refuses to let you have friends of the same gender, or makes you have sex with them when you don’t want to and then says “that’s just how monogamy is!” But people who haven’t been poly—quite naturally—don’t have that same sense for polyamory. Some people emotionally neglect their partners, or play their partners off against each other, or break commitments, or get offended when their partners make reasonable requests—and some of them will say “that’s just how polyamory is! You’re jealous, you should work on yourself.”

Gender Ratios

Honestly, the effective altruism community seems weirdly not messed up given a 70/30 gender ratio where a bunch of the women are lesbians. People have problems dating, but in the normal way attributable to the human condition. Some of it, of course, is that a lot of effective altruist men are bi. I also think polyamory is helpful here. A single extroverted woman can easily date three men who are only dating her. While her two secondary partners would probably prefer to have a primary, a secondary relationship 80/20s it, especially if you don’t want children.

Effective Altruists Are Edgelords

Effective altruism attracts people who like thinking about counterintuitive, unpopular ideas and then taking all their implications seriously. To a certain extent, that’s what effective altruism is.

It’s difficult to turn off this habit of mind once you’re done reading philosophy papers. So, naturally, some effective altruists wind up pondering the question of polyamory,. Some of them come up with opinions like “when we’re immortal transhumanist superbeings we’ll all be bi and poly” or “while of course I support people’s individual choice to be monogamous and I don’t know that it’s tractable to stop being jealous, from a god’s-eye view surely it’s much better to not be jealous so that your partners can experience more love and pleasure.”

It has been suggested that effective altruists should stop doing this sort of thing, but I feel doomy about any attempts to convince effective altruists that this one topic is one that you should stop biting tasty, tasty bullets about.

There also seems to be little appetite for the equal-and-opposite norm, which would forbid “polyamory leads to more conflicts of interest and sexual harassment” or “polyamory makes women feel unwelcome.”⁶

What relationship style you choose is an important life decision. It seems possible to me that we should have open discussion of this topic, and that both a one-sided and a two-sided censorship norm would stifle these conversations.

1. Retreats, conferences, local groups, weird rituals, castles…

2. They’re currently learning to play Magic: The Gathering. My son thinks this is great fun and has no idea it’s reading and math practice.

3. I can’t overstate my awe and gratitude about the patience and support I’ve had from my friends and community when dealing with my chronic illness.

4. At which point they’re hit in the face with a pillow.

5. No.

6. Both of these are noticeably much harsher criticisms of polyamory than any criticism I’ve seen of monogamy. I have never seen an effective altruist claim that monogamy is a patriarchal hangover from the time when men owned women, for example.