This is a neutral addition related to "Lack of Scripts for Polyamory".
I think because I approach it from a Queer perspective, my script has always been "find out if the person is polyamorous or polyamorous-interested before asking them out". Very similar to "find out if they are queer or queer-allied before flirting with them". So, reading stories in one of the articles about a polyamorous person trying to convince someone about polyamory while they were in the process of asking them out just really caught me off-guard.
I want to add the addendum, that the reason Queer people have that level of carefulness is because they are a marginalised group, and scared of the recipient of their flirting responding in a strongly-negative way. But, I am similarly scared of monogamous people responding in a strong negative fashion. (I understand why their protectors come up, but it doesn't mean their protectors do not scare me.)
I understand it to be somewhat controversial, but honestly my gut feeling has always been that polyamory falls under the queer umbrella, even 'straight' polyamory (much as a person somewhere on the aroace spectrum belongs under the umbrella even if whatever relationships they *do* have are het ones).
I'm not in the EA community, but from the outside this Time article looks like a blatant attempt to portray a fairly universal human problem as caused by the norms of the EA community. The article does bring this counterargument up a little, but I don't think it addresses it enough.
I believe that doing bad stuff is a human universal, that rationalizing bad stuff is a human universal, and that humans tend to draw on rationalizations from whatever culture they live in. If someone rationalizes bad behavior, will changing the culture they draw that rationalization from reduce bad behavior, or will it just change what rationalization they use? Other people seem to treat cultural disapproval as omnipotent and think that all problems, especially sex-related ones, will go away if culture condemns them hard enough. I am skeptical, to say the least.
This reminds me strongly of how the Bankman-Freid fiasco was treated as somehow discrediting of effective altruism, even though there isn't a large charity in existence that hasn't had people manage money poorly and/or unscrupulously. If having someone do that discredits a charity then all charity is discredited.
> These are, as I understand it, less often considered appropriate conversation topics among high-achieving college students who aren’t weird Internet people.
Extremely weird for me to read this given my East Coast Ivy League experience where these were all normal topic of conversation there, too. Granted perhaps I was also in a bubble there; but maybe it's more a generational thing. When I was in school 20 years ago I slept with professors; I gather this sort of thing is no longer acceptable.
"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."
Your analysis would be a lot more useful if you weren't so head-in-the-sand about the obvious fact that this is overwhelmingly a *biological female* phenomenon (with a solid evolutionary explanation), while the equally well-explained typical biological male phenomenon is to expend said coolness on opportunities to pair with youth.
Acknowledging that I'm far from this world in meatspace, I'm easily willing to believe that there's a substantial correlation in this direction, but it would take a whole lot more than self-report to overcome my strong prior that such a huge difference across humanity as a whole, with the very strong evolutionary explanation, wouldn't be negated in almost any community.
Effective altruist men are highly selected to be very unusual on a bunch of axes, and also I'm quite skeptical that the natural effect size is as large as you claim. But regardless I can only report the things that I see.
I'm not objecting to the main point of the post, with which I agree pretty strongly. I'm saying that acknowledging one of the strongest, most cross-culturally reliable and most easily causally explained results in evopsych is pretty relevant to the moral objectives in question, because it bears on how interventions might be usefully directed and which might be most likely to work.
Just chiming in to say that's also not at all my experience (I'm vaguely adjacent to EA but most of the people I know aren't EAs). I'd say there's an observable tendency for hormonally male people to be somewhat more focused on looks and less focused on other things (including coolness), but as usual, intra-sex differences swamp inter-sex ones.
"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."
This is a tangent, but the above doesn't apply to straight men right? AFAICT most of them care 80%+ about looks, 20%- about everything else.
I don't know about genpop averages but afaict the straight men in rat/EA spaces care about Cool People roughly as much as anyone else? Maybe they're much more likely to flirt with pretty girls but I wouldn't put that at 80%+ of what they care about?
If this were true, I'd expect a lot higher use of dating apps in one's area? If a straight man is prioritizing looks at a 4:1 ratio to everything else and is in a community with over twice as many men as women, intra-community dating is a *terrible* strategy, so it's confusing why so many people would do it unless they genuinely had strong preferences about a partner that were hard to satisfy in the pool of Tinder singles.
It might be because the *women* care about traits that are easier to credibly signal inside the community than on Tinder. Also, AFAIK dating apps also have more men than women.
There is definitely a contingent of straight men who are attracted to powerful, successful, cool women; my impression is that this may be more common among guys who are less conforming to traditional masculine gender roles.
This is a neutral addition related to "Lack of Scripts for Polyamory".
I think because I approach it from a Queer perspective, my script has always been "find out if the person is polyamorous or polyamorous-interested before asking them out". Very similar to "find out if they are queer or queer-allied before flirting with them". So, reading stories in one of the articles about a polyamorous person trying to convince someone about polyamory while they were in the process of asking them out just really caught me off-guard.
I want to add the addendum, that the reason Queer people have that level of carefulness is because they are a marginalised group, and scared of the recipient of their flirting responding in a strongly-negative way. But, I am similarly scared of monogamous people responding in a strong negative fashion. (I understand why their protectors come up, but it doesn't mean their protectors do not scare me.)
I understand it to be somewhat controversial, but honestly my gut feeling has always been that polyamory falls under the queer umbrella, even 'straight' polyamory (much as a person somewhere on the aroace spectrum belongs under the umbrella even if whatever relationships they *do* have are het ones).
I'm not in the EA community, but from the outside this Time article looks like a blatant attempt to portray a fairly universal human problem as caused by the norms of the EA community. The article does bring this counterargument up a little, but I don't think it addresses it enough.
I believe that doing bad stuff is a human universal, that rationalizing bad stuff is a human universal, and that humans tend to draw on rationalizations from whatever culture they live in. If someone rationalizes bad behavior, will changing the culture they draw that rationalization from reduce bad behavior, or will it just change what rationalization they use? Other people seem to treat cultural disapproval as omnipotent and think that all problems, especially sex-related ones, will go away if culture condemns them hard enough. I am skeptical, to say the least.
This reminds me strongly of how the Bankman-Freid fiasco was treated as somehow discrediting of effective altruism, even though there isn't a large charity in existence that hasn't had people manage money poorly and/or unscrupulously. If having someone do that discredits a charity then all charity is discredited.
> These are, as I understand it, less often considered appropriate conversation topics among high-achieving college students who aren’t weird Internet people.
Extremely weird for me to read this given my East Coast Ivy League experience where these were all normal topic of conversation there, too. Granted perhaps I was also in a bubble there; but maybe it's more a generational thing. When I was in school 20 years ago I slept with professors; I gather this sort of thing is no longer acceptable.
"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."
Your analysis would be a lot more useful if you weren't so head-in-the-sand about the obvious fact that this is overwhelmingly a *biological female* phenomenon (with a solid evolutionary explanation), while the equally well-explained typical biological male phenomenon is to expend said coolness on opportunities to pair with youth.
Maybe among normies but effective altruist men definitely like successful researchers, charity founders, and bloggers.
Acknowledging that I'm far from this world in meatspace, I'm easily willing to believe that there's a substantial correlation in this direction, but it would take a whole lot more than self-report to overcome my strong prior that such a huge difference across humanity as a whole, with the very strong evolutionary explanation, wouldn't be negated in almost any community.
Effective altruist men are highly selected to be very unusual on a bunch of axes, and also I'm quite skeptical that the natural effect size is as large as you claim. But regardless I can only report the things that I see.
How would this alter the relevant conclusions at all if true?
Because it's directly relevant to morally desirable egalitarian concerns?
I don't follow. Can you be more explicit? Whatever concerns you have in mind, it doesn't seem like they're the ones the post is discussing.
I'm not objecting to the main point of the post, with which I agree pretty strongly. I'm saying that acknowledging one of the strongest, most cross-culturally reliable and most easily causally explained results in evopsych is pretty relevant to the moral objectives in question, because it bears on how interventions might be usefully directed and which might be most likely to work.
Just chiming in to say that's also not at all my experience (I'm vaguely adjacent to EA but most of the people I know aren't EAs). I'd say there's an observable tendency for hormonally male people to be somewhat more focused on looks and less focused on other things (including coolness), but as usual, intra-sex differences swamp inter-sex ones.
"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."
This is a tangent, but the above doesn't apply to straight men right? AFAICT most of them care 80%+ about looks, 20%- about everything else.
I don't know about genpop averages but afaict the straight men in rat/EA spaces care about Cool People roughly as much as anyone else? Maybe they're much more likely to flirt with pretty girls but I wouldn't put that at 80%+ of what they care about?
Disagree here. Looks will attract a man's attention, but being cool will *keep* it.
Source: am a straight man
If this were true, I'd expect a lot higher use of dating apps in one's area? If a straight man is prioritizing looks at a 4:1 ratio to everything else and is in a community with over twice as many men as women, intra-community dating is a *terrible* strategy, so it's confusing why so many people would do it unless they genuinely had strong preferences about a partner that were hard to satisfy in the pool of Tinder singles.
It might be because the *women* care about traits that are easier to credibly signal inside the community than on Tinder. Also, AFAIK dating apps also have more men than women.
There is definitely a contingent of straight men who are attracted to powerful, successful, cool women; my impression is that this may be more common among guys who are less conforming to traditional masculine gender roles.