Recently, the effective altruism organization Nonlinear was revealed to have exploitative business practices, including: Socially isolating employees by encouraging them not to spend time with “low-value people.” Unclear and messy finances which left employees financially dependent on their bosses (who could arbitrarily decide not to pay expenses).
I think this general principle is very applicable to kink/BDSM scene. Because we play with pretty sketchy stuff there (non-consent, explicitly unequal power dynamics, physical violence and pain, mental pain and possibly violence, etc etc etc) the tail end will contain a lot of extremely objectionable stuff.
This kinda suggests (and I'm probably unhappy about the implication but it's intriguing as a concept) that a small shift LEFT (towards more focus on safety, accountability and maybe even overdoing the "performative virtue" and performative consent) could result in a significant reduction of the Rare Truly Bad Shit at the end of the right tail.
On the other hand, we could see the Rare Bad Shit as outliers not being part of the general pattern (I have not checked the data but I suspect that serial killers don't follow normal crime patterns to do with poverty, social anomie, etc).
When I read the title I first thought this was going to be about that UK-based EA group that bought a castle because it was cheaper in the long run to host their conferences and seminars there than constantly hire event spaces.
What I read here reminds my of a post I read a while ago that I'm pretty sure was also on thingofthings (or at least linked from there) but I can't find just now, the argument was that if you're making a list called "10 signs you're in an abusive relationship" then you should list 10 features of abuse, not 10 features of relationships. Group houses on their own are not a sign that anything is wrong; how and why those group houses are run might be. Cults tend to want their members to interact only with the "right" people, but not every group building a filter bubble is a cult.
I think the sketchiness argument comes down to this: there are heuristics that work well for normal situations, but fail badly on data points outside of their design space. For example in a monogamous relationship, your partner getting intimate with someone else is, as a heuristic, A BAD SIGN. If most relationships in the world are mono, then someone might round off to the heuristic that it's a bad sign in relationships in general. But that heuristic completely fails when applied to the poly community! There's a clue in the name!
I would add a point to the bullet list that when a community wants an exemption from a generally useful social heuristic, it's on them to construct their own alternative rules, which means understanding what aims the heuristic is trying to achieve in the first place (the Chesterton's Fence argument) and being satisfied, at least among people inside the group, that either the alternative achieves the same aims or that the group explicitly disagrees with those aims. The poly community seems to be quite far down that path already, and there's parts of the kink community as far as I'm told that are really good at this too (and other parts that, a while back, ended up on the YesMeansYes blog in a post called "Your Kink is Rape" IIRC).
I'm happy to grant the EA community their group houses and their own way to allocate chores, if they have their own standards of behavior to replace the usual ones, and that cover the same aims as the "don't date your managers/reports" rules in non-EA organisations. Or, if you want an exemption from suspicion because you pattern-match a properly researched list of "10 signs you might be in a cult", that's fine as long as your group has some rules in place that prevent the bad kind of stuff people normally mean when they say "cult", like the head honcho having the undisputable right to sleep with anyone they want including the children, or the mass suicide thing. For a group that's not actually a cult, this should be a workable compromise.
Generally accepted accounting principles for anything that touches money seems fairly non-negotiable to me. One of the aims of those principles is to prevent the kind of thing SBF got up to; that fence should really really have stayed up. This applies to all startups including non-EA ones.
I think a lot of this starts when a business hires the founder's friends and then starts hiring people formally and doesn't appreciate that this is different in kind and you can't treat someone you hired as a friend.
"Many effective altruists break laws, such as drug laws," could be reframed as "many people break laws, such as drug laws, including effective altruists."
Especially in light of scandals in the last year before the Nonlinear fallout, I've noticed a tendency for some effective altruists to become hyper-scrupulous. The reaction against the apparently very overlooked absence of ethical guardrails in some corners in EA has been necessary.
That shouldn't overshoot into fearing EAs tend to give themselves moral license the average person doesn't. If for no other reason than to hold themselves accountable to their loftier ideals, EAs should aspire to be more morally conscientious than the average person. It's how EAs set an example for others. Some EAs have fallen into the hubris of assuming that by default they have been more ethical than others by virtue of their worldview. Clearly, they're not.
That never became so bad that EAs have developed ethical blindspots of being way worse than the general population without realizing it. You're not saying that. You're being reasonable. A lot of people have been saying unreasonable things, including EAs needlessly going after each other. It needs to be said EAs aren't preternaturally better than anyone else, but that by and large they are still more conscientious than the average person.
For example, when it comes to drug laws, I'm aware most EAs are mortified by the idea of doing drugs harder than consuming moderate amounts of marijuana and alcohol, and are still squeamish about being associated with people who do those harder drugs. This frankly puts most EAs as more averse to illegal drug use than half the general population.
I think this general principle is very applicable to kink/BDSM scene. Because we play with pretty sketchy stuff there (non-consent, explicitly unequal power dynamics, physical violence and pain, mental pain and possibly violence, etc etc etc) the tail end will contain a lot of extremely objectionable stuff.
This kinda suggests (and I'm probably unhappy about the implication but it's intriguing as a concept) that a small shift LEFT (towards more focus on safety, accountability and maybe even overdoing the "performative virtue" and performative consent) could result in a significant reduction of the Rare Truly Bad Shit at the end of the right tail.
On the other hand, we could see the Rare Bad Shit as outliers not being part of the general pattern (I have not checked the data but I suspect that serial killers don't follow normal crime patterns to do with poverty, social anomie, etc).
When I read the title I first thought this was going to be about that UK-based EA group that bought a castle because it was cheaper in the long run to host their conferences and seminars there than constantly hire event spaces.
What I read here reminds my of a post I read a while ago that I'm pretty sure was also on thingofthings (or at least linked from there) but I can't find just now, the argument was that if you're making a list called "10 signs you're in an abusive relationship" then you should list 10 features of abuse, not 10 features of relationships. Group houses on their own are not a sign that anything is wrong; how and why those group houses are run might be. Cults tend to want their members to interact only with the "right" people, but not every group building a filter bubble is a cult.
I think the sketchiness argument comes down to this: there are heuristics that work well for normal situations, but fail badly on data points outside of their design space. For example in a monogamous relationship, your partner getting intimate with someone else is, as a heuristic, A BAD SIGN. If most relationships in the world are mono, then someone might round off to the heuristic that it's a bad sign in relationships in general. But that heuristic completely fails when applied to the poly community! There's a clue in the name!
I would add a point to the bullet list that when a community wants an exemption from a generally useful social heuristic, it's on them to construct their own alternative rules, which means understanding what aims the heuristic is trying to achieve in the first place (the Chesterton's Fence argument) and being satisfied, at least among people inside the group, that either the alternative achieves the same aims or that the group explicitly disagrees with those aims. The poly community seems to be quite far down that path already, and there's parts of the kink community as far as I'm told that are really good at this too (and other parts that, a while back, ended up on the YesMeansYes blog in a post called "Your Kink is Rape" IIRC).
I'm happy to grant the EA community their group houses and their own way to allocate chores, if they have their own standards of behavior to replace the usual ones, and that cover the same aims as the "don't date your managers/reports" rules in non-EA organisations. Or, if you want an exemption from suspicion because you pattern-match a properly researched list of "10 signs you might be in a cult", that's fine as long as your group has some rules in place that prevent the bad kind of stuff people normally mean when they say "cult", like the head honcho having the undisputable right to sleep with anyone they want including the children, or the mass suicide thing. For a group that's not actually a cult, this should be a workable compromise.
Generally accepted accounting principles for anything that touches money seems fairly non-negotiable to me. One of the aims of those principles is to prevent the kind of thing SBF got up to; that fence should really really have stayed up. This applies to all startups including non-EA ones.
I think a lot of this starts when a business hires the founder's friends and then starts hiring people formally and doesn't appreciate that this is different in kind and you can't treat someone you hired as a friend.
"Many effective altruists break laws, such as drug laws," could be reframed as "many people break laws, such as drug laws, including effective altruists."
Especially in light of scandals in the last year before the Nonlinear fallout, I've noticed a tendency for some effective altruists to become hyper-scrupulous. The reaction against the apparently very overlooked absence of ethical guardrails in some corners in EA has been necessary.
That shouldn't overshoot into fearing EAs tend to give themselves moral license the average person doesn't. If for no other reason than to hold themselves accountable to their loftier ideals, EAs should aspire to be more morally conscientious than the average person. It's how EAs set an example for others. Some EAs have fallen into the hubris of assuming that by default they have been more ethical than others by virtue of their worldview. Clearly, they're not.
That never became so bad that EAs have developed ethical blindspots of being way worse than the general population without realizing it. You're not saying that. You're being reasonable. A lot of people have been saying unreasonable things, including EAs needlessly going after each other. It needs to be said EAs aren't preternaturally better than anyone else, but that by and large they are still more conscientious than the average person.
For example, when it comes to drug laws, I'm aware most EAs are mortified by the idea of doing drugs harder than consuming moderate amounts of marijuana and alcohol, and are still squeamish about being associated with people who do those harder drugs. This frankly puts most EAs as more averse to illegal drug use than half the general population.
Relevant: my proposal to have codes of conduct in EA/rat orgs: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dPmmuaz9szk26BkmD/vanessa-kosoy-s-shortform?commentId=CCYMbibsGobtBxQSW