In some recent discussions of values drift, it was noted that, anecdotally, one of the major causes of people not having as large an altruistic impact as they had hoped is people marrying or getting into committed relationships with people who are, at best, apathetic about effective altruism. Some people pushed back against advising effective altruists to marry people who share their values, on the grounds that it “seems culty.”
If that’s true, lots of people are culty. Evangelical Christians warn regularly about the dangers of being unequally yoked. Catholics aren’t even allowed to marry non-Catholics without a special dispensation. Interfaith marriage is also limited in Islam. It’s not just religions: “if he’s not a feminist, dump him” is a common subject of feminist thinkpieces. And whenever I go on OKCupid I find myself surrounded by people who only want to date anti-capitalist anti-colonialist anarchists who want to smash the patriarchy with gay sex.
Indeed, for any major life plan, it’s important to make sure that your potential primary or primaries are on board. If you want to have children, you should not marry someone who is childfree, or even uninterested in children. If you want to travel the world, marry someone who loves to travel. If you want to become an artist, marry someone who is going to rejoice at your gallery opening and not mind too much if they have to pay all the bills. If you want to retire at forty, marry someone who gets a kick out of figuring out how to save money.
Let’s say you have a goal to donate thirty percent of your income to charity. You marry someone who doesn’t care about effective altruism. As part of your marriage, you merge your finances. Maybe your spouse will tolerate this as a quirk of yours for a few years. But at some point they’re going to say “you know, if you didn’t donate that thirty percent of your income, we could buy a house.” Or “going on a vacation to Hawaii has been my dream for my entire life.” Or “our son is getting bullied in public school, and we could afford private school if you stopped donating. Do you want him to be bullied?”
Maybe your goal is to do direct work. If you’re like many effective altruists, you might be giving up tens of thousands of dollars in potential income to do direct work. Is your plan that your spouse is not going to, like, notice?
Maybe you have some really ambitious goal: you want to found your own charity, or completely reorient your career so you can work on AI risk, or run for office. Do you want to be married to someone who says “yes, absolutely, I’m 100% behind you– I understand that there are sacrifices and I am willing to make them by your side”? Or do you want to be married to someone who says “ever since you founded that stupid charity I never see you anymore” or “why can’t you just work a normal job”?
As the cliche goes, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time around. Some people, maybe, can maintain an altruistic motivation without the encouragement of the most important person in their lives and while sometimes having to debate it with them. But why make yourself do that?
There’s an idea that you should marry someone you’re in love with, who gives you butterflies in your stomach and hearts in your eyes, and not really worry about compatibility. Thinking about finances and life goals is unromantic. All those issues will work themselves out because love conquers all.
This idea is really really stupid.
It might be easier for me to notice that, because I’m polyamorous. I already have a category for “person who gives me heart-eyes and stomach-butterflies but with whom I have deep incompatibilities about dreams and goals and values.” That category is “secondary.” Perhaps it is more difficult for monogamous people.
But I do think we should, in general, cultivate an appreciation of the romance in a person who has your back, who will lift you up when you fall and celebrate with you when you succeed, who understands the stupid quixotic goal you’ve committed your life to. The person who makes you a better person because when you’re uncertain of whether you’re willing to make a sacrifice they encourage you and because when you think about doing something wrong you imagine the look of disappointment in their eyes.
Of course, being married to a supportive person isn’t the same thing as being married to an effective altruist. Indeed, because a plurality of the effective altruist community is heterosexual men, it is impossible for every effective altruist to be in a romantic-sexual relationship with another effective altruist.
Effective altruists who are concerned about animals should try to find dates within the vegan community, which is predominantly female and also has a heavy LGBTQ presence. Many religions have more female adherents than male, and many consider charity to be a moral duty, whether it’s zakat, tikkun olam, or the preferential option for the poor. (Of course, it’s important to filter heavily for people whose beliefs you can respect, who actually follow their religion’s teachings about charity, and who are willing to prioritize effectiveness at least somewhat.) Some effective altruists might also be interested in a platonic primary partnership with other effective altruists: you don’t have to have a romantic-sexual relationship to have many of the benefits of having a life partner.
Thing of Things 
Last sentence in the second last paragraph cuts off:
> Of course, being married to a supportive person isn’t the same thing as being married to an effective altruist. Indeed, because a plurality of the effective altruist community is heterosexual men, it is impossible for every effective altruist to be in a romantic-sexual relationship with another effective altruist. E
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The second- and third-last paragraphs seem like they got cut off at the ends somehow? “The person who makes you a better person because when you think about hurting them”, “E”?
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Fixed!
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I already compromise on my values to be able to function in society reasonably well. Some compromise to be able to have a relationship is not meaningfully different and is probably necessary for many people.
Also, not all of us have a large supply of people who match with our personality and who want to be our life partner. Some people have the luxury of choice, while for others it is a struggle to find even one partner.
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Well, it depends. If you’re an effective altruist who would like to avoid values drift, compromising on factors other than values is a good idea. In general, a bad life partnership can be much much worse than staying single.
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The issue I have with your article is that you seem to equate people’s current behavior with their needs and/or terminal values.
If I may be a bit cynical/realistic, I think that a lot of activism is done to achieve a mixture of needs. Like: meeting like-minded people, getting (self-)respect, establishing an identity, having something to do, doing fun activities, etc.
So if a person currently spends 10 hours a week on activism, the actual altruistic part can just be a fraction of this. I worry that your post may convince people that their current behavior is a terminal value, making them very inflexible.
If they can better satisfy many of these needs with a partner, then they may be better off having that partner and spending only 2 hours a week on activism, or merely giving money to a good cause.
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There are also situations where opposites do attract. For example, some people greatly enjoy debating and may be worse off with a too similar partner. An example of that may be Laci Green, who is perhaps happier with her anti-feminist boyfriend (and he with a feminist), than if she had a feminist boyfriend who didn’t challenge her that much (and he an anti-feminist girlfriend who didn’t either).
Anyway, I agree with you that a bad life partner can be worse than no partner. What I disagree with is your direction pushing to make people equate a good partner more with a more similar partner and for people to see values drift as a bad thing. Some people need to hear the opposite advice to be more flexible in their partner choice and/or to be more open to change their lives.
PS. Isn’t your advice very anti-diversity? Isn’t diversity one of your values? 😛
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I feel like taking a lower-paying job that you really care about is a fairly normal recognized thing that really doesn’t require sympathy to EA in particular to be supportive of. Otherwise I agree.
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I agree with your overall idea, but for me, comparing EA to Evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, and Islam *really* doesn’t sell the point that EA is not culty, and in fact does the exact opposite. I’m much more sympathetic to the point about feminism and smashing patriarchy with gay sex, probably because I’m much more sympathetic to these movements – I may disagree with some of their beliefs, tactics, and values, but broadly speaking, their values make sense to me, whereas the values of Evangelicals just seem completely nuts, and thus it seems more nuts to self-isolate over these values. Which makes me wonder if I’m atypical as far as the feelings about religion vs feminism go among the readers of this blog.
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I think it’s more that rationalists often segregate the questions of
– “what are some good strategies for maintaining and spreading values” and
– “how do we decide which values are good to maintain and spread”
Both are important questions, of course, but if the methods aren’t immoral, you can take guidance on the first from successful groups, even if you disagree on the second.
I think the point is that you can call EA culty or not, but if you think it’s important, then prioritizing EA on your partner selection criteria is likely to be effective.
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“There’s an idea that you should marry someone you’re in love with, who gives you butterflies in your stomach and hearts in your eyes, and not really worry about compatibility. Thinking about finances and life goals is unromantic. All those issues will work themselves out because love conquers all.”
I think you’re rolling two very different things into one here:
“You should marry someone you’re in love with, who gives you butterflies in your stomach and hearts in your eyes”
and
“You should not really worry about compatibility. Thinking about finances and life goals is unromantic. All those issues will work themselves out because love conquers all.”
Are two very different and unconnected claims, and only the latter is stupid; I think that the thing that will make most people happiest is looking for someone who gives them butterflies in their stomach /and/ worrying about finances.
I suspect that being in love is one of the best bits – arguably the best bit – of being human (I very much regret never having managed it properly myself) and that suggesting people forgo it is a truly massive sacrifice to ask of them.
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Reading your blog and being able to guess at who is typical for your readership, I thought of a perspective on marriage for effective altruists I think you would have missed. The first thing that came to mind for me, is among the people I know, it isn’t too difficult to imagine my peers being able to marry a woman who isn’t herself EA-sympathetic. Of course, that those words popped into my mind shows you what types of perspectives I’m exposed to. As a cis male, the pattern that generalized to EA from my own experience is knowing many other men who have a different faith than their spouses, but it doesn’t cause as much conflict as one would think. I think between moderately patriarchal societies, men, especially if they’re more passive about it and keep their own marriage more secular, have success in marrying women who don’t share their religions or values.
In a marriage among two people who stick to more traditional gender roles, the more dominant spouse is likelier to get away with running the family or their individual life according to their own values. If there is a compromise, I imagine the dominant spouse would get the better end of the deal. Of course I’ve been thinking of traditional gender roles, but of course queer people or anybody could have marriages with a hierarchical element to it. Of course how egalitarian or not a marriage individual EAs might prefer would depend on their preferences.
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True, on the one hand. On the other hand, women with traditional ideas of female submission also tend to have traditional ideas of the men being a ‘good’ provider (not frittering away their time at low-paying altruistic jobs or giving away the family’s money to strangers). So you’d have to go for a traditional female-subservient woman with no support system of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles to ramp up the societal pressure, which seems to me like a recipe for a very unhappy marriage.
And in that case, why bother?
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