Your Partner Dating Lots Of People Is Less Scary Than You Think It Is

Tags

polyamory, sex positivity

When I see people talk about polyamory, one concern they often have is that the partner who’s more attractive (or female) will be out every night sleeping with a new person, while the partner who’s less attractive (or male) will spend all their nights alone crying into their bowl of ice cream while watching Netflix.

There is a grain of truth to this. In my experience, it’s very rare for everyone in a primary relationship to be dating exactly the same number of people. Lots of primary poly relationships include one partner who is dating four or five people or having a lot of casual sex, and another one who isn’t. And certainly it’s much easier to have casual sex if you’re more attractive or if you’re a woman.

A lot of people assume that this situation is naturally the sort of thing that makes the left-out partner miserable. They might feel insecure, like their partner is more attractive than they are; they might be envious of their partner’s relative level of sexual success; they might be jealous; they might feel humiliated. And I don’t want to say that those dynamics never happen.

But I think the level of distress caused by one’s partner dating lots of other people is often pretty low, assuming that the rest of the relationship is healthy. Obviously, people are often sad if their partners are neglecting them for other people, or won’t stick to their agreements, or want a less committed relationship than they want, or similar. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about sadness caused solely by your partner dating lots of people when you aren’t dating very many at all. And I do think that’s less common than a lot of monogamous people think. 

One reason this is true is that the number of people you date isn’t just related to how attractive you are: it’s also related to your extroversion and your pickiness.

Some people thrive on having lots of relationships: there’s nothing they love more than having a brunch date with Sally Saturday morning, grocery shopping followed by a long walk with Alex Saturday afternoon, and going out dancing with Josh Saturday evening– and then repeating it all on Sunday. For other people, this sounds like a newly discovered tenth circle of Hell.

Obviously, that second group of people are going to have way fewer partners.

I called this “extroversion”, but it’s not just about extroversion. It’s about how you choose to spend your time. Some people prioritize having lots of romantic partners and sex. Other people prioritize writing their novel, or having deep and rich platonic friendships, or maintaining open-source projects, or climbing the corporate ladder, or binge-watching Netflix. If you’re into writing novels, and your partner is into going out on lots of dates, you’re probably not going to be sad that you have fewer boyfriends than your partner does. You’re going to be like “great! He’s busy and not bugging me, so I can really dig into the edits on Chapter Three.”

And of course this is particularly an issue for casual sex. Lots of people don’t have much casual sex because they find casual sex unappealing. And many people are not at all jealous about not participating in their partner’s unappetizing and incomprehensible hobby.

Another factor that affects how many people you date is pickiness. I have a friend who, at any given time, has a crush on about half of the women he interacts with. Inevitably, whenever he meets someone new, two days later he’s PMing me to go “so-and-so is pretty.” Naturally, he is dating a rather absurd number of people.

Now, I don’t mean to insult my friend’s girlfriends, all of whom are lovely people the appeal of whom I entirely understand. I’m not saying “some of the people your slutty partner dates will be ugly as fuck” (although this is sometimes true). But if you are only interested in shy, petite, multilingual girls who enjoy tabletop roleplaying, love children, and never raise their voices, then you will be totally uninterested in your metamours who are tall, loud, outgoing, monolingual, and aggressively childfree and who think dice only come in six-sided. In my experience, it does not hurt nearly as much for your partner to date lots of people if all the people they’re dating are unappealing.

Moreover, there’s a certain fairness to it. You are aware that if you liked as many people as your partner does, you would be able to date as many people as they do. Your partner dates lots of people because they like lots of people; you don’t because you don’t.

In general, extroversion and pickiness matter more than attractiveness when explaining why one person is dating more people than their primary partner is. In general, with some exceptions for people with unusual tastes, people tend to date people who are about as attractive as they are. (And quite often if your primary is more conventionally attractive than you are but is super into you due to your unusual traits, you will be pleased to have scored such an attractive person and accepting of their increased romantic success.) So most of the difference within relationships is about extroversion and pickiness. 

I am not saying that there’s no such thing as jealousy in poly relationships– there is– nor am I saying that no poly person is ever insecure, neglected, or envious. But quite often when one person dates many more people than their partner does, it is because that person wants to date more people than their other partner does. The person with fewer partners might need more alone time, be putting energy into something other than dating, or simply have a hard time meeting people they’re interested in– and that means they’re dating exactly the number of people they actually want to date. 

Hermeneutical Injustice, Not Gaslighting

Tags

abuse tw, language, neurodivergence, not feminism go away, speshul snowflake trans

I have regularly complained about misuse of the term “gaslighting.” Gaslighting is a form of abuse in which a person you trust manipulates you into distrusting your own perceptions, memories, and judgments.

Unfortunately, the Internet has decided that instead “gaslighting” should be used as a synonym for concepts like “lying” or, in particularly irritating cases, “disagreeing with me.” As someone who was abused by gaslighting, I find this incredibly upsetting.

It is not gaslighting when someone contradicts you, or intentionally causes you to doubt your beliefs, or leaves you uncertain of what you believe, or even makes you think that they think you are crazy. Gaslighting is about someone lying to you in a way that causes you to lose trust in your own capabilities as a rational person: your ability to reason, your competence to figure out the truth, your capacity to remember things in a broadly accurate fashion even if you are sometimes fuzzy on details, your knowledge of your own feelings and thoughts and desires. And if your mind is unreliable… well, you’ll have to rely on someone else.

Gaslighting is already confusing and difficult to identify by its very nature, even when people haven’t decided to make the only word we have to refer to this very important concept mean “lying, but like I’m really upset about it.” If “gaslighting” refers to “lying,” it is difficult for people to name their abuse and recognize that what is happening to them is wrong.

(Honestly, using “gaslighting” to refer to someone disagreeing with you is itself kind of gaslight-y. Might want to check that out.)

Many people who want to misuse the term “gaslighting” should just suck it up and use a phrase like “blatantly lying” instead. However, I think sometimes people are gesturing for a concept that really isn’t covered by words like ‘lying.’ They’re gesturing for something structural, a harm done by society rather than by an individual; they’re gesturing for something oppressive, a dynamic related to their presence in a marginalized group; they’re gesturing for something that causes harm to your ability to reason and come to conclusions and trust your own self-knowledge, similarly to how gaslighting does, even if less severe and not perpetuated by a person.

In the name of not striking terms from others’ vocabulary without suitable replacement, I would like to suggest an alternative: hermeneutical injustice.

Hermeneutical injustice is a term invented by philosopher Miranda Fricker in her book Epistemic Injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is the harm caused to a person when they have an experience, but do not have the concepts or frameworks they need to make sense of what their experience is. For example, a man who falls in love with a man, in a society where homosexuality is conceived of as a disgusting perversion with no true affection or love in it, experiences a hermeneutical injustice. A woman whose boss keeps plausibly-deniably touching her breasts and telling her that she has a great ass, before the invention of the concept of sexual harassment, experiences a hermeneutical injustice. A man forced into sex who has no concept that men can be raped experiences a hermeneutical injustice.

(Of course, not all cases of hermeneutical injustice are related to a social justice topic: trypophobes of the world suffered a minor hermeneutical injustice before we had a cultural understanding that, for some people, that particular pattern of holes is just horrible.)

The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice is, of course, that you can’t express your feelings or experiences. If you don’t have the concept of “transness” or “sexual harassment” or “misophonia,” you are going to sound like an idiot when you try to explain why something hurts you.

You: “That sound is just BAD, okay. It makes me want to KILL SOMEONE. I want to STAB OUT MY EARDRUMS.”
Them: “This is a kind of unreasonable reaction to forks scraping against a plate. Why do you feel that way?”
You: “I don’t KNOW it just SUCKS.”
Them: “Well, are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?”
You: “AARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH.”

Hermeneutical injustice also makes it harder to understand your own experiences. If you don’t have the concept of gender dysphoria, it’s hard to put together your body image issues, your depersonalization, your deep-seated jealousy of women, your desire to wear skirts, and the fact that you never play a male RPG character. Those will all seem like discrete unrelated facts that don’t point to anything.

But the harms of hermeneutical injustice go deeper. There are harms to the individual as a knower: you feel stupid or crazy because you can’t articulate your experiences, and that makes you feel stupid and crazy in general; it is hard to cultivate certain epistemic virtues if you can’t understand yourself and your own mind. And quite often– especially in more serious cases of hermeneutical injustice– there is a harm to your identity. The harm of growing up conceptualizing yourself as a sodomite rather than a gay person; the harm of thinking of yourself as a person who freaks out about normal flirtation instead of a victim of sexual harassment; the harm of having your very sense of self shaped by narratives and concepts that were developed by people who don’t understand people like you at all.

And if you’re harmed by hermeneutical injustice– if the concepts and narratives available don’t describe your experiences, and this makes you feel stupid and crazy and hysterical, and you internalize as descriptions of yourself statements that aren’t true because you don’t have a way of saying the things that are true— well, you might reach for the word “gaslighting” to describe the way it makes you feel. As a way of expressing that this is a very serious harm, that it’s driving you crazy, that your problem is not just lying or disagreement but something more fundamental.

And if you’re in that situation, I hope this essay resolved that piece of hermeneutical injustice, and therefore you can stop perpetuating hermeneutical injustice against me.

Philosophy of My Advice Column

Tags

ozy blog post

I have been writing an advice column for a little more than a month, and I have already discovered I have many opinions about how my advice column works. I have decided to write them up in order to help people decide whether they would like to write to my advice column or a different advice columnist.

First: I view my job as an advice columnist as trying to help the letter writer solve their particular problems. I am on, a very basic level, on my letter writer’s side. I have already received letters that make me feel like I would not like the letter writer particularly much as a person, ones with political beliefs I strongly disagree with, and even ones that made me tempted to go “well, stop sucking and you wouldn’t have the problem anymore.” But I’ve tried my best to attempt to improve my letter writers’ lives according to their own values, goals, and preferences, without telling them those values are stupid and they should get better ones. And I avoid telling my letter writers that they are terrible people.

If I receive a letter where I’d have a hard time being on my letter writer’s side– whether because of personal triggers or because I actually find their goal appalling — I’d probably avoid answering it. But I think I can be on the side of a lot more writers than one could naively assume: if you want to write me about your struggle to avoid masturbation, or your difficulties with loneliness as a celibate same-sex-attracted person, or your paralyzing fear about the world being destroyed by superintelligent AI, I am going to do my best to adopt your worldview instead of starting with “well, I disagree.” (If for some reason this is a problem you feel is best solved by a sex-positive feminist who prioritizes global poverty and animals.)

I don’t think this approach is right for every advice columnist: Dan Savage certainly doesn’t, and Savage Love is an amazing advice column; That Bad Advice is an amazing advice column which does literally the opposite of my thing. But I think it creates a certain amount of safety when you’re writing, and it’s an approach I personally feel comfortable with.

Second: this is an advice column. I am providing solutions to problems the letter writer has in their life. I am not providing political commentary, structural solutions, explanations of what things would be like in a better world than the one that already exists, or essays loosely inspired by the letter. Again, there are lots of great advice columns that do those things, but this is my advice column and this is what I’m doing.

Third: I am a person with limited knowledge. In an announcement, I described my areas of expertise as “sex, kink, dating, polyamory, BPD, neurodivergence more generally, effective altruism, transness, scrupulosity, abuse, spiritual abuse, and parenting persons under the age of 18 months.” However, if you write me about some topic that is far outside of my area of expertise, I’m going to assume you want my perspective on it; I will probably talk to friends with more knowledge or note that this is not a thing I have a lot of experience in, but I will still offer my uninformed opinions.

Right now, I’m getting few enough letters that I can answer every letter. If or when that changes, I’m probably going to favor answering letters in my areas of expertise over answering letters which are not in my areas of expertise.

Fourth: I strive not to recommend ending relationships or seeking therapy/medication. I feel like these are common band-aids when the advice columnist doesn’t really know how to answer the question, and they’re usually provided without considering why it might be hard for a person to end a relationship or seek therapy/medication. Some people have moral objections to divorce or estrangement from parents; some people are financially dependent on the person; some people are coparenting children and have a functional coparenting relationship; some people are simply not ready to end it. Many people can’t afford therapy or medication, have a difficult time finding a compatible therapist, can’t fit in appointments around their schedules, or are dependent on a parent or spouse who would object.

I do suggest ending relationships, therapy, and medication sometimes. But I try to always provide some other alternative, in case the person doesn’t choose that: advice about how to maintain the relationship, in the former case, or self-help books, peer support groups, coping mechanisms, or advice about supplementation.

(Exception: if to the best of my ability to interpret the letter writer they are writing a letter of the genre “please give me Official Permission to end my terrible relationship,” I will give them official permission to end their terrible relationship. This is also the response you can expect if you’re looking for Official Permission to transition, to identify as LGBT+, to have a particular kind of sex, or not to have sex.)

Fifth: I am a weird person and this has improved my life a bunch. A lot of my solutions tend to be of the form “have you considered just being weird?” If you are particularly interested in being normal and respectable (instead of just appearing normal and respectable to outsiders, which of course is a thing many weird people sometimes have to do), my advice is unlikely to be helpful.

Sixth: I tend to recommend safe rules. These are rules that have a lot of false negatives but don’t have a lot of false positives: that is, they almost never say something is okay when it isn’t, but they often say that things aren’t okay when they really are. Knowing what actions are okay often comes down to context, personal relationships, and the ability to read the room. As an advice columnist, those are exactly the things I don’t have– and I definitely can’t have it for every situation you might encounter. That letter would be far far too long. And I don’t want to say “pay attention to context and read the room,” because if you knew how to do that you probably wouldn’t be writing me. I also find that safe rules tend to be helpful for my anxiety: I can very confidently say “well, I’m following the rule, so it’s fine.”

When I’m recommending a safe rule, I tend to specifically highlight it as a conservative rule with a lot of false negatives and few false positives, so that people don’t worry that the probably-fine things they’re doing are actually bad.

If this advice column interests you, you can read it here or send an email to thingofthingsadvice@gmail.com. (For people who use throwaway emails, I’ll note that I don’t answer letters privately and you don’t have to remember the password to your throwaway.) If you appreciate my advice, you can back me on Patreon.

In My Culture

Tags

not like other ideologies, ozy blog post

I really liked this post by Duncan Sabien:

Because none of us quite have the same culture, after all. We all differ in different ways from the Basic Package—even those of us who’ve lived in the same towns, gone to the same schools, worked in the same industries, played the same sports, read the same books, watched the same shows—we’ve all got our own unique little takes, built up out of the odd quirks of our parents, tiny traumas and formative experiences, countless accumulated musings about how Things Could Be So Much Better If Everyone Would Just _________!

And so Your Culture, though it might match mine at a thousand different points, will also be noticeably different at a thousand others. You and I would found different churches, write different constitutions, build different schools and startups—

—and we would recognize different things as trespasses or offenses, and react to those trespasses and offenses in different ways.

And I thought I’d take the opportunity to describe what things are like in my culture. I’m mostly going to be addressing the same subjects Duncan addresses; later in the post I will address some things he doesn’t mention.

—

In my culture, although we wouldn’t use many of the words or the framing Duncan uses, we are conscious of the idea of a broader “context culture.” We are not only aware that other cultures do things differently and we should cooperate with them, but that these cultures often work well for their adherents. There’s a default assumption that people are different, and their needs are different, and if your needs are incompatible with mine you can’t be my friend but I still might wish you well.

Conversely, in my culture, there is little felt need to justify our norms to outsiders. Someone from another culture might say “that wouldn’t work for me” as a counterargument to our norms; this is likely to be met with a blank stare of incomprehension. Of course they don’t work for you. We didn’t design them to work for you. You should leave us alone to do our thing, and maybe you can find some other thing you like better somewhere else.

—

In my culture, it is assumed that people regularly fail to choose their most-preferred option from the list of options available. You will prefer X, and want to do X, and really intend to do X, and for some reason wind up instead doing Y. We don’t use the word “akrasia”, any more than you’d have a word for every action other than sitting in chairs. But we observe that while most people sit in chairs sometimes, and many people sit in chairs all day long, it is not at all uncommon to do something other than sit in a chair. Similarly, it is not at all uncommon to (for example), really prefer and want and intent that you go to bed at 10pm and instead stay up until 2am on Facebook.

It is important, therefore, in my culture, to distinguish between a person doing X because they actually want to do X, and a person doing X for some other reason. Of course, sometimes things actually have to get done; the baby’s diaper has to be changed regularly no matter what reasons you have for not changing the baby’s diaper. And sometimes people lie about what their preferences are, or self-deceive into believing they want to study Latin when in reality they want to write high-context fanfiction.

But it’s possible to distinguish between those things. And the right way to respond to a person not wanting to do something is different from the right way to respond to them wanting to do something and not doing it. The former can sometimes be changed by persuasion, giving people more information, or incentives, but often can’t be changed at all; you just have to accept that the person isn’t going to do the thing until they want to. Depending on what the problem specifically is, the latter can in theory be changed many different ways, from Facebook-blocking software to medication to making sure to get enough sleep to keeping tempting objects out of your house to reframing the way you think about things.

But sometimes the latter cannot be changed either. And even in that case we think it makes sense to treat them differently, in my culture. It can be frustrating to try your hardest to do something, and fail, and be told that that’s because you actually just wanted a different thing. We think “I wanted to but couldn’t because of my mental limitations” isn’t that much different from “I wanted to but failed because of my physical limitations.”

—

In my culture, we distinguish between an emotion being valid, an emotion being justified, and an emotion being effective.

A valid emotion is simply one that makes sense. All emotions are valid, because all emotions occur for reasons connected to particular situations, details of your history, thoughts and models you have of the world, and so on. Your emotions are trying to help you as best as they can, given what they “know” about the world, both from past experience and from the powerful optimization process of evolution. No emotion is stupid or dumb or wrong.

A justified emotion is one that in a certain sense “corresponds” to the situation that prompted it. If you respond to someone insulting you for no reason by cringing and apologizing, that’s valid; you have reasons to do that. But the justified response is anger. In general, among flourishing and self-actualized humans, people respond with anger to being insulted.

An effective emotion is one that gets you the thing you want in the situation. You’re stuck in traffic and you’re angry that you’re going to be late. This is a valid emotion– there are reasons for it– and it is a justifiable emotion– anger is a justifiable response when an important goal is frustrated. But it is not an effective emotion. Being angry will not cause the traffic to move any faster, and it might make you feel unhappy. If being angry causes you to drive more recklessly, it may even cause harm.

—

In my culture, as in Duncan’s, you can leave any conversation at any time. While there are blunt or rude or cruel ways to leave a conversation, you don’t owe anyone your time, attention, or energy on demand. Of course, there are obvious exceptions: if you’re the parent of a young child, for example, or someone has paid you to have the conversation. And there are relationships where you can expected to provide a certain amount of time, attention, or energy in general, even if you can’t be expected to provide it on any specific occasion.

Suicidality and other forms of mental health crisis are not one of the exceptions. If you are suicidal, people may choose to sit and talk with you about it, but you have no right to demand that they do.

—

In my culture, if I cover the check, you won’t pay me back, but it is expected that at some point you will cover the check for me, and it will all balance out. (Or not– maybe you’re broke, and covering the checks is just the cost of me spending time with you. That’s fine too.)

If you actually do want the check to be split, you should probably remind me; that way only one person has to remember the debt.

My culture tends to assume that people are generous but very forgetful.

—

In my culture, we try to recognize the ways that people communicate affection. It’s easy to miss that someone cares about you if you’re looking for them to express affection one way and the way they express affection is different. Sometimes it can cause hurt, if you are looking for affection expressed by invitations to things you like” and you aren’t getting any and assume you are not loved, when in reality your friend was attempting to express affection by reading your Tumblr and having thoughtful opinions about your posts.

So we make an effort to notice the ways that each individual person expresses care and affection within a particular relationship. They bring you a cookie when they go to the store to get snacks; they make a moodboard about your favorite character; they say affectionate words; they take your infant for an afternoon so you have some time to write; they stay up late to talk to you when you’re sad; they send you links to articles they think you’ll like, and they’re usually right; they read the books you recommend.

—

In my culture, it is always okay to ask verbally for consent for a hug. That doesn’t mean that you always will– sometimes you know someone’s cuddly, sometimes you can read their body language, sometimes you know each other well– but it’s unmarked to ask. We don’t notice or care whether you ask. If someone asks a lot, even when told that hugs are always fine, they might get teased lightly and affectionately about it, but it’s a quirk and doesn’t need to be changed.

If you’re touching someone for a while, it is also always okay to check in whether the cuddling is welcome, if you are uncertain.

My culture is, perhaps relatedly, very very cuddly. It is not at all uncommon in my culture to cuddle with platonic friends or friends of friends. While cuddling is sometimes a sign of flirting, it is often just an indicator of affection.

—

In my culture, if you randomly punch someone (even lightly, without causing damage) without prior consent, it is a major violation of social norms. You will be gossiped about and not invited to parties. People will passive-aggressively tell their toddlers about how YOU know that we do not hit but EVEN SOME ADULTS are confused about this. When your name comes up, people will say, “oh, isn’t that the guy who hits people?”

Of course, you may feel free to punch people if you have discussed this with them ahead of time and clarified that they are okay with it.

—

In my culture, if you want people to celebrate your birthday, you must announce “IT WILL BE MY BIRTHDAY SOON” several weeks ahead of time to give them a chance to prepare. If you fail to do this and your spouse forgets about your birthday and is like “isn’t your birthday coming up soon?” a week after it happens, this is a funny story and not a great offense. It isn’t even a funny story if it happens with your friend, it’s just normal.

—

In my culture, if you honk at people and there is not an immediate safety concern, you are an asshole and people will fantasize about fining you twenty dollars every time you do. More generally, my culture takes noise pollution very seriously; we’re opposed to car alarms, fireworks, and loud parties at unreasonable hours.

—

In my culture, there’s a strong norm that there are things we do not do. We don’t misgender anyone, no matter what. We don’t make fun of people’s names or appearances, no matter what. It’s always acceptable to say “hey, I think you’re being unfair, a more reasonable interpretation of that person’s words/actions is X,” no matter how many awful things that person has said or done.

It’s not that there aren’t any ways you can punish someone who is doing wrong. You can personally decide not to interact with them and encourage your friends to do the same. You can gossip; my culture is extremely gossipy, about good things as well as bad. You can criticize their behavior. In extreme situations, you can post a public callout post or even call the cops. But there is a certain baseline of respect everyone gets just because they’re a person, and you don’t lose that.

—

In my culture, people often say things behind other people’s back that they wouldn’t say to their face, but it’s a moral failing (however slight). You might phrase things more tactfully around the person, or avoid bringing it up unless directly asked, but you shouldn’t say someone’s dress looks nice and then make fun of it when they’re out of the room. You can either avoid making fun of the dress or say “eh, I don’t love the color on you” when they ask you about it.

—

In my culture, if someone makes an unusual claim about how their brains work– “actually, I’m two different people”, “I identify as a lizard”, “I can summon Loki into my brain”– there are a range of acceptable ways to respond to this claim. You can shrug. You can ask questions, as long as they’re polite and curious and the other person is willing to answer. You can say “cool!” You can say “what is the etiquette around people who are in some sense lizards?”

You are not permitted to mock them, or to ask questions if they don’t want to answer questions, or to condescendingly explain to them that people are not actually lizards, or to get offended about how People Think They’re Lizards Now, Tumblr Has Gone Too Far. If they ask you not to call them a human, or to use plural pronouns for them, or to switch names when they put on the necklace that indicates that they are a different person, then you should do that. Of course, they should also be understanding if you forget or if the thing they’re asking is something you’re just not capable of. If you absolutely can’t handle not calling someone a human, then you should avoid that person; clearly you are socially incompatible.

It’s okay to privately think they’re not having the experience they claim to be having. If they are a close personal friend or have signaled openness to such conversations, you might bring it up politely and respectfully. If they are not, you should leave them alone, because someone having weird beliefs but not bothering anyone is literally none of your business.

Some Things Are Not Coordination Problems

Tags

not like other ideologies, ozy blog post

A coordination problem is a situation where, in order to get the best outcome, everyone needs to be doing the same thing. For example, which side of the road you drive on is a coordination problem: if everyone drives on the same side of the road, it’s okay, but if some people drive on the left and some people drive on the right, there will be car crashes everywhere. Global climate change is another example of a coordination problem. You can’t fix global climate change by deciding that you yourself will stop polluting; everyone has to cut back on their carbon emissions to prevent climate change. Lots of the problems in the world are coordination problems.

Unfortunately, some people I know claim that things are coordination problems when really they aren’t. Often, they don’t bother to try to establish that the thing is a coordination problem first; they just skip ahead to the part where they morally exhort people about the importance of not participating in coordination problems and/or complain about how the rationalist community is supposed to be full of people who are rational and yet here we are all irrationally having coordination problems.

I’m going to take social network use as my example, but I think the error occurs more generally.

In many ways, Facebook is bad. It invades your privacy. Hundreds of very smart people make very high salaries to try to figure out how to get you to keep clicking on Facebook, even when it doesn’t make you happy and you’d rather be doing literally anything else. Its algorithms often favor clickbait-y news over thoughtful longreads that give you a deep understanding of a particular issue.

If Facebook is bad, some people might wonder, why do people still use it? The “coordination problem” answer is that everyone else is on Facebook. A social network isn’t very much fun if no one is on it, so everyone has to use Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook, even though it is a bad website.

I don’t think this is true. I have personally observed a very successful shift away from a social networking website in 2007. In the Strikethrough and Boldthrough events, LiveJournal deleted a number of journals for expressing interest in sex-related topics such as BDSM, sex work, pedophilia, and rape. Infamously, this included communities that supported rape survivors; infamously, it also included a bunch of fanfiction porn communities.

In the wake of Strikethrough and Boldthrough, Archive of Our Own was founded as a free-speech alternative to LiveJournal and other ways that people commonly hosted fanfic. Today, it is one of the world’s most popular fanfiction archives, and the only known case of a free-speech alternative to something that didn’t become immediately overrun with Nazis.

By the “coordination problem” argument, there should have been a lot of trouble in getting everyone to use Archive of Our Own instead of LiveJournal. But there really wasn’t. Fanfiction writers genuinely care about Harry Potter porn free speech, and so when a site proved itself unreliable at hosting Harry Potter porn free speech, they quickly switched to a different website.

(Tumblr is unfortunately doing a similar attack on Harry Potter porn free speech, but moving seems to be going poorly due to the lack of an adequate substitute for Tumblr. I think you can get people to switch to a good substitute, but of course if the grossly inadequate website is the best you can get then people aren’t going to move.)

That places a lower bound on how hard it is to get people to move. In order to get people en masse to change from one social networking site to another, they have to care about the problems with the first site at least as much as fanfiction writers care about Harry Potter porn free speech. That’s it.

For any social network, there are three kinds of users. There are people who prefer the social network in question to any other social networks available. There are people who are kind of meh about it– this social network is fine, but there are others that are just as good. And there are people who hate the social network but can’t move because all their friends are there.

The “coordination problem” argument requires that most people are in the second or third groups, with only a small number of people in the first group. And I don’t think that’s actually true. If, say, forty percent of your users are “this social network sucks” and sixty percent are “meh, whatever, I’ll go where everyone else is going,” the forty percent can post about it, create common knowledge of the fact that they think it sucks, move to a different social networking site, and drag the apathetic sixty percent along with them.

The situation with Facebook is that there are lots of people in the first group– people who actively like Facebook. They like getting in political arguments and getting tagged in selfies and looking at pictures of other people’s babies. They don’t really care about privacy, don’t necessarily mind spending an evening on Facebook when they meant to be doing something else, and enjoy reading clickbait about which Game of Thrones character looks most like your cat. These people would continue to use Facebook even if it halved in size, as long as the Game of Thrones quizzes kept coming. In fact, I’m pretty sure the “uses Facebook, actively likes Facebook” group outnumbers the “uses Facebook, hates Facebook, wants to switch to something else” group.

Now, you can argue that those people’s preferences are stupid preferences. Probably they should care more about their privacy and being hacked into compulsive behavior they don’t endorse and should prefer reading Dostoyevsky to taking quizzes about cats. But that’s not a coordination problem. That’s a “the things people care about are bad and they should care about different things” problem. You do not fix that problem through moral exhortation to avoid coordination problems or informing people that the entire point of the rationalist community is avoiding coordination problems. And once you have fixed people’s preferences, I think the coordination problem will actually take care of itself.

Entitlement, Covert Contracts, Social Libertarianism, and Related Concepts

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

One of my most unpopular opinions is that “entitlement” is actually a useful concept.

It makes sense that people have a knee-jerk negative reaction to it. “Entitled” is one of those words (like “patriarchy” and “rational”) that it is useful to have in your mental toolkit but if you ever find yourself using it you need to rephrase your argument. More on this later; it ought to show up later in the essay but I wanted to put in “I know that there are good reasons for you to hate the word ‘entitled'” in the forlorn hope that this would keep people from writing angry comments before they read the post.

I think that entitlement is a useful concept when thinking about the interplay between these three concepts:

1. Basic rights and expectations for any relationship.
2. Boundaries and needs you have in some specific relationship.
3. Needs that are completely unreasonable.

There is a very common model of social interaction which you might call “social libertarianism,” beloved by poly people, sex-positive people, and assholes who don’t want to get called on being assholes. Under social libertarianism, people have sets of needs and boundaries, and the goal of social interaction is to find someone who can fulfill your needs and whose needs you can fulfill, without violating either side’s boundaries. The only misdeed is to deliberately violate another person’s stated boundaries. No set of needs or boundaries are right or wrong, but some may be incompatible with other people’s. If you enjoy screaming curse words at other people, then all you have to do is find someone else who likes having curse words screamed at them, and the problem is solved.

Social libertarianism often comes from a good impulse. Many people generalize from “I would be unhappy in this sort of relationship” to “everyone who is in this sort of relationship is unhappy and being exploited and a victim of Insert Cultural Boogeyman Here.” Social libertarianism has built into it the idea that people are different from each other, an insight which is all too often forgotten. If you’re the sort of person whose perfectly happy relationships get accused of being unhappy and exploitative and only existing because of Insert Cultural Boogeyman Here, there’s a natural tendency to embrace social libertarianism.

But I don’t think social libertarianism works as a model, because it is in fact actually possible to be an asshole.

For example, if I were friends with someone and they decided to tell me my hair was ugly, my blog is stupid, I would never fulfill any of my dreams, and all my friends secretly hate me, I would not say “I see I have not set the boundary with you that you don’t get to insult me at all my most vulnerable points; my mistake, in the future please don’t do that.” I would say “never darken my doorstep again.” This is because it is actually wrong to insult your friends. I don’t have to set the explicit “don’t insult me” boundary; it is understood. Similarly, I might specify that a car I’m selling is red, but I wouldn’t specify that it has wheels. All cars are supposed to have wheels. It’s a basic expectation.

There are actually quite a lot of these in relationships. “Don’t share people’s private information without their consent.” “Don’t forbid someone from being friends with someone else just because you don’t like them.” “Don’t tell people they are bad people for having a feeling.” Spend a few hours reading any advice column or relationship advice book and you will discover hundreds of basic rights you never knew you were respecting. (Years later, I remain boggled at More than Two spending at least a page patiently explaining why it is wrong to veto a partner’s relationship because it makes them too happy and that makes you jealous.)

I realize the concept of “unspoken rules that are wrong to break” is going to give some of my more socially phobic readers hives. To which I say, as reassurance: this is literally all stuff you learned in kindergarten, it’s “play fair” and “don’t hit people” and “be nice.” Most people get through life fine without ever being confused about this stuff. Some people are actually ignorant, particularly autistic people and people who grew up in abusive or fucked-up homes: I myself was confused until relatively recently about why I shouldn’t share other people’s private information. But if you are, most people will forgive you if you apologize, explain yourself, and don’t do it again. There’s a difference between a mistake and malice, and “don’t treat people’s mistakes like they’re deliberate attempts to hurt you” is one of the basic expectations for any relationship.

On the other end, sometimes people have expectations that are, in fact, completely unreasonable. For example, if I don’t watch myself, I tend to expect that if I just do everything right then everyone in the whole entire world will like me. So I feel a lot of social phobia: if someone dislikes me, it means I have done something wrong, and I need to self-flagellate about my wrongness and carefully search all of my actions until I determine what horribly wrong thing I have done.

I do think, in a sense, my social phobia is a form of entitlement. (Not everyone’s social phobia is entitlement, of course. Probably most people’s isn’t. But mine is.) You can tell, because sometimes I get fed up with the whole self-flagellating/navel-gazing business and instead start being unreasonably angry. “How dare you dislike me!” I think. “I am a good person and I deserve universal adoration! I should come up with the most cutting insult possible so that you will regret your decision to have any negative opinions about me whatsoever.”

Like most entitled thoughts, this line of thought is a reasonable thing to want. Being disliked feels bad; that’s why we have a bunch of social rules about not explicitly saying when you don’t dislike someone. It’s natural to want to avoid ever having to experience this unpleasant thing. The problem is when a natural desire turns to an expectation that the world should be this way.

Also like most entitled thoughts, when you actually explain it it is balls crazy. Like, pretty much the only way it would be justified to think this is how people work is if you lived on a desert island for your entire life and learned about people solely through your copy of the Sims 2. Everyone has flaws, which means that everyone is going to be disliked for their flaws by someone. Sometimes people dislike each other for silly reasons: some people are going to dislike me no matter what I do because my writing style grates on them, or I remind them of their horrible ex, or they think my name is pretentious. Even if I were absolutely perfect in every way and somehow managed to talk everyone out of disliking me for silly reasons, horrible people exist. I’m not going to get Homophobe McNazi to like me, which is okay, because Homophobe McNazi’s approval would fill me with shame.

One very common form of entitled thoughts is “covert contracts,” a concept which I learned from the Red Pill and intend to rescue from the horrible misogynists who currently own it. A covert contract is when you make up a deal inside your head where if you do something, then in return someone else will do what you want, and then never tell the other person that this is the deal.

Examples of covert contracts: “if I never disagree with you then you will like me.” (This one I am annoyingly prone to.) “If I do the dishes then my housemate will sweep the floors.” “If I refer you to my company, then you’ll do really well on the interview and impress my boss with your good judgment.” “If I spend lots of time trying to solve your personal problems, then you will be my friend.”

The problems of covert contracts are many:

• The other person might not even want the thing you’re giving them. (Maybe your housemate doesn’t care about the dishes. Maybe your attempts to solve other people’s problems are actually busybody meddling.)
• The other person has literally no idea that this contract exists, and therefore will only fulfill it by coincidence or telepathy.
• You didn’t give the other person a chance to say “no” and they might not want to take this deal. (Maybe they aren’t sure if they’ll be able to do well on the interview. Maybe your housemate really fucking hates sweeping.)
• The other person thought they were getting a favor for free and is going to be really annoyed at you when they discover that you in fact made a deal with them under false pretenses of doing a favor.
• Sometimes the contracts are just balls crazy. (If someone likes you on the condition that you never disagree with them, you don’t want to be their friend.)

The solution here is twofold:

1. Do nice things when you want to do nice things for their own sake, not because you expect to get something out of it.
2. If you want to make some sort of exchange (dishes for sweeping, referral for good interview performance, therapy for friendship), tell people about it ahead of time and give them the chance to say no.

(In Guess Culture, exchanges are often not explicitly discussed, but instead negotiated some other way. I am not Guess Culture enough to give advice about how to negotiate this, but I would suggest that your implicit contracts should definitely avoid the pitfalls outlined above.)

So hopefully at this point you can see why I think “entitlement” is a useful concept which identifies a specific class of distorted thoughts that cause harm to oneself and others. Why, then, is the term “entitlement” so universally despised, at least by the non-asshole population?

Two reasons. First, some people say that people are “entitled” when the thing they are is “sad that they can’t have a desirable thing.” It is true that it’s very unreasonable to expect someone to date you even if they don’t want to, but you still get to be sad that they don’t want to date you! It is okay to be sad about the way the world is! This is an awful misuse of the term and people who do it should be hung up by their thumbs.

Second, and more perniciously, it is used to cover up arguments about which of the three categories– basic expectations, expectations that can be negotiated, and completely unreasonable expectations– something is in.

Recently I was watching an old John Oliver clip about the NCAA’s refusal to pay its players. An NCAA spokesperson characterized the student-athletes protesting not being paid as “entitled athletes”. You notice he didn’t say what the student-athletes felt they were entitled to, because saying that would immediately reveal that his position was bullshit. Student-athletes think they should get paid because they are destroying their bodies to earn other people millions of dollars. No fucking shit they’re entitled to it. This is one of those “basic expectation” things. If someone is profiting off your labor, then you are entitled to a cut of it, and you are certainly entitled to not have all of your possible employers form a cartel for the specific purpose of ensuring you don’t get paid.

But if he just says “entitled athletes,” then everyone is like “ah, yes, entitled athletes, hooking up with cheerleaders without condoms and getting drunk and vandalizing buildings” and they fail to notice the bit where the student-athletes’ complaint is actually totally reasonable.

This happens all the time.

So I would suggest never using the word “entitled” without following it with the word “to”. Very very few people think they are entitled to literally everything they want. “Entitled” by itself should sound to you as strange as saying “in love” by itself: in love with whom? Entitled to what? And given people’s perfectly reasonable objections to the term, even if you personally use it in your thinking, it might be best just to never use the word at all, instead replacing it with something like “so-and-so has a distorted thought that they deserve Thing.”

In Defense of Unreliability

Tags

neurodivergence, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post

In a long post mostly about a different issue, Zvi Mowshowitz writes:

I also strongly endorse that the default level of reliability needs to be much, much higher than the standard default level of reliability, especially in The Bay. Things there are really bad.

When I make a plan with a friend in The Bay, I never assume the plan will actually happen. There is actual no one there I feel I can count on to be on time and not flake. I would come to visit more often if plans could actually be made. Instead, suggestions can be made, and half the time things go more or less the way you planned them. This is a terrible, very bad, no good equilibrium. Are there people I want to see badly enough to put up with a 50% reliability rate? Yes, but there are not many, and I get much less than half the utility out of those friendships than I would otherwise get.

First of all, I’d like to say that nothing in my post should be construed as saying Zvi’s desire for reliable friends is invalid or wrong. It’s disappointing to expect a friend to come over and then they don’t. If you’re a busy person, on vacation or otherwise limited in time, a friend’s canceled plans may mean that you’ve missed out on an important opportunity to do something productive and/or fun. It is very reasonable to want to befriend people who will reliably show up places they said they will on time. However, I do want to explain why I myself am quite unreliable and how I benefit from a social norm in which this unreliability is acceptable. (We should also note that I have lived in the Bay for the majority of my adult, actually-socializing life, so I may be unfamiliar with the benefits of a non-flake lifestyle.)

I primarily get places through public transit and Uberpool. The Bay Area’s public transit system is really really good compared to public transit in most of the rest of the country (for one thing, it is possible to get places on it). However, our public transit is certainly inferior to, say, New York City’s. One of the ways this works is that sometimes, based on the Inscrutable Whim of the Train Gods, the train will choose to show up fourteen minutes late. Uberpool also has high variance in time estimates, because they have to pick up and drop off other people. What this means is that when I say “I will get there at such-and-such a time”, I mean “there is a bimodal distribution of times when I could show up which is centered around this time and probably has a standard deviation of like five to ten minutes.”

So there are ways I can fairly consistently show up on time. One is that I could take UberX wherever I’m going and eat the extra expense– although doing that consistently would trade off against my goal of using money responsibly. Another is that I can plan to show up on average ten or fifteen minutes before I’m supposed to show up, and then most of the time I will be on time. (This is what I do for doctors’ and therapists’ appointments.)

There are two problems with adopting the latter strategy in general. First, my time also has value! If it’s bad for me to show up ten minutes late because the person is waiting around being bored, then it is also bad for me to show up ten minutes early so I have to wait around and be bored. Second, in many cases, showing up early is just as inconvenient for others as showing up late. For instance, if a friend invited me over for dinner and I show up fifteen minutes early, they might be still in their bathrobe and really counting on that fifteen minutes to shove the floordrobe into the closet and take the garbage out. That would be considerably ruder than showing up fifteen minutes late (at least if you keep them posted), because at that point the food is probably only beginning to get cold.

(I guess I could arrive early and then hang out on a street corner until it was time for dinner but see above re: my time has value.)

In general, instead of trying to always show up before you said you would, I think the best strategy is to try to be early about as often as you are late, unless it is something where being early is much much better than being late (a theatrical production, a doctor’s appointment, a job interview) or vice versa (a party with lots of other invitees).

However, Zvi didn’t just talk about being on time: he also talked about flaking. My local corner of the Bay seems to have less of a flaking problem than his corner. I, a diagnosed agoraphobe, still manage to make the majority of the social events I agree to go to, and many people of my acquaintance make as much as ninety or ninety-five percent. (Maybe I am particularly charming and people don’t want to flake on me, or maybe I’m proactive and flake on them first.) But I think it is very useful that no one gets angry at me for flaking as much as I do.

I’m scared of leaving my house. This means that when I make social arrangements a lot of the time I won’t end up actually going to them because I will be too scared of leaving my house. Whether I’m going to have a good mental health day or a bad mental health day is hard to predict even a week in advance, because it depends on short-term triggers like whether I’ve fought with a close friend, whether the assholes across the street have decided to set off fireworks, whether a person has said something unpleasant about me on the Internet, whether I’ve been doing a good job of remembering that in spite of what my brain tells me doing things will make me feel better and not doing things will make me feel worse, and so on. So the only way I can achieve any sort of reliability in social arrangements is by not making them.

I do not want to not make social arrangements. Social isolation makes my mental health worse. And doing literally anything tends to make me less depressed. I am also informed that some people would occasionally like to talk to me [citation needed]. So therefore I have decided to make plans anyway, and push onto my friends the negative consequences of dealing with my flakiness.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me that one would object to this state of affairs and choose not to have me as a friend. (This is one of many good reasons why someone might not want to have me as a friend.) But I think before advocating for a complete shift in social norms one should consider the benefits the social norms already have to those participating in them.

Why Attitudes Matter

Tags

free speech sequence, ozy blog post, sex positivity

Sometimes when I am giving ethical advice to people I say things like “it’s important to think of yourself and your partner as being on the same team” or “just remember that women in short skirts are almost certainly not wearing short skirts to arouse you in particular” or “cultivate your curiosity and desire to know what’s actually going on.”

I get pushback on this. After all, I am a consequentialist. Why am I talking about people’s attitudes instead of their actions? It doesn’t matter what I think of the woman in the short skirt, as long as I refrain from being a dick to her because of her clothing choices.

An emphasis on attitudes can be really bad for some people. Some people, having been given the advice that they should cultivate their curiosity, will spend a lot of time navel-gazing about whether they’re really curious and whether this curiosity counts as curiosity and maybe they are self-deceiving and actually just want to prove themselves right. Not only is this really unpleasant, but if you’re spending all your time navel-gazing about whether you’re sufficiently curious you’re never actually going to go buy a book about the Abbasid empire. It completely fails to achieve the original goal. If this is a problem you’re prone to, I think my attitude-based advice is probably not going to be helpful, although I can’t give any other advice; I personally get as much navel-gazing as I can stand trying to keep my obviously shitty attitudes in check, and don’t have any introspective energy left over for anything else.

Nevertheless, I think an attitude emphasis can be really important, for two reasons.

First, for any remotely complicated situation, it would be impossible to completely list out all the things which are okay or not okay. For instance, think about turning my “think of yourself and your partner as being on the same team” advice into a series of actions. You might say “it is wrong to insult your partner during disagreements.” But for some people, insults are part of resolving disagreements. Saying “I am not sure you’ve really thought this through” rather than “that is the stupidest fucking idea I’ve ever heard” feels artificial to them, like they’re walking on eggshells. For them, intimacy requires the ability to say exactly what you’re feeling, without softening it.

Or you might say “if you think of arguments for your partner’s side, then say it.” However, this might lead you to fall victim to what C S Lewis in the Screwtape Letters called the Generous Conflict Illusion:

Later on you can venture on what may be called the Generous Conflict Illusion. This game is best played with more than two players, in a family with grown-up children for example. Something quite trivial, like having tea in the garden, is proposed. One member takes care to make it quite clear (though not in so many words) that he would rather not but is, of course, prepared to do so out of “Unselfishness”. The others instantly withdraw their proposal, ostensibly through their “Unselfishness”, but really because they don’t want to be used as a sort of lay figure on which the first speaker practices petty altruisms. But he is not going to be done out of his debauch of Unselfishness either. He insists on doing “what the others want”. They insist on doing what he wants. Passions are roused. Soon someone is saying “Very well then, I won’t have any tea at all!”, and a real quarrel ensues with bitter resentment on both sides. You see how it is done? If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official “Unselfishness” of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it. Each side is, indeed, quite alive to the cheap quality of the adversary’s Unselfishness and of the false position into which he is trying to force them; but each manages to feel blameless and ill-used itself, with no more dishonesty than comes natural to a human.

Or you might say “if your partner seems to be making a mistake, give them some friendly advice, without being overly critical.” But some people are naturally controlling– not abusive, just the sort of people who get upset when their partner loads the dishes a different way than they’re used to or prefers to read a map rather than using the GPS. Those people might very well decide that they shouldn’t give any friendly advice, for much the same reason that an alcoholic shouldn’t go to a bar. It never stops after one.

If you are thinking about the situations from a position of “my partner and I are both on Team Our Collective Happiness And Well-Being,” then the answer to all these thorny situations becomes clear. You should give a word of friendly advice, unless you are the sort of person who is incapable of stopping at a word of friendly advice. You should speak in a way that makes your partner and you feel more intimate and able to resolve conflicts, rather than less so. You should say “hm, I think the vacation you want to go on is cheaper” but you should not do the Generous Conflict Illusion. And so on and so forth.

Second, an attitude emphasis prevents rules-lawyering. Whenever you list a set of actions, there are a certain number of people who will figure out how to get as close as possible to breaking the rules, and then complain when you get annoyed at them, because technically they didn’t break any rules. (Rules-lawyering is particularly likely to happen in issues of sexual ethics, but it is certainly not reserved for those situations.) For example, they might say “you said I wasn’t supposed to yell at my wife or call her nasty names! You never specifically said I wasn’t supposed to respond to my wife forgetting to do the dishes by piling up all the dirty dishes onto her bed.”

But obviously if you are two people cooperating to solve the problem of the dirty dishes piling up, “stick the dishes on the other person’s bed” is not how you would respond. (Unless, I guess, they agreed ahead of time that this was a useful if disgusting way to help them remember– like I said, it’s really hard to make hard-and-fast rules.) That is a way you’d respond if you’re approaching the situation as a war between you and your partner, and the winner is whoever gets a clean sink while having to do the least dishes. This is, to put it lightly, not a good way of solving your relationship problems.

I suspect that action-based advice works best in relatively simple situations where there aren’t a lot of possible actions and where there are few situations that require a judgment call: for instance, it works great for “don’t hit people unless they started it”. Attitude-based advice works best for complicated situations where there are lots of possible ways of fucking up: for instance, it works well for intimate relationships, intellectual or artistic life, and career choice.

Why Do All The Rationalists Live In The Bay Area?

Tags

not like other ideologies, ozy blog post

[Attention conservation notice: non-rationalist readers, this is incredibly rationalist inside baseball]
[ETA Disclaimer: I know the Seattle rationalist community exists and is cool. However, if the entire Bay Area rationalist community moved to Seattle, many people would probably wind up working at Amazon, and also moving several hundred people is legitimately very hard. Also, the reason I personally am not moving to Seattle is that it seems like it contains far fewer homeschooling parents.]

I have seen several discussions of the fact that rationalists tend to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, in which it is pointed out that the Bay Area housing market is one of the worst housing markets in the country. It seems somewhat irrational to live in such an expensive place, particularly since many rationalists are also effective altruists, who intend to donate a high percentage of their income. Why do we keep living here?

Well, as Willie Sutton said about robbing banks, because that’s where the money is.

Rationalists are disproportionately likely to work in tech. If you’re a weird person who likes computers– particularly if your school history is kind of checkered– software engineering is your best chance to make four or six times the US median income. Of the top places to be a software engineer taking into account the cost of living, #2 is San Jose and #5 is San Francisco. Somehow I think “the San Franciscans should move to the South Bay” was not precisely what everyone was thinking of (however personally beneficial it would be for me).

But of course there are other places on the list. We could, for instance, all live in Seattle, Raleigh, or Portland (#1, #3, and #4). Why don’t we?

For some people, the answer is obvious. They’re students at UC Berkeley or Stanford; they’re an App Academy graduate who has to spend the next year in San Francisco by their contract; they work at the Center for Effective Altruism, which is going through Y Combinator; they work at Open AI; they work at MIRI and CFAR, which need to be near prospective collaborators (MIRI) and students (CFAR). You add together those groups and you get a pretty substantial rationalist/effective altruist community already.

I’m going to hold off for a bit on talking about why the software engineers don’t move and instead talk about why I don’t move. After all, I write for a living. My job is extremely portable. I don’t even have to change out of my pajamas.

The first problem is that my husband works for Google. I could, I suppose, move away from my husband. But there would be various inconveniences. I was sort of planning on having him take the kid for a while (once we have one) so I could get some uninterrupted alone time. My husband’s love language is physical touch and he would probably go mad being married to someone he couldn’t cuddle. He can go outside with me when I’m agoraphobic, which wouldn’t be possible if we lived in the same place. The airfare costs would be horrendous. And I can’t imagine we’d actually save that much on rent: we currently share a room, and my husband would probably be quite unreasonable and insist on having his own room instead of acquiring another permanent bedmate.

Why don’t we both move? After all, Google has offices in places that aren’t Mountain View.

Well: since I work from home, incidental conversations with housemates are a majority of my face-to-face interaction. It is very easy for me to find new rationalist housemates when I need one; in a city without a rationalist community, I’m more likely to room with some stranger and lose the opportunity for social interaction. I currently live within two hours of all my partners except for one, and they can be easily visited over the course of a weekend. When the baby comes, I’ll be able to get advice and support from my friends who like kids (I have perhaps half a dozen), including my housemate. I expect that at least one of my children will have a developmental disability, and I don’t want to put a developmentally disabled child in public school; my friends are planning on running a group unschool, which means I neither have to sacrifice my career to homeschooling nor cough up tens of thousands of dollars in private-school fees. Events I enjoy (such as sex parties and rationalist seder) occur on a pleasantly regular basis. If I have a nervous breakdown, I expect that people besides my husband will be there to take care of me, and he won’t have to worry about caregiver burnout. If I divorce my husband, I expect to have a couch to sleep on until I get back on my feet.

And I’m relatively lucky! For instance, I prefer to do online brainstorming; if you prefer face-to-face meetups, you have to be close to people. I’m not founding a new nonprofit, startup, or other project; again, living close to your cofounders is really helpful (not to mention that in a community you’re more likely to meet your cofounders). I don’t need referrals for jobs. I have a supportive husband and will be able to solve many of my parenting problems with money; for poor parents, especially single parents, a supportive community can be the difference between good parenting and neglect. And so on and so forth.

It’s important to note that many of the benefits of community are altruistic. Referrals for high-paying jobs, brainstorming, living near cofounders, support from friends that lets you save money, and even the happiness of living near friends– these concretely improve people’s ability to improve the world.

Of course, most people could probably get the majority of these benefits with only five or ten close friends. (Not all of them though: job referrals depend on having a lot of weak ties, nonfrequent and transitory social relationships, which studies have suggested increase wages and aggregate employment. Weak ties are also useful any time you might like to initiate a relationship, such as with a housemate, cofounder, romantic partner, or coparent.) But my friends– much to my great annoyance– insist on not sharing my set of five or ten close friends, and instead having a set of five or ten close friends of their own, which may or may not overlap with mine. The whole thing grows logarithmically. If we want everyone to have friends– and are not just organizing the whole system for my own personal benefit– it’s going to be a group of a couple hundred people at least.

“Okay,” you might say. “So we move the entire community!”

But let’s examine the typical case: a rationalist who works a job at a non-rationalist company. Let’s say you’re a Googler– as many rationalists are– and you’re looking to move to one of the new rationalist hubs of Raleigh or Portland. As I write this blog post, Portland has one Google job open. Raleigh doesn’t seem to have jobs at all, but Chapel Hill has two jobs open. (Information comes from here.) What happens to the second rationalist Googler who wants to move to Portland?

[ETA: In the comments, Jeff Kaufman points out that Google often is hiring for more than one position from a single ad. This weakens my point; whether rationalist Googlers would swamp the local job market depends on how many positions Google is hiring for in a location, which appears to be unclear.]

Of course, this is a solvable problem. Perhaps the second rationalist Googler can find some equally high-paying job at some other company in Raleigh. But you are going to have to simultaneously solve problems like this for a hundred people, even assuming you have buy-in from all of them. This is really fucking hard.

It is particularly hard for early-career software engineers. A software engineer with more experience has more power: for instance, they can hold out for a job where they work remote. But someone who is relatively early in their career is going to have a significantly harder time getting a job outside of tech hubs.

(Notably, Seattle is enough of a tech hub that it doesn’t necessarily have this problem, as far as I know. However, many of Seattle’s tech jobs are at Amazon, which has a notoriously awful company culture, and it seems to me it is perfectly rational to avoid it.)

Finally, I have to remark that the expensiveness of the Bay Area housing market is somewhat misleading. Of course renting an entire house is quite expensive, but no one rents an entire house. My husband and I pay a little less than the median American household does for housing, because we live in a two-bedroom one-bath house with two roommates. We could probably move to Raleigh and have roommates there, but Raleigh’s lower rents means it has far less of a group house culture, particularly a child-friendly group house culture. Thus I would be unlikely to find such a good setup with such pleasant people.

Thoughts On Cults

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abuse tw, ozy blog post, there is no justice and there is no judge

[content warning: descriptions of spiritual abuse]

I prefer the phrase “spiritual abuse” to the word “cult” for several reasons.

First, spiritual abuse is less discrete. Either a religion is a cult or it is not; however, the same religion may be spiritually abusive to some people in some contexts while not spiritually abusive to other people in different contexts. For instance, some Alcoholics Anonymous groups isolate their members, tell them not to take psychiatric medication, and pressure them into sex; however, a lot of people find AA an invaluable resource in getting sober. The Catholic hierarchy covered up pedophilia, and a lot of people are faithful Catholics whose lives have been tremendously improved by the church.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s okay to go “well, we’re not literally one hundred percent always spiritually abusive, so there’s no problem here!” Part of one’s religious or spiritual organization being spiritually abusive ought to be an enormous wake-up call to examine what led to the spiritual abuse and how it can be prevented in the future. But I also think that you can say “wow, spiritually abusive AA groups are horrifying, I wonder how we can prevent thirteenth-stepping in our groups” while also saying “my AA group is great”. You can’t say “wow, AA is a horrifying cult” and also say “my AA group is not a horrifying cult.” It does not work that way.

Second, “cult” tends to be applied disproportionately to new religious movements.

Now, there is a good reason to be suspicious of new religious movements. The Catholic Church has been around for a long time and although it has caused quite a bit of harm it is also a known quantity. We know the circumstances in which the Catholic Church directly causes mass murder and have secularism laws in place to prevent this. A new religious movement might unexpectedly lead to mass murder in a way we don’t have laws to prevent.

On the other hand, it is not exactly like the Catholic Church has never been spiritually abusive, between the coverup of the sexual abuse of children, the Magdalene Laundries, churches in which women are pressured into having far more children than they can handle to prove they don’t have a contraceptive mentality, traditional Catholics who teach that it is a sin to refuse sex, and relationships in which Catholic teaching on Hell and sin is used as a tool of abuse. Even if mainstream religions are less likely to be abusive than new religious movements, spiritual abuse in the former affects more people than the latter– after all, they’re bigger! I think “cult” gives a mistaken idea that old religions that aren’t New Agey are safe from spiritual abuse, when in reality every religion has been touched by spiritual abuse.

(I suspect this is historical– “cult” originated from the Christian countercult movement which conflated spiritual abuse and heresy, while “spiritual abuse” originated from survivors of fundamentalist Protestant spiritual abuse. Naturally, the latter is more willing to admit that mainstream religions can be spiritually abusive.)

Third, “cult” is a word which a lot of times gets used against harmless weirdos.

I actually find the broad use of the term ‘cult’ wildly offensive. Like, you do realize that people get PTSD from spiritual abuse, right? “Cult” is not a cool shiny term to use about every group you don’t like. Here are some things that are not, in and of themselves, spiritually abusive:

• Normal groupthink and ingroupy behavior.
• Donating money that you can afford to spend to charities other people in the group approve of.
• Weird but consensual sexual behavior.
• Fervently holding beliefs that outsiders think are weird.
• Having rituals.
• Having group houses.

Here is a list of things that are actually spiritually abusive:

• Isolating people from friends and family who aren’t members of the group.
• Requiring people to make financially unsustainable donations to be part of the group that go solely to finance the group leader’s lavish lifestyle.
• Coercing people into sexual behavior they don’t consent to.
• Not letting people disagree with the orthodoxy.
• Encouraging people to think of themselves as evil, wrong, or shameful.
• Physical assault.

The difference between these two lists is whether it causes harm. A person who thinks they were abducted by aliens who gave them a message of peace and love to share with the Earth: weird but harmless to themselves and others. A person who spends hours screaming insults at people who like the peace and love message but are skeptical of the aliens thing: very damaging to other people! Like, honestly, if you can’t see the difference between “lots of people in this group live in housing situations which are kind of like cult compounds if you squint” and “people who disobey in this group are physically assaulted,” I am kind of worried about you.

A lot of people who sling around the word ‘cult’ have a missing mood. You’d think they’d feel sad that people have been deceived into an ideology that hurts them; after all, the primary people that any spiritually abusive situation hurts are, you know, the people being spiritually abused. Instead, a lot of people’s response is something like this: “Ha ha! I think you’re a victim of psychological and possibly physical abuse! I have so much contempt for you! I’m going to laugh at you for being terrible now!” I am not sure whether these people enjoy laughing at and blaming victims of abuse, or they know perfectly well that the people they’re talking to aren’t spiritual abuse victims but they enjoy making light of the experiences of actual victims in order to insult people they don’t like. Neither one speaks very well of their moral character.