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I believe their answer to ‘how should people meet partners’ is ‘at contexts specifically designed for that’, by which they mean nightclubs, dating apps, that sort of thing.
The fact that this idea has obvious drawbacks doesn’t mean they don’t have one.
And, tbh, ‘attempting to convince women to change their boundaries and entire lifestyle in order to sleep with you’ is maybe not the sort of thing that should be illegal, but it’s a very central example of the sort of thing that should come with the label of ‘pushy and kind of a creep’.
I mean, that's kind of what dating/flirting is. Going from single to living together, having intimate emotional connections, having regular sex, starting a family together, ect. is very much a radical change in boundaries and lifestyle. There's no polite way to ask for that which is compliant with any standard HR policy. Yet it is a bedrock assumption of our social policy that you can just put men and women in the same society and they will spontaneously rearrange themselves from "single" to "married"(or whatever the PC equivalent with minor variations is).
But this is in the context of polyamory. It's not Guy A flirting with Girl B and wanting to date and maybe have a relationship in the conventional sense, it's Guy A wanting to date and maybe have a relationship within the context of "oh and I'm poly and in a relationship with three other people".
If Girl B is not interested in being a side-piece, keeping on insisting that poly is the superior rationalist thing instead of monogamy which is yucky is creepy. Guys A, C and D may well have believed that they could present the Superior Rationalist argument for poly and have Girl B be immediately convinced because she too is a rationalist, but it's entirely possible for Girl B to go "Yes, your argument is good but I still prefer monogamy so I'm not going to join your polycule".
And if Girl B has to have the same song-and-dance with guys C and D after guy A, can you see why she finds it more and more like some kind of creepy cult rather than "I thought we were here to discuss ways of helping the world?"
This is probably the right analysis in regards to polyamory in 99% of normal situations. The curveball is that this is an effective altruism event, and the whole point of effective altruism is to apply rationality and scientific argument to charity in order to maximize happiness and minimize suffering.
So some guy comes along and says, "You know what generates a lot of happiness? sex. Yet most people don't have nearly as much sex as they could be having. If more people were poly and didn't let jealousy or embarrassment get in the way of having more sex, then there would be much more happiness in the world." This is a very basic utilitarian argument. The kind of argument that EA is full of.
Now, our heroine has three options here. She can:
Accept the argument, become poly, and have easy sex.
Have a principled consequentialist reason why the above argument isn't valid, or at the very least does not apply to her.
Say, "Yes, your argument is good but I still prefer monogamy so I'm not going to join your polycule".
Options 1 or 2 are acceptable. Option 3 simply doesn't fit in an EA framework. You're surrounded by people who dedicate their lives, pick jobs based on EA criteria, or become vegetarian even though they love eating meat, and yet you are admitting to selfishly leaving utility on the ground.
Frankly, the argument isn't that hard to refute. I'd argue that anyone that doesn't accept it who can't (or doesn't want to) refute it should not have any decision-making power at any EA organization at all. The bar needs to be higher than that.
Being nasty here, there's also Option 4:
"Yes, your argument is good, people don't have as much sex as they could be having, and if I were poly and didn't let jealousy or embarassment get in the way of having more sex then I would be happier. So I will now go and offer to be poly with that hot, rich, high-status guy over there, thanks for convincing me!"
If she ain't into you, bro, all the rational argument in the world won't convince her. As to leaving utility on the ground, the counter-argument is weighing up the utility, if any, of having sex with Polycule Guy versus not having sex with him and having it with someone else, and if the utility of "someone else" seems higher, then not joining his polycule is the right decision. Which is better: a quarter share in him or the whole of a different relationship? Is he that hot, clever, rich and high-status that being one of a harem is better than being the monogamous partner of someone else? Is sex that important to her that it does make her happier than some other activity? Would sex with Polycule Guy make her happier?
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"The happiness I gain from exclusivity far outweighs the happiness I gain from lots of crap sex."?
Because that's... all it is, isn't it?
I take it that's what he was getting at with the last paragraph, the one starting "Frankly, the argument isn't that hard to refute".
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Or just "You don't appeal to me sexually, and since your argument would equally apply to me having random sex with any person at all I met on the street, and I do not agree that would make me happier, then I reject your premises".
'yes more sex might make me happier but only if it's with someone I find attractive and I don't find you attractive' is, I think, the underlying reason and why the guys tried arguing her into being poly, because nobody wants to think they're not attractive.
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Isn't it valid to say "I get jealous and it makes me feel bad and I don't think it's something I need to work on. Thanks"?
No, because then you're opening yourself up to needling and further evangelising about why feeling jealousy is sub-optimal and blah blah blah.
Jealousy is a form of mental illness/evolutionary baggage I have and thought leader said it was okay not to resolve that stuff before I consider your offer to join your polycule.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1445193026641412096
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Rephrase option 3 as "Sorry, I'm narrowmantic." Now it sounds logical and scientific and pushing further would make you a bigot.
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I suppose if you’re a turbo autist, yes it is.
In reality being pushy towards a woman who is not interested in the kind of relationship on offer, and who has made that clear, is quite a bit different from a date request to a woman who’s looking for one. More analogous to pursuing a married woman.
Being pushy is just traditional and courtship. That’s not “autistic”. Being pushy is just part of every romcom ever made.
Like in yougotmail for example Meg Ryan hated Tom Hanks in person but he realized she was his pen pal they both got along with. He spent months courting her with the today awful secret ambition of boning her and having kids and living happily ever after. Or Mathew Mcconaughey chasing down his girl on his motercycle going to the airport in how to lose a guy.
Basically every romcom plays some story of guy realizes he loves girl then stubbornly pursues her because she’s his special little snowflake.
So I don’t understand how that is autistic when it’s the plot of every moving I ever saw growing up on how a guy should pursue a girl.
I also, and that's a large part of why I thought that was absolutely horrible. She said "no", why are you trying to force her to do something? It's like okay, you love jazz so you want her to like jazz too and if she says she doesn't like jazz you keep pursuing her and playing jazz at her and trying to make her give in. Nobody would tolerate that!
Movies are a terrible way to get the information of what the world is like, but that's how most of us do get it - and then we eventually run our faces into the wall of "movies and TV are not real, they're fiction, and the real world is not like that".
Every woman says "no". That's the most basic of shit tests. In order for a man to become romantically/sexually successful, he needs to learn to differentiate between a fake "no" and a real "no" and power through the former.
If people actually took the feminist line about how "no means no" seriously, nobody would ever have sex, because that is simply not how women work.
I've definitely gone all the way without ever hearing "no". (Sometimes it's "yes yes yes" all the time haha.)
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The line is far less distinct then you're letting on. What one person sees as too pushy is often times completely effective and other times will make a woman quite uncomfortable or even angry. It's difficult to know which is which until you try, and the threshold is actually far below the aforementioned case of trying to get some women to join what amounts to a harem.
Exactly, the threshold is far below trying to talk some woman into joining a harem after she's said she wants nothing to do with the whole thing.
Just because someone is a degenerate weirdo in silicon valley doesn't mean that dating norms, or the stated (but entirely ignored) norms set out by HR departments and oversocialized libs are valid either. Nor is being a silicon valley degenerate weirdo particularly a big deal. People don't have a right to social comfort beyond the option of just getting up to leave. This is a case of hysterics in the face of someone who is maybe slightly out of line.
And the point was that the threshold for discomfort can be lower. Again, a person doesn't have a right to total social comfort. The moral question of polygamy is a whole other thing which really isn't done justice by any leftist lenses.
Agreed that the question of whether polygamy/amory is OK is ancillary to the question of whether or not the specific behavior in question is OK.
Disagree that this is only slightly out of line(at least if true; I will very much allow for the possibility that the story is greatly exaggerated). This is worse than more central examples of being aggressive and pushy because the woman has demonstrated a previous opposition to the lifestyle in question. It's very much the equivalent of badgering a conservative Christian woman into a friends with benefits situation, or a happily married woman into cheating.
And, realistically, this is the problem with live and let live liberalism more broadly- it only seems to go in one direction(that is, in favor of degenerate sex weirdos and drug addicts). You see the same thing with lesbians getting pressured into sleeping with intact biologically male transwomen, or the constant odor of marijuana smoke in major American cities, or that Colorado baker that's been sued so many times that if I put out a number it'll have to be edited right after I hit "comment". And yes, some of those examples are sympathetic to me, but some of them aren't. I have no illusions that these women trying to join up in EA spaces are going to follow socially conservative norms otherwise, but that doesn't mean it's OK to try to pressure them into joining a harem over their own objections to such an arrangement. It shouldn't be #metoo level to say that. SJW's writing a set of ridiculous norms about dating doesn't mean they're wrong in every particular just like gun control advocates saying ridiculously false things about AR-15's doesn't mean I'm not going to leave if I see a skinny teenaged boy open carrying one in a Walmart.
I think we just have fundamentally different moral values. I don't think it's that big of a deal for some woman to have to turn down a weirdo multiple times. To me, that just seems like part of life. I don't think its nice for some weirdo to keep asking, but there's a huge gap between not nice and meaningfully wrong. There is no damage caused here, at least on the individual level. If we want to talk on a societal level, that's a lot more foggy, especially because currently there is no presiding sexual morality to speak.
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