This isn’t limited to professional contexts, though I do think some of the situations there are clearer.
An example norm for a context in which no organization is involved is that I don’t think people (especially organizers) should be hitting on first-timers at EA meetups.
Not hitting on people on their first meetup is good practice, but none of the arguments in OP seem to support such a norm.
Perhaps less charitably than @Huluk, I find the consent framing almost tendentious. It’s quite easy to see how the dynamics denounced have little to do with consent; here are two substitutions which show how the examples are professional ethics matters, and orthogonal to the intimacy axis:
- one could easily swap “sexual relations” with “access to their potential grantee’s timeshare” without changing much in terms of moral calculus; - one could make the grantee as the recipient of another, exclusive grant from other sources. In this case, flirting with a grantmaker would no longer have the downstream consequences OP warned about.
All in all, the scenario in OP seems to call not for more restrictive sexual norms, but for explicit and consistently enforced anti-collusion/corruption regulations.
Once again: this is limited to the examples provided by @jefftk, and the arguments accompanying them. It’s possible that consent isn’t always enough in some contexts within EA, for reason separated from professional ethics—but I did not find support for such thesis in the thread.
This isn’t limited to professional contexts, though I do think some of the situations there are clearer.
An example norm for a context in which no organization is involved is that I don’t think people (especially organizers) should be hitting on first-timers at EA meetups.
Not hitting on people on their first meetup is good practice, but none of the arguments in OP seem to support such a norm.
Perhaps less charitably than @Huluk, I find the consent framing almost tendentious. It’s quite easy to see how the dynamics denounced have little to do with consent; here are two substitutions which show how the examples are professional ethics matters, and orthogonal to the intimacy axis:
- one could easily swap “sexual relations” with “access to their potential grantee’s timeshare” without changing much in terms of moral calculus;
- one could make the grantee as the recipient of another, exclusive grant from other sources. In this case, flirting with a grantmaker would no longer have the downstream consequences OP warned about.
All in all, the scenario in OP seems to call not for more restrictive sexual norms, but for explicit and consistently enforced anti-collusion/corruption regulations.
Once again: this is limited to the examples provided by @jefftk, and the arguments accompanying them. It’s possible that consent isn’t always enough in some contexts within EA, for reason separated from professional ethics—but I did not find support for such thesis in the thread.