I haven’t participated in CFAR workshops, I’m working from your written posts and my experience in other communities, so take these comments with the appropriate grains of salt.
I read the shift you describe as being from getting people on board with a largely preset agenda towards a more collaborative frame (and that the results have been promising so far). I wonder if the underlying issue here may be format-intent alignment. If CFAR has specific rationality techniques it believes are valuable and wants to teach, there’s an inherent directiveness to that goal. Workshop/discussion formats, however, signal exploration and reciprocity. When the intent is directional but the format signals collaboration, participants can experience a disorienting mismatch.
I’m curious whether CFAR has considered hybrid formats that are explicit about which parts are directional and which are truly collaborative, or if you are leaning entirely on shifting intentions to fit the existing format—even if that means letting conversations drift away from anything adjacent to rationality or x-risk. I don’t think there’s an inherently right answer here, but understanding where you are on the spectrum and being transparent about this choice could help participants set their expectations, or self-filter regarding whether CFAR is a good fit for them at all.
Seeing this as a spectrum rather than a binary seems important because it prevents participants from running into “invisible” restrictions. Mutual learning and meeting people where they are at are great, but it doesn’t seem realistic to try to be all things to all people. It’s therefore important to be ready to say “this is what we offer, these are our constraints, respond as you will” even if where you think it is best to draw those lines has a wide range of valid answers. Sometimes a person is incompatible with an organization and that doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault.
A second, arguably more complex and charged dynamic I am wondering how you intend to navigate is responsibility for managing participant capacity. Is CFAR explicitly working to build participants’ ability to recognize misalignment, maintain their sense of agency while in seemingly asymmetric power dynamics, and advocate for their needs? Or is the plan for CFAR to create sufficiently careful environments that participants won’t need those skills? Or to screen applicants for having the capacity for self-advocacy already? Your post makes it sound like you are primarily taking the second approach, which is fine, but I am wondering how you are assessing the trade-offs involved.
For transparency, I personally believe in building capacity for self-advocacy and agency, with community care supporting that development and acting as a fallback when capacity isn’t present, but I recognize that different approaches work for different purposes/people. What I am pushing for here is an explicit articulation of the balance you are striking so that participants can make a fully informed choice as to whether they wish to join.
In any case, I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your post and willingness to share CFAR’s evolution publicly.
Setting prevalence aside and taking your case study as representative of some subset, there are some other things that might be going on.
First, a desire to have someone else initiate maps to the Allowing quadrant of the Wheel of Consent, which minimizes effort while maximizing feeling desired. That said, true Allowing should still be compatible with giving clear responses, so this doesn’t by itself explain the aversion you are seeing.
Second, emotional reactions follow the pattern: event ⇒ meaning (via priors) ⇒ affect ⇒ narrative. Suppose this woman holds strongly negative priors about men’s motivations. A consent request is not simply coordination, it’s an implicit demand for legibility. But if she sees the interaction as inherently adversarial, that’s giving you leverage. And if you do all the right things, that can be perceived as just more manipulation.
Now consider the internal conflict. She feels good about you initiating, then has a negative reaction to the consent request...while also consciously endorsing the belief that asking for consent is a Good Thing. Add the background tension of wanting to interact with men while viewing them as partially adversarial...and social advice to “trust your intuition” combined with long-term dissatisfaction with her relationship status and wanting to change it. That’s substantial cognitive dissonance with no widely shared conceptual handles. Hence the shutdown.
So the behavior you describe may be better explained by Allowing plus aversion to legibility (under distrust), rather than by a desire for nonconsent.
Other, non-substantive notes:
LessWrong may have high decoupling norms, but on charged topics like this, disclaimers may help prevent contextualizers from inferring views you likely don’t endorse.
Watch for selection effects! Women who give clear signals and are comfortable with explicit consent often pair off quickly. The women who remain visible in dating contexts—and thus command more of your attention—are disproportionately those who communicate more ambiguously.