Many people appreciate love, art, and even daydreaming, without realizing that they inherently make you stronger.  While most people only think of evolution as a competitive tooth and nail fight to the top, in fact cooperation is also a strategy that evolved in this environment.  People who share and cooperate with each other simply outcompete those who don’t.

This past summer, Scott Alexander posted a piece called Meditations on Moloch on his excellent blog, Star Slate Codex.  I like this piece, since it is a strange mashup of ideas from Ginsberg’s Howl, AI disaster scenarios from Bostrum’s Superintelligence, and dark age ideas about how society should be structured from one of these new conservative types.  This piece has really captured the imagination of the rationalist community and many people I know seem to fully agree with his viewpoint.  I happen to disagree with some of the premises, so I want to clarify my thoughts on the matter.  

It’s very hard to sum up Alexander’s post, as you might imagine from the disparate sources he is trying to bring together.  But one key focus is on “multipolar traps,” in which competition causes us to trade away things we value in order to optimize for one specific goal.  He gives many examples of multipolar traps, all of which are problematic for various reasons, but I will try to give one example that Bay Area home buyers can relate to: the two-income trap.  Alexander believes that two-income couples are driving up home prices, and that if everyone agreed to have only one earner per household, home prices would naturally drop.  Here is how Alexander sums up this particular multipolar trap:

It’s theorized that sufficiently intense competition for suburban houses in good school districts meant that people had to throw away lots of other values – time at home with their children, financial security – to optimize for house-buying-ability or else be consigned to the ghetto.

From a god’s-eye-view, if everyone agrees not to take on a second job to help win the competition for nice houses, then everyone will get exactly as nice a house as they did before, but only have to work one job. From within the system, absent a government literally willing to ban second jobs, everyone who doesn’t get one will be left behind.

So he is describing a sort of competition that helps no one, but that no one can escape from.  It’s hard to think of how folks could coordinate to solve this, though a law capping real estate prices seems more realistic than banning second jobs.  I actually think this is a bad example, since it seems to put the burden of driving up home prices on two-income families.  In fact, I am confident that home prices demand two middle income earners because of the huge amount of capital amassed by the very rich.  If all middle income earners coordinated their efforts and stopped buying homes priced above a certain level, I predict the crash in real estate prices wouldn’t last very long.  The very rich would just continue snapping up real estate and drive the price right back up.  

Of course I’m happy to allow that multipolar traps do exist, government corruption is a persistent bane to civilization, for example.  And Alexander himself points out that the universe has traits that protect humans from the destructive impact of multipolar traps.  In his view, there are four reasons human values aren’t essentially destroyed by competition: 1. Excess resources, 2. Physical limitations, 3. Utility maximization, and 4. Coordination.  Let me try to address each point in turn.

First, here is what Alexander says about excess resources:

This is … an age of excess carrying capacity, an age when we suddenly find ourselves with a thousand-mile head start on Malthus. As Hanson puts it, this is the dream time.

As long as resources aren’t scarce enough to lock us in a war of all against all, we can do silly non-optimal things – like art and music and philosophy and love – and not be outcompeted by merciless killing machines most of the time.

This actually seems like a misunderstanding of what resources actually are.  Humans aren’t like reindeer on an island who die out after eating up all the food.  Most animals are unable to manage the resources around them.  (Though those other farming species ARE fascinating.)  But for humans, resources are a function of raw materials and technology.  Innovation is what drives increases in efficiency or even entirely new classes of resources  (i.e. hunter and gatherers couldn’t make much use of petroleum).  So in fact we are always widening the available resources.

I don’t believe we are in some Dream Time, when humans have a strange abundance of resources, and that we are doomed to grow our population until we reach a miserable Malthusian equilibrium.  It’s well understood that human fertility goes down in advanced (rich) cultures and is more highly correlated with female education than food production.  Humans seem to be pretty good about reigning in their population once they are educated and healthy enough.  There is some concern about fertility cults like Mormons and Hutterites, but time isn’t kind to strange cults.  Alexander himself points out that their defection rates are very high.  It’s not fun taking care of so many kids, I hear.  

But actually, innovation might just be a function of population, so the more people we have, the more innovation we will have.  Innovation (and conservation) will always expand the resources available to us.  It’s foolish to think that we have learned all there is to know about manipulating matter and energy or that we will somehow stop the trend of waste reduction.

But a more interesting point to consider is that art, music, philosophy, and love actually make cultures MORE competitive.  The battlefield of evolution is littered with “merciless killing machines” who have been conquered by playful, innovative humans.  This has been my most surprising insight as I examined my objections to Alexander’s Moloch or Hanson’s Dream Time.  In fact, it’s the cultures with art, philosophy, and love that have utterly crushed and destroyed their competitors.  And the reason is complex and hard to see.  Surely art and love are facilitators of cooperation, which allows groups to cohere around shared narratives and shared identities.  But Hanson and Alexander are dismissing these as frivolous when they actually form the basis of supremacy.  Even unstructured play is probably essential to this process of innovation that allows some cultures to dominate.  Madeline Levine has a lot to say about this.

Alexander alludes to this poem by Zack Davis that imagines a future world of such stiff competition that no one can indulge in even momentary daydreaming.  But this is a deeply flawed understanding of innovation.  Innovation is about connecting ideas, and agents that aren’t allowed to explore idea space won’t be able to innovate.  So daydreaming is probably essential to creativity.  In rationalist terms, Davis imagines a world in which over-fitted hill climbers will dominate, when in fact, they will all only reach local maxima, just as they always have done.  They will be outcompeted by agents who can break out of the local maxima.  It’s especially ironic that he uses contract drafting as an example where each side has an incentive to scour ideaspace for advantageous provisions that will still be amenable to the counterparty.

It’s strikes me as very odd to think that human values are somehow at odds with natural forces.  Alexander brings up how horrible it is that a wasp would lay its eggs inside a caterpillar so that it’s young could hatch and consume from the inside out.  Yet, humans lovingly spoon beef baby food into their toddler’s mouths that is derived from factory farm feedlots, which are so filthy that some cows fall over and can no longer walk, but are just bulldozed up into the meat grinder anyway.  So much for tender human sensibilities.  This might be a good example of where sociopaths can play a role in the population dynamics.  A few psycho factory farmers can provide food for the vast squeamish billions who lack the stomach for such slaughter.

Because really, love conquers all, literally.  Alexander overlooks this:

But the current rulers of the universe – call them what you want, Moloch, Gnon, Azathoth, whatever – want us dead, and with us everything we value. Art, science, love, philosophy, consciousness itself, the entire bundle. And since I’m not down with that plan, I think defeating them and taking their place is a pretty high priority.

In fact, the universe has been putting coordination problems in front of living organisms for  billions of years.  Multicellular organisms overcame the competition between single cells, social animals herded together to survive, and humans harnessed art, science, philosophy, and maybe even consciousness, to take cooperation to a whole other level.  Far from being a strange weak anomaly, cooperation in all its forms is the tried and true strategy of evolutionary survivors.  Alexander makes an allusion to this at the end of his essay when he mentions Elua:

Elua. He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.

The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”

But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of unfortunate accidents.

No one is sure how Elua survives?  Well, it’s clear that multicellular organisms outcompete single-celled organisms.  The cooperative armies of the early civilizations defeated whatever hunter gatherer tribes they came across.  The nonviolent resistance of India ended British rule, and the Civil Rights movement in America mirrored that success.  Modern America has drawn millions of immigrants in part due to its arts and culture, which are known around the world.  Coordination is a powerful strategy.  Love, art, and culture are all tools of coordination.  They are also probably tools of innovation.  If creativity is drawing connections between previously unconnected concepts, then having a broader palette of concepts to choose from is an obvious advantage.  

Cooperation has certainly evolved, and so have human values.  I am with Pinker on this.  Alexander prefers to quote esoteric texts in which time flows downhill.  But in Pinker’s world, we are evolving upward.  Why not?  Life is some strange entropy ratchet after all, why not just go with it.  But if our values are tools that have evolved and are evolving, then it doesn’t make sense to lock them in place and jealously protect them.

Alexander is a good transhumanist, so he literally wants humanity to build a god-like Artificial Intelligence which will forever enshrine our noble human virtues and protect us against any alternative bad AI gods.  I can’t really swallow this proposition of recursively self-improving AI.  My most mundane objection is that all software has bugs and bugs are the result of unexpected input, so it seems impossible to build software that will become godlike without crashing.  A deeper argument might be that intelligence is a network effect that occurs between embodied, embedded agents, which are tightly coupled to their environment, and this whole hairy mess isn’t amenable to instantaneous ascension.

But I will set aside my minor objections because this idea of fixed goals is very beloved in the rationalist scene.  God forbid that anyone mess with our precious utility functions.  Yet, this seems like a toy model of goals.  Goals are something that animals have which are derived from our biological imperatives.  For most animals, the goals are fairly fixed, but humans have a biological imperative to sociability.  So our goals, and indeed our very desires, are subject to influence from others.   And, as we can see from history, human goals are becoming more refined.   We no longer indulge in cat burning, for example.  This even happens on the scale of the individual, as young children put aside candy and toys and take up alcohol and jobs.  An AI with fixed goals would be stunted in some important ways.  It would be unable to refine its goals based on new understandings of the universe.  It would actually be at a disadvantage to agents that are able to update their goals

If we simply extrapolate from historical evolution, we can imagine a world in which humans themselves are subsumed into a superorganism in the same way that single-celled organisms joined together to form multicellular organisms.  Humans are already superintelligences compared to bacteria, and yet we rely on bacteria for our survival.  The idea that a superintelligent AI would be able to use nano-replicators to take over the galaxy seems to overlook the fact that DNA has been building nano-replicators to do exactly that for billions of years.  Any new contestants to the field are entering a pretty tough neighborhood.

So my big takeaway from this whole train of thought is that, surprisingly, love and cooperation are the strategies of conquerors.  Daydreamers are the masters of innovation.  These are the things I can put into effect in my everyday life.  I want to take more time to play and daydream to find the solutions to my problems.  I want to love more and cooperate more.  I want to read more novels and indulge in more art.  Because, of course, this is the only way that I will be able to crush the competition.

I attended the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit, and here is what I learned.  Effective Altruism is the idea that charitable giving should actually produce measurable results.  It’s an evidence-based approach that is supposedly in contrast to more conventional charities.  Some people have told me that large groups like the Gates Foundation do demand evidence of efficacy when funding projects, so it’s not clear how different Effective Altruism really is.  Apparently Peter Singer is a big promoter of this movement, but I haven’t read his work. One of the other attendees suggested that I start with Singer’s essay entitled: Famine, Affluence, and Morality.

I am attracted to this idea of measurably effective giving because I feel that I have been fairly successful in my life, but I have been failing to give back enough.  I have been very influenced by Seligman’s PERMA model when considering my own self-actualization.  PERMA is an acronym describing well-being.  It encompasses Positive emotions (happiness), Engagement (state of flow), Relationships (social life), Meaning (involvement in things greater than ourselves), and Accomplishment (success).  I am not really a very happy person (I suspect I’ve always had a more active right prefrontal cortex.), but I do find my work engaging and I have some decent relationships.  I have been fairly successful in my career, but one thing I do feel that I am lacking is Meaning.  I feel that giving to help people in need will actually help my own well-being by adding more meaning to my life.

I heard about the Effective Altruism movement at various rationalist meetups and also at CFAR.  I have been very inspired by the many bright people in these communities that truly hold the greater good as their highest life goals.  I have met many gifted folks who feel obligated to apply their talents to having a positive impact on the world.  I often feel humbled when I compare their ambitious and noble sentiments to my own narrow self-interest, and I am grateful to them for providing a model of altruism and service which I can strive to emulate.  Of course there are always murmurings from the Dark Enlightenment fringe that perhaps seeking the greater good is not the the most virtuous goal.  But I haven’t been turned to the dark side yet and remain in light for the moment.

One of the most influential Effective Altruism organizations is GiveWell, which evaluates charities to find the ones that that are “evidence backed, thoroughly vetted, and underfunded.”  I  heard about this group a couple of years ago and have previously donated to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which focuses on deworming efforts in sub-Saharan Africa and is still a top-rated GiveWell charity.  I had no idea that intestinal worms were such a problem and that it was so cheap to treat.  I guess it stands to reason that folks won’t be able to work or go to school if they are too sick from parasitic illness.

Currently, GiveWell’s top rated charity is GiveDirectly, which donates cash directly to poor people in Kenya and Uganda.  They give recipients a single lump sum (equivalent to about 1-year’s income) and allow the recipients to spend the money any way they see fit.  I was initially attracted to this idea since it lacked the paternalistic quality that most charities have.  The mechanism of cash transfer is M-Pesa.  I gave a small amount earlier this year, but when I saw Paul Neihaus’ presentation, I was completely blown away.  I had no idea how rigorous GiveDirectly’s methodology was.  The most impressive thing to me was the fact that GiveDirectly conducted a preregistered Randomized Controlled Trial to test the effectiveness of their giving.  This is basically the gold standard of research, and many academic studies don’t meet this level of rigor.  The study confirmed the following benefits of GiveDirectly’s program:

Transfers from GiveDirectly have large, positive, sustainable impacts across a diverse set of outcomes, including:

•  Assets, with recipients increasing asset holdings by 58% primarily through investments in livestock and home improvements (including iron roofs)
• Business and agricultural income, with income gains implying a 28% annual rate of return on transfers
• Expenditures, with increases in nearly every category, but not tobacco, alcohol, or gambling
• Food security, with a 42% reduction in the number of days children go without food
• Mental health, with large reductions in stress and depression and increases in life satisfaction, as measured using validated psychological scales

The study also found no evidence of impacts on crime, conflict, or inflation.
–http://www.givedirectly.org/evidence.php

One detail Niehaus noted in his presentation at the EA Summit was that domestic violence was reduced and recipient’s cortisol levels actually went down.  This is just amazing to me.  It’s one thing to give people a self-report questionnaire asking how stressed they are, but actually measuring this physiological marker for stress provided even more evidence of a benefit.

I can’t emphasize enough how truly impressed I was by GiveDirectly’s methodology.  They are extremely transparent and actually track the number of bribes paid by recipients in the process of receiving the cash.  This is an extremely hard-nosed and realistic thing to track, and Niehaus suggested that few other charities are tracking this sort of information.  GiveDirectly also makes excellent use of technology.  In Kenya, they use a service called M-Pesa, which is a mobile phone based way to transfer money.  They pay a lot of attention to fraud prevention and have several high tech solutions for this.  They discovered that a simple way to identify the poorest people who are most in need is that they tend to have thatched vs. metal roofs.  GiveDirectly used satellite imagery to help validate eligibility by having the images judged cheaply via Mechanical Turk.  Their data entry procedures are also first rate, and include geotagged timestamps for every data point as it’s collected in the field.  This also helps cut down on fraud.

It’s interesting to hear stories about how the money is spent.  The payments are in one big chunk deliberately, so that people can make real investments.  One person built a fish pond, another bought a power saw and set up a business cutting wood for hire.  All sorts of little livelihoods were launched, from musicians who bought guitars to earn money playing in clubs, to a person who bought a motorbike to taxi folks around on.  As Niehaus pointed out, there is no charity donating power saws to the poor, and not every person would be inspired to set up a sawing business.  But giving a chunk of cash to each person allows them to turn their own skills and inclinations into vocations for themselves.  This is not something that could have been planned from above.

As impressed as I was by GiveDirectly, I must say that I was surprised that their presentation was in a side room, while a CFAR presentation was given in the main theatre.  If this was a principled decision, it suggests that the organizers have an interesting philosophy.  They appeared to privilege the importance of CFAR, which teaches rationality techniques to high functioning first world people, over GiveDirectly, which is helping some of the poorest people in the developing world.  This is an interesting proposition that seems to mirror Peter Thiel’s thesis that innovation is more likely to save the world than globalization.

Thiel’s general thesis is hard to argue with, the world clearly needs huge innovations in energy, water, and food to support the world’s burgeoning middle classes.  Innovation is more frequently driven by highly functional developed world people than low functioning developing world people, so I can see why Thiel would want to invest here.  But I will say that this bet is a long shot.  It’s much harder to throw money at the innovation problem.  I attended a CFAR workshop and have a great deal of respect for their team and their approach, but it’s very hard to estimate how much world saving innovation will be created by each dollar donated to them.  Risk averse turtle that I am, I prefer the sure bet that my cash will directly improve the lives of people who are the worst off.

I attended Ephemerisle for the first time this year, and it was quite an amazing experience.  Ephemerisle is sort of a floating community set up in the Sacramento Delta, comprised of several “islands” that are formed by joining together houseboats and floating platforms.  I understand this sort of thing is also known as a raft-up.  This event was originally conceived by seasteader Patri Friedman, and though it resembles more of a floating Burning Man, it still retains some of that libertarian seasteading flavor.  I found myself in several friendly arguments about the overreach of governments. (Though I have yet to hear a convincing libertarian story on how to handle externalities.)  One fellow joked that the original idea was to promote seasteading by moving this floating party from the delta, out to the bay, and finally to the ocean, where it would attract folks from far and wide just to the enjoy the freewheeling celebration.

I was bunked on the big island of Titan, known as the authoritarian party island, since this island had rules(!) such as wearing a safety whistle and having a life vest handy.  Risk averse nerd that I am, I was more than happy to comply with rules bent on keeping me alive.  Titan’s party credentials were sealed by its huge floating dance floor and DJs blasting electronic music late into the night.  Every night.  Until sunrise practically.  Which was challenging for me since I am not generally a party animal.

I have never been to Burning Man, and I do love my comfort, but I decided to take the plunge and attend Ephemerisle this year as an experiment in Comfort Zone Expansion.  I attended a CFAR workshop in June, and this was one idea that stood out for me: CoZE or Comfort Zone Expansion.  It’s the idea that we need to gather more data by trying new things.  CFAR’s seminars generally rely on Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 model of cognition:

• System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious
• System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious

System 1 is something of a pattern matcher, it needs a database of experiences to match against.  Trying new things expands that database and makes your intuition more powerful.  Thus, I found myself at Ephemerisle on a purloined bunk at 5 am for 5 nights in a row with music pounding in my ears, in spite of the ear plugs screwed tightly in place.

Unfortunately, I didn’t understand that I was really purchasing a shared bunk, not a bunk for myself, when I signed up.  At 6’6”, I found that arrangement too cramped for my taste.  Luckily, the assigned sleeping was fairly flexible and I was able to locate ad hoc bunks each night to sprawl my gangly frame out on.

So what was this Ephemerisle thing?  It was certainly a dance party at night, and a hot, sunny boating vacation during the day, and a non-stop intellectual smorgasbord with insightful conversations to be had around every corner.  But one unexpected aspect of this trip that I hadn’t foreseen was the uncanny sense of community.

 Though the small circle of friends I had back in Buffalo who lived in shared housing was somewhat similar, I had the sense of living in a little village for perhaps the first time in my life.  There were about 150 people on the island most of the time, which is a nice comfortable Dunbar number.  When I woke up each day, I would go forth in search of caffeine and bacon, and, lo and behold, I was surrounded by other folks doing exactly that same thing.

I am used to quiet mornings by myself shuffling around my apartment making my own tea and breakfast while by girlfriend snoozes away in the bedroom.  But mornings on Ephemerisle were communal affairs.  I saw others around me pursuing the same morning goals and it felt … comforting.  Modern life is so isolating with each little nuclear family tucked away, separate from all the others.

 It’s a warm, inclusive feeling to share experiences with your neighbors.  Each evening at sunset, the entire population of Titan was up on the roofs of the houseboats, taking in the beautiful view, enjoying the golden hour together, socially.  It felt really natural and compelling.  We humans probably evolved in little groups about this size, and I love the neo-paleo idea of intentional communities like this.  We need to bring back the village and the shared community.  But these should be communities of choice rather than the forced obligation of villages in the past.  (Of course I would think that, being a liberal.)

So what else did I learn at Ephemerisle?

 Well, being a Bay Area crowd, of course there were lightning talks, since we do love our talks.  At Ephemerisle these are called Memocracy.  Christine Peterson urged the women of the crowd to forsake the bad boys and give the good guys a chance by dating them for at least two months to give the oxytocin a chance to kick in.  Though she acknowledged the allure of bad boys and noted the common strategy of women marrying good guys and cheating with bad boys (cuckolding!), she warned of the dangers involved with that approach.  Good guy that I perceive myself to be, I fully concur with her sage advice.  Stay away from those players, you wise females, it’ll end in tears.

Divia Caroline Eden talked about TagTeach and operant conditioning.  She reiterated the idea that one should make as few errors as possible when learning a new skill.  This was non-obvious to me at first, but was also touched on by Michael Valentine at the CFAR workshop.  It made more sense to me when I considered that you shouldn’t practice making mistakes.  Thus to learn a task, Divia recommended breaking it down into the smallest blocks possible and focusing on precision before speed.  She suggested that if you can’t perform a task in the first two or three attempts, to make it simpler.  I hadn’t heard her speak before, but she seemed very knowledgeable on this topic.

All the talks were quite interesting, but I will gloss over some others briefly.  Fellow QS’er Dan Dascalescu talked about a blood work service called Inside Tracker that recommends optimal supplementation based on your actual nutrient levels.  Conor White-Sullivan spoke on his passion for learning and being inspired by Ben Franklin’s Junto.  Randy Hencken spoke about the opportunities being explored by the Seasteading Institute and clued me in to some show called Silicon Valley that had a seasteading episode.  I have to check out any show with a character modeled after Peter Thiel.  A fellow from Honduras was promoting the opportunities for libertarians to experiment with new forms of government in Honduras’ new autonomous free trade zones.

Bleys Goodson gave a talk on harm reduction, which I missed, but I did have a chance to talk with him and his thesis is similar to David Pearce, who also dreams of removing all suffering from the world, even to the extent of modifying ecosystems so that predators won’t need to prey on other creatures.  I had been skeptical of this approach, arguing that once we remove suffering, we will effectively narrow the full range of sensation.  It may even turn out that any state short of complete bliss will seem like suffering in this world.  To which Bleys effectively replied, “So what, that would be better than this world.”  I thought this over for a minute and I had to concede the point.  I really can’t argue against those who would reduce the suffering in this world.  It’s really a worthy goal that’s worth the trade-off of a compressed range of experience.

Of course I chatted with a bunch of tech people here and there.  I learned that there is a stealthy hierarchical social network platform being built called Urbit.  I heard about a distributed internet resource platform called MaidSafe.  One fellow made the misinformed claim that the Deep Web was resistant to government control, neglecting the fact that the NSA can tap all the pipes and capture data in transit, so it doesn’t matter if the websites you visit are indexed or not.  But it’s interesting to think about the fact that the majority of the internet is unavailable to search engines.

There was much discussion of leadership, and it was pointed out that leaders must not show fear or uncertainty, since we all mimic each other and it’s unhelpful for a team to mimic fear when undertaking a project.  I was reminded of a new age woo weaver, called the Visionary Activist, who asserted that:

We now know that the alpha wolf is the charismatic one who invites everyone in the pack into creative play. And you can identify an alpha wolf within 10 days of birth because it is the cub in the litter with the lowest resting heart rate. The calmest, coolest wolf turns out to be the most charismatic, the most fun.

I couldn’t actually find any supporting evidence for this “fact,” which appears to have been pulled out of some rear orifice, but I like the idea nonetheless.  I don’t like the idea of a domineering leader.  I am more comfortable striving to be a leader who invites allies into creative play.

I was also turned on to René Girard’s Mimetic Desire thesis, which suggests that desire is essentially social in nature, which fits into my conceptual framework nicely.  It seems to fit into the whole friendly AI question, and might give a clue as to how a group of agents with diverse desires could actually outcompete a single agent with static desires.  It also throws more cold water on hard individualism, which I will always delight in doing.

Unlike a lot of events that I normally attend, there was much talk of poetry and music.  Jim O. coordinated a poetry reading and brought a wonderful collection of books.  I literally had tears streaming down my face as people read selections like Robert Frost’s Acquainted with the Night and ee cummings’ What of a Much of a Which of the Wind.  I learned that I truly admire the work of Wallace Stevens, who I hadn’t heard of before.  Joe B. shared poems like Six Significant Landscapes and The Man with the Blue Guitar.  And then there was the hilarious and apropos I’m a Modern Man by George Carlin, who might well have been mocking half the attendees at Ephemerisle.  Selections like Tim Minchin’s Storm, Circus Animals Desertion by Yeats, and Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel rounded out the reading.  I was remarkably moved by this moment of culture, and it reminded me that I haven’t read poetry in years, let alone heard it read aloud with strong emotions.  This is a deficit I look forward to correcting.

As for music, I learned that there is a genre called ElectroSwing, which proved to be quite popular.  It combines old-timey jazz with modern progressive beats, and I actually found that I could dance to it just a little bit, unlike the jarring DubStep that the kids like to spaz out to these days.  I asked around and the consensus was that Caravan Palace is one of the bands to definitely check out in this style.  Though there was a diverse range of tastes represented with some people preferring trap music artists like Dirty South Joe, 90s artists Fantastic Plastic Machine, and even modern harpist Joanna Newsom.

Now I want to address a sensitive topic that presented something of a moral dilemma for me.  A small number of women at Ephemerisle were topless or nude at certain times during the event.  (Some men were nude as well.)  Now, I would certainly never disparage public nudity at an event like this that has liberty as a core value.  But newbie that I am to these sorts of events, I had a difficult time dealing with it.  Given the puritanical and even prudish norms of American society, public nudity would be expected to trigger some amount of sexual arousal in onlookers.  I am willing to allow that different social norms have been established in communities like this and Burning Man.  Yet, I remain skeptical that at least some of the people that chose to be nude weren’t engaging in some sort of explicit exhibitionist sexual play.

Even if the nudists just wanted to feel free of arbitrary social constraints, that’s fine.  All of the participants at this event were well-behaved, and the only rumors I heard of unpleasant incidents involved party crashers who were quickly escorted off of the island.  I mentioned my discomfort at seeing these naked young women to a friend of mine and he reassured me that they wanted to share their beauty and there was nothing wrong with appreciating that beauty.  And that made me feel better to a degree.  But seeing a topless twenty-something woman hula-hooping or giving a lap dance to the judges in a cooking contest triggers more of a physiological response than some dispassionate admiration of beauty.  Really, even a young woman sitting topless and nodding along sagely as conversation turns to Federal Reserve policy strikes me as remarkably kinky. 

I’m the first to admit that I am being a prude here.  When Christine Peterson notes the attraction that women have for bad boys, the converse should also be noted.  Men are often attracted to bad girls as well.  Esther Perel points this out in her excellent Ted Talk on maintaining the spark in long-term relationships.  The forbidden is erotic.  Transgression makes desire more potent.  The most obvious moral dilemma I ran into was this: At what point does a forty-something like myself cross the line into perversion by ogling naked women in their twenties?  Regardless of how the Ephemerisle community may view this sort of thing, I don’t want to think of myself as a dirty old man.  I subscribe to virtue ethics in these scenarios.  Style and character matter.

And yet when faced with a moral challenge, I had a remarkably difficult time resisting the urge to look at these nude women.  I had the slightly unpleasant experience of struggling for control of my own involuntary physiological responses.  I will grant that this dilemma would have been greatly reduced if more of the nude women had been my own age.  (Is Generation X more modest than Millennials?  You sure won’t see me getting naked in public any time soon.)  Large age disparities equate to large power disparities, which I find ugly in any relationship.  There is a beauty to symmetry in relationships.  And this is where I realize that the sexual play between a voyeur and exhibitionist inherently lacks symmetry, even when the ages of the participants are comparable.  The arousal of the voyeur simply cannot be reciprocated by a exhibitionist exposing herself to a large group.  So yeah, I guess I am going to be a stick-in-the-mud on principle here.

And, of course, bringing this discussion home to my girlfriend of 17 years led to some fairly passionate discussions.  She’s quite a jealous person, so we had to work hard to come to a mutual agreement on the matter.  In the end she conceded that it’s unreasonable for her to expect me not to ever be attracted to other women, and that we both value honesty enough to deal with the consequences of talking about it.  For her part, she acknowledged feeling undervalued by a society that places such a premium on the youthful beauty of women.  But she dresses very androgynously (a throwback to when her queer sister used to help dress her), and she learned that showing off her figure a bit more will garner more attention from both men and women, which I don’t have a problem with, so this was a productive crisis for both of us.

Overall, I was deeply impacted by my experience at Ephemerisle. It certainly far surpassed any expectations I had about Comfort Zone Expansion.  I came out of it with a renewed interest in intentional communities, a newfound love of boating, a new favorite musical genre (ElectroSwing!), a whole plethora of new ideas to explore, a greater capacity to gracefully deal with public nudity, and really many new social connections, because I met some amazing people that I look forward to getting to know better in the future.  I want to extend many thanks to all of the people who worked so hard to make this event happen, it really was a transformational experience for me.