Three Villages in a Trenchcoat, Post I

Epistemic Status: 15 years working as a therapist, 6+ of them with rationalist and EA clients. 9 years teaching and directing at rationality camps and workshops, as well as being a member of several of this community's overlapping subcultures. Disclaimer: I finished my first draft of this article and its two subsequent ones months ago and sent them out for feedback to various people before a bunch of stuff happened in my life that derailed me from finishing, and in the meantime a big ol' brouhaha started around Slutcon 2 and various frictions this article was meant to highlight within the rationalist and EA community surfaced in The Discourse. All of which is to say this post isn't about any particular incident, but the underlying dynamics that make many of them arise. When I make claims about how things go wrong and why, I'm drawing on a mix of research, observations, and both clinical and non-clinical experiences within these communities and beyond them. TL;DR : It's helpful to think of the rationality/EA community as a village (social scene, professional network, dating pool, housing market, all tied together by shared culture and communal events), but it's also ultimately misle