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It's better if potential donors are persuaded by content, not by form, ie. choice of words.
Regarding the lawyer: Perhaps I have a wrong idea both about the legal nature of the document and about what a lawyer does. But yes, in my imagination a lawyer is able to advise you on how to formulate a policy clearly and remove vagueness. So I might go to the lawyer and ask: ‘If this were to be legally binding, how would we have to write it?’
My imagination might be wrong, though – I haven't dealt with lawyers much.
Some suggestions:
- Go over this with a lawyer and let them formulate it right.
- Replace ‘romantic and/or sexual’ with ‘intimate’.
- Right now those terms are at the top level of the bullets. One could make them stand out less by turning the hierarchy around. Example:
Sufficient causes for recusal of a fund member: Applicant is a close family member, or is/was a romantic/sexual partner within the last year.
Not sufficient for recusal, but should be made public: Intimate relationship that lasted longer than two weeks and ended more than a year ago. / Current intimate relationship with a third person who is in an intimate relationship with the applicant.
- Pull things together to make them more innocuous:
The fund member has shared particularly intense experiences with the applicant on the level of, eg. a week-long silent meditation retreat, a CFAR workshop, or a shared psychedelic experience.
Who would get to see this policy statement? If I imagine myself in the shoes of a more conservative potential donor, who is checking the fine print as part of their due diligence, I would be put off by phrases like ‘metamour’, ‘consumption of drugs’ and the repeated mentioning of sexual relationships.
Thanks for your comment on my article! I appreciate your thoughts and have left a lengthy answer.
I've written on LessWrong about a fairly airtight approach to psychosomatic wrist pain: A cognitive intervention for wrist pain
And I think it's important that every article writing about physical causes and interventions also contain a section about psychosomatics. Because the people prone to psychosomatic wrist pain might read the warnings of permanent physical damage and disability, and enter a vicious circle of worrying leading to pain leading to more worrying. This is how it was for me, as I describe in the article.