The essay by Noelle Perdue has some blind spots but she was struck by one of their kink practices:

The wider network of Effectively Altruistic, Bay Area AI tech brotherhood has been covered on and off- in varying degrees of concern- for their seemingly wide community interest in kink, BDSM and “Consensual Non-Consent,” aka rape play. I experienced this myself, sitting in a circle of self-identified rationalists as they explained to me the pleasures of “red means no” parties; full-contact “rape orgies” where participants are encouraged to fight back.

…

(Being forced to have sex is) a relatively common fantasy in individuals, but one I’ve never seen such widespread community interest in outside the Bay Area.

Scott Alexander and Scott Aaronson mostly want a woman to produce and raise babies. Gwern does not seem to post much about sexuality. Kelsey Piper probably keeps that to Tumblr and Project Lawful although she is queer and polyamorous. Caroline Ellison was into submission to men and being in a hierarchical harem. Duncan Sabien didn’t mention BDSM fantasies in his post about what he was like in bed. Yudkowsky is into dominance, sadism, and horny Japanese pop culture. Michael Vassar is into much younger women and at least one person says he advocates sex between adults and girls as young as 12 (but not that he commits such acts). Brent Dill liked master/slave relationships with much younger women which are a kind of consensual non-consent. Polyamory is big in this subculture. I don’t know much about Burning Man culture. But I can’t recall anyone in Bay Area rationalism and EA expressing interest in rape parties until Aella showed up. So is this like Yudkowsky spreading AI doomerism, and Alexander spreading neoreaction?

There is a difference between old school SoCal kink, where you spend a lot of time making fursuits and paddles and occasionally use them with someone fetching, and Aella’s version where you rent a house or a field and go to town on each other. Kink culture stresses skill and technical proficiency whereas Aella likes to feel helpless in the power of big strong men. The Rationalists don’t like the protective measures which kinksters have learned from experience, like limiting or banning substance use, safewords, and joining a national or international kink community so you can get a second opinion about that proposition on FetLife. (Yudkowsky has posted “of course I use safewords, but what if I didn’t?” and I have seen a claim that the rape parties involve games like drugs roulette). Many of them are hostile to mainstream ideas of informed consent, preferring a Libertarian approach where if you sign a contract what happens after is your responsibility.

Edit to mention Vassar

Edit; in her 2023 How my Consensual Nonconsent Orgies Work, Aella says that she has enough Bay Area people to play with and she is no longer actively recruiting outside her current social network. I did not know her playmates included so many LW people given how many kinksters live in the SF Bay Area and given that these are high-risk group activities in an overwhelming sensory space. She does not respond to a comment reaching out from another Bay Area playspace, or a question about herpes risk.

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    I think that some 1980s and 1990s fantasy like The Mists of Avalon and a sprawling unfinished series has the “women are magical, men are not” trope. The author of Mists covered up for a pederast. I did not know this idea also comes up in Satanism.

    Some forms of sex magic have the idea that men need a female ritual partner to be complete, which echos Scott Aaronson’s idea that he needs a woman to bear his babies to be complete and in a just world he would be the chief rabbi and the peasants and craft workers would give him their prettiest daughter.

    Someone called Lennox posted some thoughts on “ideological drift” or Of Marx and Moloch where he seems to say that his time in Effective Altruism was channelling his frustration that he had not pair-bonded yet. Even though he sees many problems with EA, like the gigantic probabilistic models with incredible numbers of assumptions layered on assumptions which can only ever approve of a limited range of interventions, he still seems to think their approach is right.

    Someone shared a list of incidents at these parties with me but I don’t have the link handy and I would be uncomfortable posting it anyways. Right now we have the stories by people close to Aella that they are responsible and fun, and the Buddhist poster who says there are drugs and unclear boundaries. I would not recommend that anyone explore risky things with our friends.

    Edit, was the sprawling series Wheel of Time?

    Edit, Lennox’ post features Bob Jacobs in the comments politely explaining that Effective Altruists don’t understand socialism and are very open to race pseudoscience/HBD and hostile to arguments like “a variety of studies show that cooperatives are more effective than hierarchical corporations, and EA orgs could easily be structured as coops”