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I've gotten into some light twitter drama around Vibecamp, specifically whether it's appropriate to have a midnight nude pool party and a designated sex tent at an event where children are allowed, and even encouraged, to be brought by parents. Here's the full text of my tweet:
I've had this argument with the rat/post-rat scene before, and it always baffles me how strong the resistance is. I've had people directly say that no, having nudity and a sex tent LOWERS risks!
I've had multiple people saying that my evidence/argument are weak and burning man does it, so it's totally fine.
I'm genuinely trying to have reasonable discussions with people, but I just don't get this sort of thing. The inferential gap here is so large it's hard to fathom how to begin to bridge it. People arguing that it's actually good and healthy to have kids around nude adults they or their parents don't know seem extremely alien to me. Some of these people even have kids, apparently!
Either way, I love the rat/post-rat/EA/tpot scene, I've met many wonderful and awesome people there. Compared to the average normie they're generally intelligent, earnest, kind, and overall fun to hang with. But these sorts of fundamental moral disagreements are why I stopped running a local EA group, and why I just can't identify too strongly with the scene as a whole. I genuinely wish people in these groups had a more traditional sense of morality, a better understanding of boundaries, and generally just cared about Chesterton's fence and second order effects. I hope that these issues don't completely derail the movement (even more, after the FTX poly harem scandal) but I'm not holding my breath. It really is a shame.
The interface between intelligence and instinct is the reward system; pleasure and pain. I think that the intensities of pleasure and pain are about right for the ancestral environment, especially if intelligence is directed outwards to solving the problems of daily living. Directing it inwards to game the reward system is a problem.
For example, in the ancestral environment hunting and gathering is tough. Want meat? You are not leading a lamb to slaughter, you are hunting a wild animal that can fight back and may kill you. Want vegetables? There are no crop varieties, you are gathering wild plants, with chemical defenses and few calories. You could stay home and fail to fatten up in autumn. That risks dying in a hard winter. The future belongs to those who really enjoy their food and take their chances and enjoy their wild fruit and berries.
Fast forward 100000 years and humans game the reward system with calorie dense, hyper-palatable snacks and Chili Heatwave Doritos. It is supposed to make people happy, and it kind of does. But it also leads to morbid obesity. Using intelligence to game the reward system is an auto-monkey-paw.
My example illustrates the idea of having a reward system of about the right intensity, and how it can get subverted by modernity. But the example isn't about sex. Maybe sex is different.
Sex is about reproductive success. Success against nature, success against other species, but also success in competition with other humans. If Alfred has a higher sex drive than Boris, he has more descendants. Natural selection increases the strength of the sex drive until it is so intense that the problems it causes balance the boost to reproductive success. That might mean that Carol blows up her happy marriage to Boris with an affair with Alfred (he is so sexy) and Boris stabs Carol and Alfred to death (natural selection has imbued Boris with maximum jealousy and lust). More commonly it gives humans lives that are driven by lust, obsessively so. And people are psychologically defenseless because it feels so good. My thesis is that natural selection naturally leads to sex drives that are too strong for humans to have happy lives. At the very least, unbridled lust leads to lying and deception, which leaks out into other areas of life, creating a low trust society.
In modernity, we game the reward system because not only is sex pleasurable, but more is better. Vibrators and pornography, obviously. Contraception allows a more fleshly contact per child conceived. We deploy our intellect and game the reward system with "a midnight nude pool party and a designated sex tent". Does turning it up to eleven make us deliriously happy or jaded, coarse, and insensitive. That is a tricky question; humans have weak psychological defenses again the pleasures of the moment. (Whoops! I'm back again from scrolling YouTube shorts, I nearly gave up on writing this comment, seduced by the pleasures of the moment. That damn algorithm is good at gaming the reward system!) We are unlikely to choose wisely between more is better and the counter intuitive more is worse.
My intuition is that a happy society is one with taboos around sex, and a general reticence that promotes childhood innocence, and late sexual awakenings. The basic instincts are already too strong. Directing our intellects inward to game the reward system is making them stronger still, and we are naturally inclined to fail to notice the auto-monkey-paw.
I feel like the latter does not address the former. The latter implies subjecting men to painful sexual deprivation torment, while doing nothing to stop women from cheating, once those tormented men finally marry one in her 30s (such as making adultery a felony, for one because it is treason against your spouse (and not a sex-crime), whom you swore an oath to).
I don't know why people keep making this mistake. Feminism? The ancients had it all right. Sex is good but adulterers are punished. Simple enough.
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