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An article is making the rounds on rat-adjacent twitter entitled "The Nerdy Escorts Cashing In On Silicon Valley’s AI Boom."
I can't bypass the paywall, but someone posted on X:
I know that aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money. It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.
Even regardless of the moral aspect of the situation, the fact that a prostitute can make so much money is a huge slap in the face to people working hard for a living. That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.
Also, Tyler Cowen had a bit of a viral moment yesterday saying he wouldn't be surprised if 15 to 20% of all jobs in the near future are elder care. This of course sandwiched in a talk where he insists AI is great and making jobs not losing them!
Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!
Either way, the optimism from the pundit class around AI and the economy is feeling more and more hollow to me by the day. If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society? How will things go otherwise without some sort of relatively radical disruption? I try not to be a 'doomer' about AI, but I'm increasingly finding it hard to be optimistic on the impact of it on society.
I think this is the exact opposite story that should be disseminated widely in a culture. We want stories of women foregoing money, status, and attention for the sake of a marital pairbond and having children, because that’s what you want high iq Bayarean women doing. This story is unlikely to nudge a reader toward escortdom, but it will nudge them toward valuing money and status even more. Or it will make some think, “if she’s taking advantage of her body for so much money, then it’s definitely okay if I do it on a smaller scale with my boss / manager / investor”. But it’s impossible to get a pro-motherhood + pro-love bio in a newspaper.
If you want that, I think you're in luck. I think that the majority of high IQ Bayarean women are either pursuing or at some point will be pursuing a pair bond, usually marital, that includes children. And I doubt that any amount of news stories would have a significant impact on the changing what fraction of them decides to turn to prostitution instead.
I don’t have an IQ breakdown, but they have the highest rate of delaying birth until their 40s, per LA Times
https://archive.is/LUoTe
This is suboptimal for a variety of reasons. If we’re throwing a portion of our smartest and healthiest women there, we want them to have the lowest age of birth and the highest number of kids, to maximize health and intelligence of future generations.
Stories like this do have an effect, not any one story isolated, but the kind of women that are boosted in popularity and status among women through our cultural stories (news, social media).
It is suboptimal for society but probably optimal for a good amount of women. Let's say you have two life paths to choose from as a young, high-IQ, non-obese woman:
Career focus with upper middle class luxuries and you can be in a dating paradise for 20-30 years where men jockey for your attention. Optionally pop out a geriatric pregnancy or two when you're around 40. Retire in reasonable comfort and wealth.
Raise five kids as a tradwife and hope your husband doesn't leave you for a younger, prettier woman later on.
It's a no brainer when the risks and rewards are this unbalanced. High IQ women logically want a life of luxuries and comfort over the uncertain guarantees of raising a large family, outside of niche religious or cultural pressure to marry young and bear many children.
Aren't there a lot of high IQ women who married wealthy people and had lots of kids? Angelina Jolie had three kids (and adopted 3 more), Melinda Gates had three kids, MacKenzie Bezos (now Scott) had four...the scheme of getting society to idealize women like this has its problems, but I doubt it's due to a lack of examples.
And yes, these aren't great examples, but I suspect that's sampling bias due to notoriety; if you dig a bit you can find hundreds more women who were smart and talented, married smart and talented men, had 2 - 5 children, and didn't end up in front-page-divorce proceedings.
Yeah, but look at what happened there: she was with Jeff from the start, she stuck with him when he was just getting going, she gave him three sons (plus the adopted daughter) and managed the house and was the supportive executive wife and didn't get entangled in any scandals, and what was the end result? He cheats on her with a plastic surgery bunny that he then goes on to eventually marry, and while she got a nice slice of the pie in the divorce, I remember on here all the lamentations that she did nothing to deserve any of that.
Moral of story seems to be: don't bother doing the wifely bit, enhance your assets with surgery, find a rich sucker going through a midlife crisis, get him to dump the wife and kids, and reap the benefit of all that massive profitability without having to be there for the rough patches and backing him and his dreams.
Most of the criticism I see of the former Mrs. Bezos is centered around her use of the money. It's not even that she isn't being economically productive with it, she's splurging enormous fortunes on actively anti-social leftist nonsense.
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