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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10160 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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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:

steelman of why I think kids + nudity at an event is bad:

having a bunch of weird people (specifically high openness to nudity and sex and drugs not all weird people) around children, especially in a low trust/non gatekept community, dramatically raises risks of child abuse

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.

that's not a steel man dawg. are you saying that high openness to nudity, sex, and drugs implies tolerance of child abuse?

I don't think your concern is entirely without merit, but I don't think your argument is very good. one thing I noticed at some of the regional burns I've been two is that there is greater expectation of social rule enforcement than at vibecamp. people will narc on you if you violate the rules.

for example, last time there was a guy who pitched his tent a few feet past the property line. he got a warning to move his tent and then got kicked out of the event after failing to do so promptly. I feel like something like that would be less likely at vibecamp, and is imo necessary in the long term to create a safe and trustworthy environment

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.

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.

There is no Chesterton's Fence here. Kids were exposed to nudity and sex in the EEA and for the vast majority of recorded history, because that's what happens when you can't afford a sex room and a kids room (or, further back, a sex cave and a kids cave). High ages of consent are also basically unknown before the 1800s. You're not espousing traditional morality when you want to keep the kids away from sex; you're espousing Victorian morality.

(Admittedly, orgies are a lot less common in history, though not completely unknown.)

I'd... maybe suggest checking your history and prehistory before accusing people of disrespecting tradition and Chesterton's Fence.

There was one professor I had in college who would pounce if anyone said or wrote "traditional" or "tradition". Who's tradition and when specifically are we discussing?

Kids were exposed to nudity and sex in the EEA … because that's what happens when you can't afford a sex room and a kids room (or, further back, a sex cave and a kids cave)

I know we love to rag on Europoors, but surely they’re not that poor?

Burning Man exists, and has walked all of these roads decades before.

If you let the sex stuff in, it will take over the event, and will bring with it all of the people you do not want at the event.

You start with: weird people who, by nature of their weirdness, like to do extremely autistic things like advertise a nude pool party or a sex tent.

You get: other autistic people hear about this and think "sex tent? Everybody here wants me to have sex with them!"

You will also get: predatory people who think: "autists with no social skills and a sex tent? This will be like sexually assaulting fish in a barrel!"

You don't want any of this. If weirdos want to get their tits out and have sex with each other, then let them, and use appropriate social pressure to shun them for it, this will allow them to keep doing it, keep it fun and risque and sexy, but won't allow it to metastisize into a problem. The fun autists with their tits out will remain fun and feel like they're pushing boundries and having fun, and it will allow you a mechanism to stop the predators.

As far as kids: the nudists and sex freaks should know that they are sex freaks (that's part of what makes it fun, btw!) and they should know intuitively that they need to hide their sex freakery from everybody, especially children. Again, "normalizing" this is an open invitation for bad (or stupid) actors to act badly and stupidly.

No sex tent (orgy dome), no nudist pool party, but actually yes to the sex tent (what sex tent? Where is it we need to shut it down there are no sex tents allowed here what the HECK!?!) and yes to the nudist pool part (there was a WHAT in the pool? We'll talk to those dirty miscreants and tell them not to do that oh my goodness that's not allowed here!).

As far as the kids: yes to the kids, explicitly, and everybody on site needs to understand that the event is kid friendly, so if they're getting up to any weird (fun, risque) behavior they need to keep it hidden because this is a kids event with kids at it (actually). Make a big kids area with a playground and shade and picnic tables and stuff. Keep the fucking weirdos away from the kids, and make sure they know that they're weirdos (which they will like, and is part of the game anyway).

tl;dr/too vague: absolutely not to any weird sex shit.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

The children are allowed in the designated sex tent or they are allowed at the event with a sex tent nearby? I hope it's the latter, because the former is more outlandish, foolish, and offensive than I would have thought these people were capable.

Second order moral impact aside, I suspect the risk of child abuse is low. Burning Man hosts debauchery at a scale orders of magnitude greater with few reported sexual assaults. A perceived sense of community, selection effects due to cost of entry, and lack of privacy contributes to this.

I've surmised Vibecamp is a Burner styled festival for nerds who like to post on X. Most of these people are not hippies, but they attend as aspirational-hippies. It is known that you can't take casual or performative nudity away from hippies with a moral or a rational argument, not even weekend warrior aspirational-hippies that are fine with nudist people contained to a pool at midnight but enjoy the no swinging dicks at breakfast rule. No, you can only dissuade hippies with force or distract them (with drugs) to point their uninhibited celebration elsewhere.

Do children of crunchy granola culture suffer higher rates of sexual abuse than the general population?

Do children of crunchy granola culture suffer higher rates of sexual abuse than the general population?

Abuse from true believers of crunchy granola culture, I would assume not, perhaps even less, but I would also suspect that crunchy granola culture attracts predators and sociopaths at a higher rate than normal (see: hippie cults/communes built around charismatic figures), because to them people with few taboos and a strong belief that everyone is good if they could just shed oppressive social norms (the one that were put in place over millenia to protect people from predators) sound like deer advertising that they're unable to run away or fight back to a pack of wolves.

I've been to Vibecamp a few times so I'll take the opposite side: I don't see the big deal.

I've certainly never seen anything weird at Vibecamp of the kind that is imagined here. If I had seen that, or thought it was a realistic possibility, I would probably change my answer.

However, most of what happens is fairly normal. A large group of twitter nerds and postrats spent a weekend in the woods camping and playing games. There are campfire games and marshmallows. There's are a few traditional entertainments. Usually somebody sets up a "tea room" decked out with mattresses and decorations where everyone lays on the floor. Someone sets up a rotating "secret bar" that starts operating in some hitherto-unused location after the sun sets. Probably somebody is running a workshop where everybody practices writing tweets. There's a cafeteria with regular meals but the food sucks so some campers will set up their own provisions. I became very friendly with the guy who does a crawfish boil every year.

The campground is large and the families who bring their kids are given cabins and tents on one side of it. Adult activities are placed far away at the other end of the camp. And in my experience these two kinds of activity never intersected anyways: the children are long in bed by the time people really start drinking in earnest.

Maybe the good nerds of twitter can't explain themselves without opening broader discussions about morals and sexuality and tolerance of drugs. But in practice it's a little like complaining that the same internet has websites with Bluey and websites with porn.

I’ve been as well perhaps I should’ve mentioned that. Are you on Twitter?

I'm with St. Rev. Dr. Rev.

But also, yeah, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary high openness and social status depends on his not understanding it. They refuse to wrestle with their inability to understand normal human intuitions, they only question the things that are comfortably acceptable to question in their social groups, none of this is surprising and there will be more suffering generated by it than prevented.

I hope that these issues don't completely derail the movement

Possibly my first direct interaction with Scott was commenting that if the movement wanted to reach normal people, the whole poly obsession (during one of its many peaks) was an unnecessary expense of weirdness points. He replied that the people that said that were a much worse cost of weirdness points among people he cared about (or something like that).

Meaningful rationalism is dead, if it ever really lived. The decent parts of EA can live on as ideas but the movement is exactly what anyone should've expected up front.

I don’t know what ‘vibecamp’ is. Someone will tell me, Im sûre, and perhaps that will be my monthly reminder of the true meaning of ‘blissful ignorance’. But without knowing the context, skinny dipping is really just skinny dipping. As recently at the seventies it was seen as wholesome. It’s problematic in mixed company, and a ‘midnight nude pool party’ sounds like it’s probably a sex thing and not a Norman Rockwell painting.

A designated sex tent at a child friendly event just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen- and the existence of it is kinda weird, why don’t these people use their own space(tents, hotels, etc)?

Vibecamp just an annual convention where people from this scene rent a campground in the woods for a long weekend and hang out. Dancing, cooking, kayaking, cabins and tents, various workshops and physical games. By "this scene" I mean rationalists, "tpot," tech nerds who read Scott Alexander, etc. A good number of the people there would be familiar with The Motte, although probably not a majority.

Degeneracy... degeneracy everywhere...

I don't see how this is harmful. It's a little gross, but so is polyamory. I'm just not seeing the harm in skinny dipping? What if one of the kids accidentally sees (how old are the kids anyway, real kids or teenagers)? Who cares? The harms from sex are physical assault, unwanted pregnancy, STDs. Are any of those a risk? How?

Charitably, they genuinely believe youth is wasted on the young, but by guiding them to make better decisions, we could protect them from a lot of harm, keep them from bad choice road and help them develop healthy sexual boundaries (I suspect, around Christian morality). I would place @ThomasdelVasto in this category.

But for a lot of modern adults (many, many millennials), it's really a toxic cocktail of envy, control, and arrested development dressed up as compassion. They peaked in college, regret their own impulsive sexual decisions, and now project their failure onto the next generation. "If only someone had stopped me at 19..." becomes "No one should be allowed agency until they're as risk-averse as I am." Extending legal childhood keeps the fantasy alive that youth is this pure, fragile thing that must be bubble-wrapped, and their trauma could be pinned on an uncaring society that abandoned them when it should've protected them. The alternative is to take accountability, which is never comfortable.

We don't need to speculate how people would turn out in such a culture, just look at East and South Asian parenting and what kind of adults they produce, especially the men.

Who cares? The harms from sex are physical assault, unwanted pregnancy, STDs. Are any of those a risk? How?

OP could be American enough to believe that seeing a boob causes brain damage for anyone below the age of 18.

Allow me to namedrop Jack, there's a scene (non-sexual) between a grown, naked woman and a 12yo boy. And this was in 2014.

I don't believe in "both side-ism" but "both sides" do sometimes get in bed to package their insecurities in moral policing. Religious puritans (who probably feel guilty for watching porn) and woke feminists (probably dealing with body image issues) lose their minds seeing female nudity on screen. Think about the kids (which is beginning to include legal adults), keep the predators at bay!

At first I thought you were talking about the 90s bomb Jack, where Robin Williams plays a ten year old boy who looks forty.

This is one of those things where if I had very little experience with children I might find a way to be outraged, but now that I've spent some time around them, have a sister with a couple, good friends with some and have gotten teasingly close to having my own I just have to imagine "is vibe camp somewhere I'd take young children unless I was totally bought in and willing to handle explaining nudity to them?" and the answer is probably no. But even if vibe camp was in my local area I probably wouldn't bother to go most years anyways. Who are all these parents taking their kids to vibe camp and having bad experiences? Who are you offended on behalf of?

Who are all these parents taking their kids to vibe camp and having bad experiences? Who are you offended on behalf of?

isn't it also quite expensive to attend? or does it only look expensive to us lowly peons in the real world and not to folx with more money than brains?

It is very expensive, cheapest tickets are like $450 which is as much as bonaroo or more. The main reason I didn’t go back this year, paying almost $500 to sleep in a tent isn’t feasible for me at the moment.

looks like it's in the $600 range for a weekend with a cabin, definitely not trivial but basically in line with if not slightly cheaper than other destination festivals. cheaper than just tickets to lollapalooza in comparison which will run you $750 for the 4 day pass.

True but the big difference imo is that the event itself doesn’t hire bands or events. Pretty much all the events are organized and run by the attendees.

I admittedly don't have kids and don't have a TON of experience around them.

That being said, this just seems like extremely risky behavior for little to no gain. As @cjet79 said, there are massive legal risks for doing this sort of thing, not to mention the actual risk of exposure to kids, etc. Basically it's spending a ton of weirdness points in a way I don't think need to be spent.

Personally I'd rather just see them bar kids from the event, which is what most events I've been to like this do.

You would enjoy Anscombe's Modern Moral Philosophy a lot, even if she's on the wrong side of the Schism.

What's the gist?

The "problems" I view with the culture in rationalist and immediately rationalist adjacent communities is pretty much exactly what you alluded to.

  1. Tossing aside norms and traditions because they can reason out rules that work better and a more universally applicable morality. Whilst eliding that norms and traditions that survive are carrying important information and aren't just noise.

  2. Relatedly, a tendency to write off second order consequences that happen to other people. I'm specifically thinking of the embrace of polyamory for this and the previous one. Rationalist morality seems to care a lot about the individual... and a lot about humanity as a whole. But the in-between levels are less of a focus.

  3. And finally, the ad hoc reconstruction of certain norms and rules from 'first principles' whilst almost never acknowledging that's what they're doing. "We went through a very circuitous journey of discovery and we've wound up in almost the exact place that things started out, and we learned so many useful things along the way (that most 'normal' folks already know and consider 'common sense')! How fun!"

This is my take on EA, ultimately. "We can do philanthropy CORRECTLY by throwing out the extant playbook and starting from scratch with proper axioms, measurable goals, and airtight logical reasoning. Aahhhhg where'd all these persuasive grifters come from? Why are we falling prey to edge cases constantly? Why are all these people mad at us when we just want to improve the lives of shrimp?"

In short, when they're relegated to their laboratory in Berkeley to work and play amongst themselves they seem to get on just fine as things go. Interacting with the outside world they often project a "we're not weird, you normal folks are just doing EVERYTHING wrong!" attitude, and yet they haven't really been able to demonstrate that their way of operating (culturally, that is!) is a workable system given the substrate that our civilization is actually made of/running on.

Which hey, write all the fanfiction you want about a superior, uberrational alternate universe where things are done better! But end of day you're living in this one.

What you're hitting on seems to be a manifestation of this sort of hubris. Maybe its justified.

I think Rationalists et al. would do a lot better if they approached norms and traditions with a via negativa approach. Don't start from scratch. Remove one (1) given rule and see what changes. Then maybe another one. If something breaks then reinstate a rule. And don't slice through multiple rules in one fell swoop, especially ones that look particularly load-bearing, EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU CAN REPLACE THEM WITH NEW, MORE OPTIMIZED RULES.

If you're going to remove rules/taboos on casual, public sex... don't ALSO remove taboos on involving young kids in sexual activities/exposing them to strangers in sexual situations. Especially if you've also removed rules/taboos on drug use and, call it 'self modification' from tattoos to top surgery (fair admission: I am presuming that this stuff goes on at vibecamp).

Increasing the risk of sexual assault (and the attendant trauma and mental health issues) is certainly one possible outcome there, but you're basically banking on every individual attendee to, I dunno, intuit the proper boundaries of behavior when there are kids around, after you've already gone ahead and blurred the lines to an absurd degree?

I think a person of average intelligence but more 'standard' upbringing can foresee the failure modes there pretty easily.

And finally, the ad hoc reconstruction of certain norms and rules from 'first principles' whilst almost never acknowledging that's what they're doing. "We went through a very circuitous journey of discovery and we've wound up in almost the exact place that things started out, and we learned so many useful things along the way (that most 'normal' folks already know and consider 'common sense')! How fun!"

I have a hard time faulting anyone for doing this, because the "common sense" norms were already thrown out decades ago, long before the rationalists came onto the scene. On matters of sex, we has the Sexual Revolution back in the 60's, and now we're in a state of complete social anarchy, by which I mean that social shaming is ineffective because you can always find someone else who agrees with you. If I deign to judge anyone for their sex life, now I'm the one who's causing a problem. Even in the last remaining areas where laws are still on the books (rape and underage stuff), enforcement is spotty at best (viz. Epstein) and you'll find people muddying the waters with various postmodern-style arguments ("rape just means she regretted it later", "no actually all sex is rape", "but ephebophilia"...)

So along come the rationalists (and others perhaps), who find that since appealing to social consensus doesn't work, it has become necessary to argue every point in long-winded detail. When you're born in the wilderness, you have no choice but to wander.

So along come the rationalists (and others perhaps), who find that since appealing to social consensus doesn't work, it has become necessary to argue every point in long-winded detail. When you're born in the wilderness, you have no choice but to wander.

I'm going to bite the bullet here and say that ethics based on reason is progress and ethics based on la favela abuela's vibes is bad, actually. No, we should not persecute people because a bunch of dirty villagers who believe in magic get an ick response to their behaviors. We actually need a high bar of evidence to justify persecuting people.

To your first point, that was the proposition Haidt tried drawing attention to with the existence of moral dumbfounding. The problem with moral reasoning isn’t necessarily reason itself, it’s in all the ways rationalists misuse and wield it. Everyone also tends tot think a system of perfect reason perfectly encapsulates and expresses all of their internally held moral prejudices (or lack thereof) about things, and it never does.

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.

Here in old Europe, nude beaches have been a thing since at least 1960, I guess. My understanding is that this is very much non-sexual nudity, generally (probably due to the sand creating friction). I do not think it is especially traumatizing for kids to see naked adults in a context where it is treated as normal.

Presumably, you mean that kids are encouraged at vibecamp, not in the sex tent specifically. I think kids should be definitely shielded from viewing sex at least until they actively start to search for it -- even more if it is strangers fucking who might be into all sorts of kinks.

I also think that it is probably a good idea to keep sex parties and everything else well separate. Bringing your kids even to the anteroom of a sex party -- where the adults are still clothed but the context is already that they will fuck each other -- would seem highly inappropriate.

That being said, I think that it is inevitable that people will hook up at vibecamp. Some will hook up with more than one partner, some even at the same time. There is a difference between the sex being the main attraction and one of the optional sideshows, though. I have been to music festivals which included fetish parties, and it did not end up setting the theme of the overall festival.

Nor is it the only part of vibecamp which may not be kid-friendly. Presumably, Doomers will attend -- as they should. An eight-year-old overhearing a discussion at breakfast where two smart people agree that it is likely that AI will kill all humans within five years will very likely be more affected than one who observed (from his hotel room, or tent or whatever, while he/she should have been long asleep) a few naked people making out during a midnight nude pool party before disappearing in the sex tent. The solution would be not to take out your sex organs or child-inapproriate beliefs where kids can see you. (There might be more child-inappropriate topics apart from sex and doom, perhaps drugs, or horror movies, discussion of wars and so on.)

Here in old Europe, nude beaches have been a thing since at least 1960, I guess. My understanding is that this is very much non-sexual nudity, generally... I think kids should be definitely shielded... even more if it is strangers fucking who might be into all sorts of kinks.

Strikes me that there's a certain cultural gestalt to the consideration too? Nude beaches are A Thing, knowingly nonsexual, from certain kinds of cultures.

One knows that Vibecamp largely pulls from, ah, very different kind of culture. Aella has attended in the past but not this year afaict. There is insufficient cultural gestalt to mix the kind of things they're mixing.

I mean, nude beaches full of grannies baring it all don’t cause problems in Europe, but they are a very different thing from a ‘midnight naked pool party’ with a ‘designated sex tent’.

On the surface, this seems like a very American hangup to me; some parts of Europe have significant amounts of public nudity (e.g. German sauna culture and nude beaches) that is accessible to the underage, and it does not seem to connect to either abuse or unhealthy development in any obvious ways. (Of course, the camp in question is in America, but why can't the US incubate some subcultures that are deviant from its prevalent norms?)

Also, you say that the children are to be "brought by parents" - surely the same parents who bring them to this camp might just as well expose them to nudity and sex at home, if they are as unconcerned by it as is implied by their participation in the camp.

German sauna culture

Excuse you?! German sauna culture?

That sort of weaksauce perversion of proper norms and slanderous cultural appropriation has no place being exposed to impressionable children and is something that should be grounds for immediate Cancellation!

Yes. I don't know how it was historically, but modern Finns are mostly committed to clothed saunaing, at least among strangers. Meanwhile, in Germany and Austria it has merged with the preexisting nudist culture to be universally mandatorily butt naked, and picked up some local innovations like ritual pouring of scented water on the heating elements followed by steam oven style manual fanning.

why can't the US incubate some subcultures that are deviant from its prevalent norms?

If anything the US incubates too many subcultures that are deviant from its prevalent norms, such that its prevalent norms have been replaced many times.

(Of course, the camp in question is in America, but why can't the US incubate some subcultures that are deviant from its prevalent norms?)

Well, you can try, but Americans are willing to assault, abduct, and murder over deviation on this topic. They are really out of control.

This is the first I've heard of Vibecamp, but this lines up with my impressions of San Francisco rationalist culture. Assuming they don't get eaten by their peers' attempts to create silicon gods, it'll be interesting to read their children's blogs about this in 15 years. It does seem like a bad idea.

A while back I was following a blog where a childhood acquaintance was processing her bad experience of living with her extremely conservative cultish adoptive parents, and it was painfully clear that they shouldn't have tried both homeschooling, and even home churching them, her mother, especially, sounded like she was terribly impatient and should absolutely not have been stuck at home with four children all day every day. She wrote about how her mother would take her out on a mother daughter date for an entire day, buy her gifts and nice foods, and then hope she would be satiated, that she had done her work as a mother, and become angry when she wanter more interaction the very next day. And it sounded so clear that they shouldn't have been bottled up together like that. But, ideology.

I'm not familiar with the ideology of Vibecamp, but I assume there is one that pushes people to do inadvisable things.

I'm too old to understand your abbreviations. Rat, postrat, EA, tpot, what do these mean? Is this a drug thing?

Nudity and children should not be in the same vicinity, I think not having orgies within earshot of children is basic human understanding.

Nah rationalist, postrationalist, effective altruism. tpot is "this part of twitter," mostly where postrats hang out.

Got it, no drugs. Perhaps the sex tent is a social status marker of sorts. As in, we are the enlightened philosophical elite unrestricted by plebeian sexual mores. Participation is then demonstration of status.

Oh, there are definitely drugs. Lots of drugs.

Oh. Then maybe drugs are a consequence of being a philosopher, and the sex tent is from the drugs.

It’s “Rationalist” terminology.

Scott Alexander’s blog slatestarcodex came out of the Rationalist community (centered around LessWrong and affiliated blogs/sites) and this forum is descended from the slatestarcodex community.

I see. I did read a little of Scott's stuff but I mostly lurked the SSC subreddit. I didn't stay long enough to learn the terms. In fact, without SSC I never would have found the Motte, which is spoken of only indirectly with hushed whispers as if naming the Motte would invoke darker powers. Like naming Voldemort in the Harry Potter setting.

Is exposing yourself to a minor not a crime in the location they are holding it?

If it is a crime then they are being very dumb. It would be an easy way for a DA that doesn't like them to basically round up all the nudists and event organizers and get them all labelled as sex offenders and put on the list. And being on the list will fuck up their lives so badly. But hey maybe if they have a sex tent at their event they just like getting bent over and having things rammed up their ass all the time.

I'd personally avoid this event like the plague.

In general I think people are allowed and encouraged to have some number of weirdness points. They can have weird beliefs, pets, sex lives, religion, activities, etc. Normal people are weird in one or a few ways, weird people are weird in many ways. If you want to be weird that's fine. But if you have ideological beliefs you want other people to adopt you must be a normal person. You basically use up your weirdness points on your ideology, and any weirdness beyond that is just doing harm to the cause of selling your ideology.

EA and rat sphere seems filled with people that want to be weird. Which makes the "effective" part seem like a lie. Lots of charity involves convincing normies to give you money, and they basically suck at that. They are claiming all the weird people though, so maybe that is them just serving a market niche that no one else was serving well. They don't seem to have the awareness that this is what they are doing.

I am a huge nerd compared to most people around me, but hearing about these people's antics always makes me feel like a bully jock that wants to humiliate the socially incompetent nerds for shits and giggles. I dislike that feeling, I wish they'd stop being weird people.

Obligatory source article on weirdness points: LW.

Which makes the "effective" part seem like a lie. Lots of charity involves convincing normies to give you money, and they basically suck at that.

The EA criticism of traditional charity is not that they were ineffective at getting donations. They excel at it, actually.

Likewise, Eliezer might have recruited more people into the ratsphere if he had spent less time writing about quantum mechanics and more time pushing deepities at people.

But both actions would have sacrificed the main selling point. You can not both optimize for pulling people's heartstrings and for the actual impact of your interventions. Do the former and you will turn off the people who are interested in the latter.

Nor can you raise the sanity waterline by using cheap tricks to recruit people into your cult -- you might gain ten times as many members, but you would also turn off the people who you need the most to write on LW.

You can not both optimize for pulling people's heartstrings and for the actual impact of your interventions. Do the former and you will turn off the people who are interested in the latter.

Fully disagree that they care about the actual impact in legible and clear terms, especially if we're talking about rationalism more than EA. Or at least, the impact they care about is not always the stated impact.

You only have to look at what they won't question to see that, or how badly they fumble when push comes to shove and they have to work with normies.

It's not that they are failing to start a cult, or run a charity MLM scheme. It's that they are turning off people like me who are fully sympathetic to the idea by being weirdos that I don't want to associate with. And if this makes you think something like "well do you even care that much about EA if you aren't willing to tolerate some weirdness" and the answer is no I don't really care about it that much. I have other ideologies I'd rather spend my weirdness points on.

When my main exposure to EA stuff was through Scott Alexander I was so on board I was basically calling myself an EA. And then I learn stuff like this and it has me noping backwards as fast as I can.

They aren't failing to trick normies who are against the values into being EAs. They are failing to convince normies who are lukewarm or even positively disposed into being EAs. And I totally fail to see how having a weird sex tent and nudist colony next to a playground is necessary for EA to be all the things that make it EA.

The quantum mechanics thing was fine. That was an example of the social institution of science being too slow relative to what an ideal Bayesian updater would have declared solved a long time ago (many worlds). And, of course, Yudkowsky's main thesis is that we don't have time to go through the whole song and dance of a generation of old scientists dying before a new generation of academics comes to accept the new theory; the first time we fuck up AGI, we are all dead.

The part where he insists on wearing a fucking fedora to every interview, however, is pure contrarianism. That's not the sort of thing rational!Draco or rational!Quirrell would do.

When people see the fedora they definitely aren’t going to think this man is an ideal Bayesian rational agent. And even Eliezer himself has said that doesn’t at all encompass all of human meaning; so he hasn’t gone so far off the rational deep end that he’s completely forgotten his foibles or humanity.

But more on the point of the influence of rationalism itself. Just look at American public policy. Take a look at the public health benefits of something like irradiation of food, which could eliminate E. coli and be a massive benefit to food safety for everyone. But the public hears “radiation” and they think nuclear fallout (like Hiroshima and Nagasaki) like it’s going to turn your meat radioactive. No. Dude… it has nothing to do with that… It’s one of the ways in which the public is very poorly educated on science and how irrationality works against us.

The part where he insists on wearing a fucking fedora to every interview, however, is pure contrarianism. That's not the sort of thing rational!Draco or rational!Quirrell would do.

I suspect his gambit may be "I know my limitations: I am incapable of seeming cool and normal. Better to deliberately play an Eccentric Character of my own choosing, than try to impersonate a conventionally charismatic, professional normie, and fall into the uncanny valley". The sheer stubbornness in the face of ridicule is still baffling, but at a guess, I think that's the 5D chess he thinks he's doing, anyway.

This reminds me of Scott A saying that in terms of giving a good impression:

  • it’s great to be cool and charismatic and self-confident
  • it’s… fine to be normal and a bit diffident and insecure
  • it’s really bad to be a slightly shy and insecure person pretending to be cool and charismatic and self-confident

I don’t know that Yud really comes across as 3. Some people who wear weird clothes really want attention - but those are precisely the most normal, personable people who dress and act flamboyantly. If your outgoing, socially successful, charismatic friend is wearing something loud, they’re peacocking / attention seeking. If your extremely weird autistic friend does it it’s more likely they’re wearing cat ears to the office because they’re an autist with little understanding of social norms than because they’re looking for attention.

I meant he was going for 2 by wearing the fedora. Better a weirdo than a weirdo who’s taken correspondence courses on how to look like a DC mover and shaker.

It’s my view that while ponytail, ill fitting suit and fedora types probably did think they were cool, this was more to do with a fondness for the jazz age, bogart, Sinatra, Fred and Ginger movies, the late 2000s / early 2010s electroswing caravan palace age (now thankfully forgotten but for a time the favorite music genre of this kind of neckbeard) than a desire to look like a ‘normal’ business man type in a suit.

At some point you're better off finding the most charismatic follower and installing him as the figurehead of the movement while you retire to be the eminence grise if you actually want to convince people. Aren't rationalists supposed to win?

I guess those would be Scott and Kelsey Piper

Scott is a good writer but is not particularly charismatic and refuses to give interviews (except the one I guess).

I don't know that Piper is focused on AI safety in particular rather than covering EA more broadly. I also see her as more of a journalist than a thinker.

EA and rat sphere seems filled with people that want to be weird. Which makes the "effective" part seem like a lie. Lots of charity involves convincing normies to give you money, and they basically suck at that. They are claiming all the weird people though, so maybe that is them just serving a market niche that no one else was serving well. They don't seem to have the awareness that this is what they are doing.

There's lots of perfectly ordinary EAs who care about malaria nets and not putting pigs and chickens into small cages (e.g. Lewis Bollard). It's just that they aren't the EAs that are posting their sex lives on Twitter.

seems like one of those "movement versus ideology" questions.

there are many perfectly normal EAs, but they don't really form EA. They do EA, they don't lead the organizations or write about it that much.

I believe you, but those ordinary EAs should probably be siding with Thomas and trying to police their weirdest members.

Mounting a shaming campaign against any event that may have EAs in attendance (vibecamp is not an EA meetup even though some attendees are EAs) isn't going to save any chicken QALYs.

It doesn't have to be a shaming campaign, an in person or on twitter convo of "ya this is weird please keep it separate from EA stuff" would be sufficient.

Or they can wait for something to hit the courts when someone sues or some DA sees an opportunity to rack up easy child sexual assault charges. I'm sure the PR for that will do plenty to hurt the EA cause.

It doesn't have to be a shaming campaign, an in person or on twitter convo of "ya this is weird please keep it separate from EA stuff" would be sufficient.

And how do you know that such an in person convo has not taken place?

It's only not separate from EA stuff in the sense that it's conceivable that an EA will attend and it's conceivable that he will mention EA at some point. That's it. That's the standard that's being applied here - the good EAs must restrict everyone else who considers themselves to be an EA from attending any possibly sus event. Needless to say, this standard isn't applied for just about any other ideology attending vibecamp (do Catholics need to worry about this?).

Ah my bad, I misunderstood what vibecamp is. Thought it was EA oriented, not just random event.

In that case carry on for EAs but personal reputation for people that attend still applies.

EA always struck me as every secular rationalist’s favorite religion.

Is exposing yourself to a minor not a crime in the location they are holding it?

To agree with you, even everything is legal, the "weirdness points" stuff matters if I ever need to explain my decisions to a pediatrician, a teacher, or another parent who hears a child's retelling of their summer vacation at a sleepover.

Eg; suppose a kid climbs a tree, falls out of the tree, and needs to go to the ER to get a leg x-ray. That's sad, but it's a risk of camping.

Only, now, the kid happens to mention that the tree was next to the sex tent, but it's ok, because the bondage-a-torium is shut down during the day, and only active at night, when the kid isn't allowed to be out. Imagining that conversation just sounds awful all around, even if everything is entirely legal.

Yes I already have to worry about that enough through standard life misunderstandings, I don't need to add to it.

Also if you were just at the event with a sex tent and that fact gets blasted onto every news channel, are you comfortable explaining to all of your friends and family your presence at the event?

They are actively filtering out normies.

Yeah I remember an old post on lesswrong about weirdness points. Totally agree. Yudkowsky is the classic offender here, but it’s definitely endemic in the rat space. Transgression just for the sake of transgression. I’m surprised so many people still get kicks out of it as they grow older.

Well “autism” isn’t really a phase people grow out of, and I’m sure it’s proportional share of responsibility for said weirdness is substantial. That’s wholly different from people who think it’s cool and quirky to be contrarian in a sort of “tee hee, I’m so weird!…,” and those people are quite annoying.

My no evidence inclination is that events like Burning Man have lower incidence of child sex abuse not because of any enlightened attitudes about nudity and sex but because it's such a challenging logistical and environmental ordeal to attend that it filters out a lot of low class dirtbags that would do child sex abuse.

Vibecamp is probably a similar demographic argument. I think it's plainly true that no sex tent or nudity would reduce sex abuse further. But I'm not sure the rates meaningfully matter once you've filtered all of the shitty people out to begin with.

There are kids at burning man? Like not in the teenagers sense, but actual kids?

And I’m kinda surprised it doesn’t have a rape problem.

And I’m kinda surprised it doesn’t have a rape problem.

Burning Man says they don’t have a rape problem. I recall reading (or watching? not sure) somewhere that they have a bad relationship with the local sheriff/PD because the Burning Man security staff pressures sex assault victims into not reporting to the police, and even recanting after calling the police (“do you really want to get The Man involved? have some drugs and chill out”), thus keeping the statistics down.

There are kids at burning man? Like not in the teenagers sense, but actual kids?

Yes, absolutely.

Vibecamp seems to cater to people who delight in sexual transgression per se.

Moreso than Burning Man? I've never come across more people that seem to have rape fantasies and not the cnc kind than at Burner adjacent communities.

Yeah fair points. The honest truth is that it gives me the ick, as the kids say.

For what it's worth, I saw that exchange, and I think you're right. I'm not a fan of their (implied) norm that the only risks which exist are the ones that can be specifically articulated, right now, with numbers to back them up.

I'd be more sympathetic to the opposition if there was a clear boundaries (literal, or social line) around the "for adults" stuff. If, for example, someone wanted to do a midnight nude pool party, in a walled-off pool, with "security" I'd be more ok with it, because there'd be a clear demarcation between the spaces where people are going to be child-safe weird and the adult spaces for adults.

But, as-is, this seems like a bunch of people who are excited about being transgressive and weird, who seem oddly enthusiastic about the opportunity to be transgressive around kids. Even if I'm not worried about specific, felony-level harm, to me that just comes off as chaotic bad judgement of the sort that makes me want to back away to avoid the inevitable splash damage.

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