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Notes -
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.
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.
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