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