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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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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