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Notes -
So, in other Aella news, she's channelling the spirit of Hanania with this poll:
Options are (with their current percentages):
Of course Aella with her reach manages to get normies to see her posts and the replies are wild that such a person could even exist, some choice replies:
While the poll itself may be interesting, what I find most interesting of all are the responses from the normies (there are responses that look objectively at the situation and say stuff like "no, if anyone is going to hire prostitutes it should be the parents, not the make a wish foundation", but they all tend to have stuff like "e/acc" in their usernames so they aren't your average randos). These tend to be extremely negative, but not negative in a "I know what I hate and this is it" form but rather a "first encounter with a terrible eldrich abomination you want to see destroyed but are confused at how could it even exist" sort of way. It does not feel like pure hate, but rather a hate that is born of fear, true xenophobia in its original meaning of the word. Nevertheless it is still a form of hate and you can quite easily see the vitriol directed towards Aella, merely for posting this poll.
My worry here though is that as technology advances and a sliver of people with disproportionate cultural cachet adopt belief systems like those of Aella and decouple from the low sophistication ways of thinking common in most westerners along with completely different cultures entering the west and taking root the current indigenous westerners will find their belief and value systems squeezed on both sides, from above by the likes of people who think like Aella does (nothing wrong with how she thinks, in fact I support it) along with from below by the value systems of recent migrants (who still care about stuff like honour and shame etc.).
While this may be a difficult time for the squeezed westereners themselves (I have little sympathy though, these very same people expect migrants to deal with a far bigger and more rapid cultural shock and blame them if they migrants take steps to mitigate this impact), I am more concerned about potential increased societal scale strife as people lash out from being put in a world that they no longer understand (see the "what if you were executed at gitmo" response above, I for one am glad this person has no power and hope it stays this way).
Naturally I have no doubt that any reified violence by the disaffected would be put down with the same prejudice we use for terrorist attacks these days, but it would still not be a good time for social harmony and that has widespread social impacts beyond a small handful of people cracking and going on a rampage where they kill a few people before bring brought down themselves.
So… does anyone on the motte want to actually debate the question posed? I’ll start.
No to child prostitutes because child prostitutes presumably cannot consent, and it is not ethical to commit a crime with a victim involved, just because it’s someone’s dying wish to do so.
Saying yes to adult prostitutes assumes that the dying child is capable of consenting to sex for themselves, which is the complete opposite of what we’ve just established for the “No to child prostitutes” case. If we want to keep “No to child prostitutes” while maintaining “Yes to adult prostitutes”, we’ll have to introduce a difference between the two scenarios: “A teenager can reasonably be expected to understand consent for sex alone (and this is why it is moral for teenagers to consent to sex with each other), but the concept of consenting to sex in exchange for money is too advanced for teenagers to consent to (and therefore immoral for a child to prostitute themselves even though it is moral for a child to have sex without money).”
At which point is it genuine nuance, and at which point is it just contorting yourself into mental gymnastics? Perhaps either saying yes or no to all prostitution in this scenario would be the most consistent moral positions to take. The case for “yes”: a being will miss out on having a fundamentally common human experience before they die. If we care about providing dying children with less fundamental human experiences (like going to Disneyland) before they go, why not provide them with one that matters more?
The case for “no”: children are not capable of deciding for themselves whether they truly want such experiences. Even adults make poor decisions that they regret because it harmed them, and it would be horrible to allow a dying child to harm themselves before they go. (Although, as I understand it, the main reason why it’s bad for an underage teenager to consent to sex with an adult is because they risk emotional manipulation by the more experienced adult. Making sure that it’s a one-off affair would seem to largely mitigate this risk.)
In fact, how much does the dying child part even matter? It seems it would only matter if we first establish that harm is always caused to children having sex, even if they ostensibly consent. Otherwise, this might as well be ethical even without the child in question being mortally ill. But if sex always causes children harm, the question is whether it’s ethical to allow kids to hurt themselves. Is it ethical to sell a knife to a teen who has just stated their desire to stab themselves, regardless of whether the teen was going to die anyways?
What perspectives am I missing?
Also, meta questions:
She's a prominent rationalist thinkfluencer/thought leader/blogger, similar to Julia Galef.
Aella leans heavily on her sex appeal; the first time I ever heard about her was on reddit from this famous NSFW photoshoot. More relevantly, she is known for doing weird twitter polls and conducting independent sex research.
She's been mentioned on ACX numerous times, such as in "There's A Time For Everyone" which talks about how Scott met his wife at one of her parties, and "Classifieds Thread 1/2022", in which she is described as a "shit-eating whore" (which is literally true, but resulted in the document being wiped from Google; here's the bowdlerized version).
How can she describe herself as a rationalist? She’s good at getting nerd affection. But she’s a female so rationally speaking selling sex by the hour makes no sense. Rationally speaking she should want to make 10 or so nerd babies. And make herself say lifetime money from that which pays much better than a thousand an hour.
Rationally speaking Musks seems to like making babies so shouldn’t she show up once or twice a month till she gets pregnant and repeat the process for a decade.
Isn’t she in her 30’s? She’s not having 10 kids, want to or not.
And, uh, have you ever been around a large family with very smart children? Or gifted children in general? Precociousness can be cute, but it’s so aggravating to caregivers that it’s fairly rational to not want a gaggle of very high IQ children.
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Sliders, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I’m pretty sure you’re not baiting, so…why do you think 10 nerd babies is rational for anyone?
Isn’t this the Idiocracy argument? We need more relatively high IQ fertility so it’s rational in the sense it advances humanity.
I don’t think a movie (or the reverse of a movie) should be anyone’s high-water mark for rationality.
Is the argument wrong - I only used it for a reference. Seems obvious if you believe in hbd that selective breeding matters.
Can you see the gap between “selective breeding matters” and “I, personally, should spend my life popping out high-quality babies?”
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What does any of this have to do with minimizing cognitive bias and making accurate predictions? I'll admit, I haven't read anything from Big Yud in a few years, but your use of "rational" seems closer to "maximizing economic value" than anything capital-R Rational.
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I smack my head against a wall whenever someone claims that x is not compatible with rationality, in the hopes that the ensuing brain damage will help ease the pain.
As much as I vehemently disagree with the religious, there is nothing inherently irrational with belief in God, even if I think they have malign priors and don't update on abundant evidence (which makes them irrational). If a Paperclip Maximizer strips me down for spare parts, I might have many choice insults to hurl its way, but irrational isn't one of them. It would need to go about its aims in an outright counterproductive way, like aiming for paperclips but ending up making safety pins.
Rationality is orthogonal to your desires, and for Aella, it's entirely possible and even likely that she genuinely enjoys her lifestyle and considers it preferential to the alternative of sniping some modestly wealth Silicon Valley engineer and settling down. Just because you disagree with her goals doesn't make them irrational, and I think she's enough of a moral mutant (I at least highly respect the high-decoupling as one myself) that the former is more likely.
I feel like this then boils down to rationality means nothing. As the other response says maybe she puts very high negative value on giving birth. Just declare something to be really bad (emotions/feelings) then therefore that behavior was in fact rational.
Rationality then becomes I am smart and I accurately verbalize my feelings therefore my behavior is rational. I’d say they are eating chocolate ice cream a normie eats it because they like chocolate ice cream but a rationalist eats it reasoning chocolate ice cream is 50 happiness points and being slightly fatter is -40 happiness points therefore they eat it.
It boils down to rationality not being the destination, but compass that (together with accurate knowledge of the world in place of map) gets you to the destination in the most rational way.
What should be your destination? Rationality does not say, it is up to you.
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Orthogonality Hypothesis
To put it as succinctly as possible, rationality is a means to an end, not an end in itself. There are a variety of behaviors that are usually rational to pursue, but there are always cases where that ceases to be true. For an average person with typical goals, being a sex worker might be suboptimal, but say what you will about Aella, she's not average.
So as I’m saying then rationality means nothing. Effective Altruism means nothing. Rationality just becomes I act like every other human who acts on emotions (I just call that my utility functions). EA well I’ve said it before they are just Democrats who gave themselves a different name to call themselves elites or above partisan politics. Which is basically true because people like SBF fairly universally just donated to Democrats.
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Aella has talked about her troubles finding a man who is up to her standards before:
It's not that she doesn't want to settle down, it's that, because of the way female hypergamy works, her own level of money, success, and status has drastically shrunk the pool of partners she considers acceptable.
Which is too bad, because Aella is 30; if she is looking for a husband and children, she is on her last chance.
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What if she places very negative value on pregnancy/giving birth?
Not to mention that nerd children have to be raised in a demanding way to be able and willing to bring you "millions", and even then it's not a guarantee. A thousand per hour is a better rate than a million per 18 years.
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