What I Learned about Sex at the Rationalist Bloggers' Conference

Sufficiently advanced integrity is indistinguishable from a sex cult.

LessOnline is a conference for rationalist-adjacent bloggers whose second iteration was held last weekend. The home page features a selection of notable writers who cover topics like AI, economics, psychology, AI, policy, AI, Effective Altruism, education, life extension, and AI.

You may wonder if the vibe at such a conference would be dry and academic or edgy and stimulating, doomer or optimist, egalitarian or hierarchical. You probably wouldn’t expect the vibe to be free-flowing libidinal energy.

How did a conference with sessions on elastomeric respirators and the Book of Revelation get horny? Like Darwin’s journey on the Beagle, I shall list some field notes from my journey to Lighthaven. Then, perhaps a unifying theory will suggest itself.

1

The venue groundskeeper, Ronny, tweeted about getting a tattoo to commemorate being Aella’s 100th sexual partner. In response, thousands of people all over the internet had an aneurysm. A comment saying “you should have been bullied when you were a kid” from someone who attended Lighthaven last year has 3,400 likes.

Why is everyone so obsessed with a few friends goofing around like any college kids on spring break? Any guy can open Tinder, click on “top picks”, and see women with body counts higher than Aella’s accumulated over men with sillier tattoos than Ronny’s. Hatred this intense usually comes from envy. But it can’t just be envy of having sex with a hot online celebrity. People reacted as if Ronny broke some sacred rule of the universe.

2

Overheard:

People have tried to smear my org with sex abuse for years, and now I’m told to censor what I think about AI labs because someone powerful might be offended? Fuck that shit.

3

My friend “Standard Deviant” gave a talk titled “How I’ve had more sex”. He described the “escalator”: starting a conversation, exchanging compliments, light touch on the arm, etc. The important thing isn’t to rush up the escalator, my friend said, but to move together in synchrony whether you’re taking a step up or a step down.

When women show interest in casual sex, he often asks: do you do this sort of thing often? If they don’t, he often forgoes the opportunity out of an excess of caution.

Afterwards, more women wanted to have sex with him. I joked that women want to have sex not with the tall guy, hot guy, or the famous guy, but with the Schelling point guy. Someone pointed out that tall, hot, and famous are the usual Schelling points.

4

Observing a scrawny, slouching blogger in an ill-fitting jacket give a talk, two women independently declared that he was the sexiest guy at the conference. I observed the man in question for a minute. I noticed that he seemed extremely comfortable addressing a crowd while sitting slouched in an ill-fitting jacket, more comfortable than most people can ever get in front a crowd no matter their dress or status.

5

I have an application to date me up on my old blog, on the view that if a girl enjoys my writing she will certainly enjoy my company as well. A few years ago, I was asked out by a girl who admitted she only read a small bit from one of my posts. She told me:

If you’re a writer, you’re cool. But a lot of people online are creepy and DM you pretending they don’t want to fuck you. The fact that you’ve had this dating form up for years means I can trust you.

6

A group of girls were talking about how it’s obvious that high-status men are sexy and that you can easily tell that by how confident they are. I asked: which is it, the status or the swagger? Is it hot when a guy is high status (e.g., respected as a master in his field) but doesn’t show it, or when he shows high confidence that isn’t really deserved? They scrunched their faces at the thought of either of these, though they couldn’t quite explain why.

7

A woman who writes about casual sex online showed up to LessOnline not being very familiar with the rationalist community. She asked a cuddling couple if they were sex partners and was shocked to hear that they’re just friends. As the evening grew colder, more and more people joined Platonic cuddles on benches around the fire pits. The woman sat apart on a chair, observing with curiosity.

8

Last summer, a story in a major newspaper accused Lightaven of having “racist ties” and hosting conferences with “extreme figures”. This summer saw a 50% increase in LessOnline attendees of all races.

9

So uh...

Chasing Right Tail

Sex requires trust. Trust requires integrity.

It’s an old idea, though not by any means universal. Fuckbois and pickup artists pursue sex with zero integrity and make fun of “nice guys”. Most people hate that, they try to punish defectors and enforce dating norms that reward being reasonably nice and honest. 99% of the discourse about sex and integrity focuses on the conflict between “sex defectors” and the mainstream.

If we draw the distribution of “integrity and trustworthiness around sex” in the population, we see that these two groups form the left tail and middle hump, respectively. But what about the right tail? What do sexual relations look like when you optimize for trust and honesty far beyond where most people settle?

The right tail is a strange place to be. The struggle for trust flips from trying to convince others to being purely internal. The signals of trust flip to countersignals. Sexual abundance lets people have very high sexual standards, but on very unusual traits.

And everyone who’s never been in a high-trust community is convinced that it’s a sex cult.

Welcome to LessOnline.