Setting the record straight

I have not made money from another person’s sex work in any way that’s remotely similar to sex trafficking!

There are two times I’ve ever received pay for someone else’s sex work. First: In the Onlyfans days, if someone used your referral code, you got a small % of their proceeds. I think I got a very small amount of money from two ladies who used my referral code, but both of them were already sex workers who were going to sign up anyway. The second is that sometimes I would film porn with another sex worker and we would both sell the video to our own audiences, so I guess technically I made money from content with her? But she also made money from content with me. I don’t think this counts as sex trafficking.

I think (it’s hard to know cause they rarely cite any evidence) most of the time people say this, they’re referencing this guide I wrote for women interested in escorting. They fail to mention that the guide starts out with a discussion of the risks and downsides and how to choose if this path is right for you.

Accusations from this are based on a tweet years ago where I advertised people should watch my sister come cam on her 18th birthday.

This was a prank. We advertised her launch as though it was going to be sexy, but when she logged on she wore a banana suit and did slapstick humor. She never did anything sexy or sexual on cam. You will never find old screengrabs of her doing sexual stuff, because she didn’t. We had a writeup in Playboy as the ‘cam sisters’ which features a photo of her live on cam, in her banana suit.

I was also not even in the same state at the time; she was living in Idaho, and I was living in Boston, and we didn’t communicate often at that point.

Her account is here:

I have never engaged with BDSM as a sex worker. I once did a very light cnc scene, last year, with someone who was very kink-experienced. In general, clients are not into cnc, and bdsm kinks are more rare among men than women. It’s not good business. I’ve written before about the type of experience that’s most useful to sell and on average it’s not BDSM. I had to start my own series of sex parties because it’s so hard to find men who are into this kink and are trustworthy and competent to execute on it.

Everyone, men and women, pay the same price within a sliding scale to attend my orgies, which is averages ~$175 (to cover venue rental, food, equipment). A screenshot from a recent RMN (sexbot is typically female and QA typically male)

I made RMN because I personally am into cnc and wanted to go to an event where men would grab and fuck me without asking. CNC is more popular among women than men, and would be a very stupid kink to pick if I were trying to service fancy billionaires. If I were going to try to make some sort of bespoke company to service billionaire needs or something, it would make way more sense to have sloppy blowjob enthusiastic girls who show up in a pile. This is not my fantasy at all and not really a business I would enjoy running.

I try to fiercely protect the RMN events from getting watered down by people who aren’t super into CNC but just want to be included in an orgy, and I have ended up turning away a lot of people in my circles trying to get involved, which includes some pretty high-status x-risk researchers. We also turn away people who might have preexisting professional relationships with people who are already attending. And a large fraction of the attendees come from the kink scene, or from online applications. But yes, maybe a quarter or so of the attendees at a given event come from the more rationalist side of my friend groups. So I guess this one is like… faintly true? Kinda? But I really don’t think these events can be used very well for networking. We tend to be busy with other activities. The biggest grain of truth in this is that some organizers object to inviting anyone who works on AI capabilities (just because they don’t want their organizer efforts to benefit that sort of person), so maybe the events implicitly discourage AI capabilities research, if anything.

There’s lots of parties and social events that occur in the larger bay area rationality scene, and this is just a truly microscopic percentage of the networking. It’s ~15 people in the scene, roughly 2x a year.

There’s been one instance of assault on our third party, in early 2023, where a man claimed to misunderstand the rules and did not use a condom when he should have used a condom, with multiple women. Upon noticing, we immediately kicked him out, banned him from future parties, communicated the incident to other kink organizing leaders, and offered to help and pay for any legal expenses if the victims wanted to go to the police. Both parties wrote up their experiences, here and here (there was also a third party, me). We also wrote up the incident in our incident report log (which is public, with specific details available by request from people with an invitation). We instituted new rules that required people pass a policy quiz at the front door so they had no plausible deniability about rule knowledge, and tightened our tolerance of other minor infractions (the offender had been late to show up, which we now are more likely to believe corresponds with an inability to take rules seriously). We also increased our standards for who gets invites at all, requiring a greater amount of referrals or prior experience in the scene.

We’ve had no further assault incidents since then.

No. My claim is that if party 1 is throwing a private event for people from a certain subculture, and party 2 is very offended that this is happening at all and is trying to police people’s own personal business carried out on their own personal time, then I’m okay with party 2 being iced out of a culture. I think that this “police other people’s personal business” mentality is what led to a lot of the woke insanity mass cancellations) and MAGA aggressiveness (trans persecution). I think, if you allow in people who do other-policing in this way into a community, you introduce a ticking time bomb which threatens to destroy the community from the inside. I am ok icing out people who are like this, whether they’re trying to police your takes on social justice or whether they’re trying to police what you do with your own body gender-wise or whether they’re trying to police whether you hold a furry convention or whether they’re trying to police whether you host a slut convention.

It’s hard to prove a negative, but I can say we sure as hell communicated several times that it is against the rules, if we did find that anybody had engaged in it we’d kick them out, and I don’t believe anybody did violate the rules.

Many people seem to think that there’s probably prostitution happening somehow because then I could make money off of it. This seems pretty silly.

1. It’s not part of the appeal of the event or sales for anyone. We clearly stated that no, we are not doing prostitution on the website. We clearly stated this in opening circle. In the girl training we said absolutely do not do any prostitution.
2. If I did want to make money from prostitution, it would be way more money for me, way faster, to simply go do prostitution myself, where the legal risk is much lower (I’m in California, and in my jurisdiction, the DA has clarified that they do not intend to prosecute prostitution). My rates are one of, if not the highest, publicly-listed escort rates, and I source clients through escort listing websites, which get way more traffic from people who are already selected to be the kind of people who hire escorts.
3. It’s illegal to run prostitution at slutcon. I already have a ton of people yelling online that I’m a sex trafficker, I really don’t want to even come close to violating any laws that involve facilitating prostitution for others, it would be absolutely retarded for me to run a prostitution ring in a widely advertised event that I named Slutcon. Like seriously, think this through. Use theory of mind.
4. We didn’t even have very many escorts present. I think… maybe 9, out of 95 women? And as far as I know they did not find this a good event to source clients. Most men do not hire sex workers, particularly high-end ones. The base rate of interest is low.

No. I think someone else made a crypto coin named Slutcon but I didn’t know about this until people told me. We have no affiliation with it.

Unfortunately, the world is inherently unsafe for women. We have several layers of security to try to make Slutcon safer than events outside slutcon. We have professional security at the front gate and occasionally checking in on the event. We have trusted security volunteers working in shifts, wearing bright vests, that walk around keeping an eye on things. We have a professional group of men used to working with triggered men and gave a button in the conference app to summon them. We brought in a female coach to do sessions with attendees, which we paid for. We gave flirt girl training, where we clearly outlined the behavior from men which was not allowed and let people know who they could come talk to if they were feeling unsafe. Currently, the only known case of sexual assault at Slutcon was during a public afterparty, between two non-Slutcon going partygoers (who did not report the event to security staff until well after the party had concluded).

The assault was not reported to us for many months, and when it was reported we did not ignore it. During the first Slutcon, one of the nights we had a party that was open to the public, where non-attendees could come, drink and dance. We had increased security for this event. Very unfortunately, one of the partygoers sexually assaulted another partygoer by grinding his penis on her while on the dance floor and ignoring her no. Neither of these people were ticketed Slutcon attendees. We had security patrolling the event and, if the event had been elevated to our attention, we would have immediately kicked the man out (and had already kicked other people out for lesser offenses). Unfortunately the victim believed that we didn’t care about consent because we were kinky and into cnc in our personal lives, and thought this meant we would “laugh at” what happened to her. Her account is here.

The same woman, in the same writeup, reported that a bartender did not respect her no. In further discussion, it turns out the bartender mistook her for another woman who he’d had previous playful context with (speaking French), and tried to get her to speak French in order to get a drink. The woman refused multiple times. This is not the behavior we expect from bartenders and if we were informed we would have relieved him of duty. The discussion of this account is here.

Only conditional on this reducing assault rates for real children. I have never ever expressed support for AI child porn for its own sake; I only have said this would be a good idea if it might help save real children from assault. We can argue if this is true, I think it’s reasonable to debate causality, but my arguments here have always been about what would best protect real kids.

The legal age of consent varies across the globe, so it depends which laws you’re talking about. I am pro Romeo and Juliet laws, for example.

I think people’s conception around age and consent is pretty incoherent, and we’re in a unique cultural moment in history where people have an unusually high amount of protectiveness around age and sex. It makes sense to draw a line somewhere, like at some point as a civilization you’ve gotta just call it, but reality has a bunch of grey area edge cases. It is true that I find it weird that someone’s ability to consent to sex can be entirely dependent on the age of the person they’re consenting to and the U.S. state that they’re in, and nothing about their own level of knowledge, mental state, or desire.

Yes, I’ve tweeted a lot of thought experiments about pedophilia, age of consent stuff, etc. But people leave out that I’ve tweeted thousands (this link is only a small %) of all sorts of weird thought experiments, and if you pull out tweets on any topic you can make it look like I’m particularly obsessed with that specific topic. I am especially drawn to questions that probe at moral intuitions and the boundaries between what people consider right or wrong, which involves a lot of questions about ethical behaviors and social norms, so ‘would this be ethical’ questions are overrepresented.

I am not funded by Peter Thiel. At the time of writing this, I’ve never met or spoken to him. I attended and spoke at Hereticon twice. I was not paid for my talks, although they did comp my hotel room. The comped hotel room is the most I’ve ever financially benefitted from Peter Thiel.

I don’t think so. I support medical and surgical transition. I support, in some cases, the ability of minors to transition. I would be happy to vote for a trans person for president. I am friends with multiple trans people. I think trans people should be able to use bathrooms on the basis of gender. I think trans people are subject to an extremely unfair persecution campaign by a bunch of conservatives. I support preferred pronouns regardless of level of transition.

I also disagree with the way some, more radical trans people conceive of gender. I personally still instinctively ‘process’ some trans people as their birth sex, depending where on their transition they are. I think many trans people have autogynephilia, but this doesn’t matter much because many cis women also have autogynephilia. If being transgender is sexual for someone, I don’t think this makes their trans identity any less valid.

This is not true of my flagship dataset. You can tell because the sample size for that is 1.3 million people (compare this against my follower count). I’ve done extensive reweighting to match the population, and also weighting that specifically targets the areas in which the survey is selected (kinkier) to more closely match population levels. My survey data has replicated a huge amount of existing research, so it’s clearly not just random noise. Check out methodology (click ‘methodology’ in upper right corner) for more details.

I do sometimes use my own followers for surveys, but when I do this I

• Clearly disclaim it, like ‘be wary about extrapolation’
• Or buy a ‘random’ (as much as it can be) sample of test takers from a paid site like positly to calibrate deviance from a positly population
• Or don’t care, because it’s the type of data where selection bias doesn’t matter much (e.g., a synesthesia survey where I checked what color people tend to imagine each letter being)

The claim is that someone misread the room (an audio group chat room) and talked about their childhood trauma, and I shut them down cruelly (“Aella cut me off to sharply attack her, saying something like “why would you share that or think anyone here would care?” )

I at first was like ‘no way I did this’ because the situation as described is not one I remember. After thinking about it more, I think she might be referring to an instance when a group of us were in a conversation, and a woman entered, did not wait at all to figure out what we were talking about, and started rambling for a very long time, out of context, about something bad that had happened to her. My perception was that this completely destroyed the flow and enjoyment of the conversation for others. I believe that people are often too timid around protecting others, and that often the person willing to be disagreeable and take a stand by interrupting and going ‘hey this isn’t what we’re talking about here’ are vital to preserving a good experience for other people. I don’t remember what I said, but it seems pretty unlikely I ‘sharply attacked’ her, or that I said verbatim what is ascribed to me. My best guess is that I asked something like ‘what’s your motivation for sharing that here’ and then tried to communicate that we are not talking about that right now.

But again this is six years ago and all our memories get fuzzy and warped, so I don’t know for sure.

This claim comes from a lady I knew from a group of camgirls when I was 21/22 years old, or 12-13 years ago at the time the accusation got made. We were all drinking a lot! We took shots while camming quite a bit, we had a bunch of sloppy lesbian sex with each other, orgies, etc.

I don’t know what her sexual assault claim is about, I have no recollection of anything like this, nobody ever expressed discomfort at the time. When I asked our mutual friends about this they were very confused by her claim.

My best guess as to what she’s referring to, is this:

We were camgirls, and constantly streaming sex acts live and recording videos of us having sex with each other and our boyfriends to sell. Sometimes we would have orgies, someone would happen to record, and we’d be like ‘sweet’ and sell the footage. Sometimes we’d have orgies that weren’t recorded, and I’d hear people express ‘man I wish that had been recorded so we could sell it as content.’

At one point, during an orgy, I recorded the lady in question and her boyfriend without asking (to avoid interrupting the scene). They had done porn before and sold content, and I thought they’d be grateful, like ‘oh that’s great now we have more content to sell’.

I was mistaken, they did not like being filmed without me asking. I was like ‘oh whoops I fucked up’ and deleted the footage.

I think I made a mistake here! I extrapolated a risky thing without asking. I was young and thought it was normal. But I quickly learned and never did anything like this again.

This is my best guess as to what she’s referring to as ‘sexual assault’.

The doxxing I don’t remember; my guess is I accidentally leaked some detail about the environment when talking casually on cam, which seems plausible and would definitely have been a mistake and I’m very sorry. Since then I’ve become significantly more careful about thinking through details I reference whenever I am livestreaming.

So yeah: my best guess here is that this is some errors in judgment I made in my very early 20s about social norms.