this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Hi, I am so sorry for what happened. I believe you and the other people with stories of abuse in these communities. Nobody should face unwanted sexual contact. I hope you have local support.
Could you tell us how closely the online communities you have met relate to pre-existing communities for kink, non-monogamy, and responsible substance use? Because I never met them in person I don't have a good feeling for the differences between LessWrong, EA, TPOT, Vibecamp, and Hereticon, but the Bay Area Rationalists don't seem like people who have a float at Folsom or sign their whole house up for a bondage workshop with people who have rigged for kink.com. It sounds more like a rationalist will sometimes ask a friend who is a kinkster or experienced substance user but not a rationalist for advice.
Is there anything you would like us to change about how we talk about all this?
thank you <3
from my perspective (which is being on twitter long before visa / life coaches showed up, i'm friends with some status451 blog people which had scott alexander in their blogroll) some people are in existing kink communities but for the most part it organically comes out of Rationalism.
I can only speculate as to why, I think the presence of high profile sex workers / the general fact that hedonism follows money and privilege. The Bay is polycule central and I think Rationalist communities just philosophize about it a lot more visibly. So I guess the tl;dr here is that there are probably a few experienced kink people but a lot of it is just organic rationalist practice, I think Slutcon is attempting to start more of an organized thing around that area.
So, substances: In general I think these communities lean towards psychedelics, but Ketamine is huge in the bay. At one of the parties I was at I ran into a notable AI researcher who told me we needed to postpone hanging out because they were in a pretty deep k-hole.
I think there's not a lot of overt / public facing harm reduction / responsible use, but some individual people know about things like testing for fent. From my experience Vibecamp has a GHB problem and I don't know what credentials their current medic has.
No drug shaming here but I think it's just not a priority for people, early on Vibecamp faced the 'what do we do about substances' problem and I can only speculate on what happens now but at least at the time of Vibecamp 2 I felt like there wasn't a really good handle on it.
TESCREAL is a good place to start from wrt conceptualizing these communities, there are differences between EA and Rats and what they do but there's a ton of crossover. TPOT has been many things since the pandemic but basically the group of Twitter users for mainly rationalists / post rationalists, with some woo people who don't talk about rationalism a lot.
Vibecamp population has also been a lot of things, it was really ambiguous at Vibecamp 1 and 2. Hereticon is an event series put on in Miami by Founders Fund, it became something different (and I didn't go to 2) but 1 was basically a gathering of a lot of cool internet people / some personalities you folks know about who did talks on various things.
Talk about things as you folks want to! I'm in a much better place now and honestly it was that bizarre reaction from these communities that did most of the damage closer to when everything happened.
Thanks so much for telling your story.
Having substance testing and trained medics is definitely important at an event where people want to alter their consciousness. GHB is a new name to me but you definitely need educated staff and clear rules at sexually charged events with substance use. It sounds like these spaces are starting to bring in some harm-reduction practices but terrible things still happen at their events and many leaders still try to cover up and blame victims.
Substance use is hard for me to understand since I have not met these people in person, but some Bay Area Rationalists seemed to think that LSD contributed to some bad situations, and reporters talk about workers and executives using ketamine.
GHB is one of many date rape drugs that people also consume recreationally, and yeah i'm not sure why they love it!
ket is definitely the drug of choice in the SF social scene, and wrt psychedelics I think there is not a lot of care put into them / some really childish perceptions of them, the Michael Vassar / Leverage situation is a whole thing but assuming it's as described, ie he was encouraging people to use drugs to 'hack' their own brains it creates a really bad situation wrt consent
honestly i think there's just a lot of untreated mental illness which gets idealized, adding psychedelics on top of that is not a great idea
random memory time!
I recall one of the people from the original rave generation here (ZA) once telling me about them taking GHB in combination with something else (I forget what), with a positively-framed comment of “it makes you feel like your eyes are aflame” — never understood the appeal, especially for that. so much so I’ve never even wanted to look the compound up on psychonautwiki
the rest of your remarks wrt goings on over in the bay area echo impressions I’ve gotten from things. kinda surprised to hear ket is that big - any idea how recent it is? I wonder whether it came about following from the findings around ket as a positive treatment for depression?
Young, confident men (like Internet Libertarians) and sheltered men (like wealthy tech workers and investors) often convince themselves that rules don't apply to them because they can prevent any mistakes with their big beautiful minds, whether that is investing or substance use or firearms safety or kink protocols. Sometimes they get a Darwin Award but other times they hurt other people.
I am glad you are in a healthier place now, breaking away from Rationalism communities can be hard.
That's really the best way to put it. The Sequences / Rationalism are based on an assumption they lead to a superior way of thinking (that Rationalists are better than normies), and most of the problems are downstream of that.