(If you want access, it’s invite-only and paid subscribers can access an invite code at the bottom of the post here)

So when the button question started trending on twitter, I couldn’t help myself. I found myself the deity of a world that people had begun to care about. I could test how people would behave when something was actually on the line. And thus:

When logging onto Glosso, users got this page. In order to access Glosso, you had to answer. I threatened people with bans if they simply closed the page. I gave this only to users who’d already signed up for Glosso, so nobody could make another account just to interfere with results.

I shoulda thought it through, because it hurled Glosso into a ton of drama. Some people got mad at me, people got mad at each other, people mourned, families were torn apart.

After about 36 hours, the big flashing timer on the page finally ran out, and users were delighted(?) to find that blue had won. Everyone was saved. No account bans. We all cheered in the little impromptu chat room I pulled up for us.

Despite many people in the debates over the last day claiming they had voted differently from the twitter poll now that they had actual accounts on the line, the results were…

Exactly the same as Tim Urban’s poll. A perfect 42/58 split. I have no idea why. Tim’s poll went extremely viral across all of twitter; my Glosso test was a narrow set of users selected for being active on a weird experiment quiz site. ?????

One benefit of my site is that I can correlate everything across everything. Glosso is loaded with questions, and roughly half of people who answered my button question had answered a decent set of questions elsewhere. So let’s investigate!

(you should know that David Shor did some much bigger polling about this and got some pretty cool, likely more robust correlations than me here and you should check it out)

Here’s the top correlations with the button, that are probably robust-ish despite the lots-of-testing I did (we have 1300+ questions with n>300, this can lead to false positives).

Okay first - obvious things stick out. Stuff associated with my MTG color test (the glosso version) white are most strongly correlated with blue pushers - communal, weak-protectors, etc. Interestingly, economic liberalism was slightly more strongly associated than social liberalism, though this might be noise.

There’s also a nature theme that surprised me; not only spending time outside as a kid, but also finding nature erotic?

I did control by gender, otherwise I’d assume it’s a gender confound.

Gender breakdown, by the way, was this:

Okay so wtf is going on with the incest questions?? I can’t think of any obvious confounder here. Gender isn’t it, and liberalness as a confounder would primarily bring up fetishes besides incest (genderplay is more strongly associated, for example).

And… gigolos?? I don’t know. It might be noise, but upon light checking I think these associations are reasonably strong enough to make it unlikely to be noise, and two incest questions is a lot to show up by accident.

Probably this is confounded by something. But I don’t know what. If the sample sizes increase, I’ll let you know.

In general, I think people parse the blue/red button question without doing much game theory about it, as evidenced how the correlations trend towards ‘nice group thinker’ vs ‘evil iq believer’. I myself am a blue button pusher, which is an unpopular opinion in much of my closer culture.

How did you vote? Are you into incest? Fight in the comments.

• You answer a bunch of questions about your sexuality, in a wide spectrum of things that might be relevant, from positions to orgasm ability to bdsm to specific fetishes to emotions, etc.

• You pick the algorithm you want to sort by. Is emotional matching the most important thing for sex for you? Do you not particularly care about enacting any fetishes irl? If so, make emotions the strongest and kinks the weakest. Do you have an extremely strong obligate fetish you need in order to be fulfilled? Set kinks to be your highest-loading weight and watch the magic happen.

• If you’ve already had sex with anybody else on the site, you can add them as a sex partner and rate your compatibility with them to help train the recommendations on your preferences. (This also generates a visualization of your sexual network as nodes and lines which is super cool)

  

• You get a list of matches of people the algorithm predicts as a best sexual fit for you.

• You can set your own personal pricing to message you (using in-site toy currency you gain by logging in every day/completing quizzes). Either make a flat rate (set it real high if you don’t want anybody to message you at all) or use dynamic pricing, where people with higher compatibility matches can message you for a lower cost.

This is currently in beta, I’m slowly tweaking and developing.

It’s not AI! You get matched via a concrete, understandable method. I think it might be the best thing out there. I’ve been studying sex in depth for many years now, via both vast quantities of data and also lots if direct interviews, and this is by far the toppest tier sex-partner-finding system that I’m aware of. Right now my top match, out of over 1,400 users, is the guy who is legitimately by far the best sex of my life. And there has been, to my knowledge, three sex meetups from the matcher itself (it’s only a few weeks old)

Even if you don’t want to have sex with anybody new, it can still be fun to use. The process tells you about your bdsm archetype, you get to generate your kink tree with data on how gender skewed your preferences are, you get reports about your currently active sex life, etc. It’s useful for people who are in long term monogamous relationships!

Again - this site is in beta. It’s currently invite-only (and Sexxo is 18+).

As I’m trying to keep the growth slow I am giving limited invite codes to paid subscribers only right now, which you can find below the paywall (scroll to the end of this post). I hope to see you on there! <3

The second item on my agenda is https://plzdontkillus.com/. We want YOU.

This is a month-long residency in Berkeley in July where you come, chill, and make short-form content every day or you’re out. We have pretty incredible artists coming to help you out and teach you, from acting coaches to niche autistic youtubers to professionally drunk philosophers to Grimes. We’re looking for a wide variety of people who wanna get creative, it’s all-expenses-paid (food and board, at least), and the general goal is trying to prevent ai from killing us but also you don’t have to have to be into that personally and you can just come vibe.

Please apply! Even if you’re a weirdo - especially if you’re a weirdo - we want all types.

Read more

When I was 19, I spent a year assembling electrical relays on a factory floor for $10/hr.

I was pretty excited to get the job. I’d been applying to much worse - I remember looking at at a craigslist ad for a sewage worker, which included a warning that it might be pretty gross. I applied for that too.

I really needed money. I was so poor I going hungry, would scrape change off the street for meals. I remember when touring a cheap room in northern Idaho to rent in a house full of strangers, they showed me the fridge, and I asked if people ever ate each other’s leftovers. They reassured me no, of course nobody would touch your food, and I was disappointed. That’s not what I had been trying to ask.

I’d grown up in a very isolated, borderline-cult type of world where my parents had made it clear that they’d give me no financial assistance once I left home. Once you’re 18, you’re on your own, get a job, support yourself. It didn’t even occur to me to let them know I was going hungry; I just figured that’s what happened to people when you were an adult.

College wasn’t viable to me; I’d enrolled briefly but got kicked out after a few months once the finances didn’t work out. A combination of my being homeschooled my entire life (weird transcripts), my parents making just too much money for me to qualify for financial aid while simultaneously refusing to cosign any loans at all, meant my path forward was not going to be one of education.

So when Schweitzer Engineering Labs called to tell me I got the assembly line job at their Pullman manufacturing location, I was thrilled. It paid a full ten dollars an hour (in 2011). My last job, shelving books at the Nampa public library, had been $7.25 an hour. And the assembly line job was indoors and I didn’t have to handle any poop! Amazing.

They said to show up at ~7am for training. I’d thought jobs usually started at 8am, and was disappointed that it was so early. But I was grateful to have a job at all, and I was an adult now and I knew being an adult was supposed to be very difficult, so I said ‘okay’ and showed up at 7.

They put me and other new hires in a little room and we learned about the history of the company and how electrical relays worked and how the manufacturing floor functioned and then they showed us what all the tools were, how to screw and unscrew things, how to solder, etc. I liked learning things and I had a great time. I was determined to do awesome and I paid attention and tried super hard.

After a few days training was over, I passed their mini tests with flying colors, and they said great - show up tomorrow at 6:30am. I was oh wow. That’s kinda early. They were like oh yeah right my bad, actually you’re on mandatory overtime, work starts at 5:30am. I shortly find out that it’s only sometimes 5:30; much of my time working there required us clocking in before 5am. Oh, and you have to work Saturdays. Sometimes if we’re really strapped, you need to come in on Sunday too. I lived 22 minutes away, so I spent my 19th year on this planet waking up at ~4:15am, getting home at 3:30pm, and going to sleep at 8pm, 6-7 days a week.

I got assigned to a section near the end, where we put the relays into the metal boxes and wired then up. Everything was on the same huge floor, the units just slowly flowed down the line and got shipped out the butt end of the building. There were no windows visible to us.

When you arrive you get lockers where you put your stuff, and you have a little blue antistatic jacket/overcoat thing, and you put on special gloves and goggles and have to de-electrify yourself by plugging a wire from your coat into the wall. Everything smelled SO specific, it’s hard to describe - like rubber and metal and other stuff I don’t have a term for.

I was determined to have a good time. I believed happiness was a choice, and if I just worked hard enough and was good and tried that things would go okay. I wanted to make everyone’s lives better, so I was annoyingly cheerful. Just downright homeschool-levels of goofy.

The units got passed down the floor on trays and these rubber pads. When I had a little downtime (which was rare and inadvised, they told us strictly that you should be finding something to do nonstop. If you are waiting for another assembler to finish their unit to pass to you, you should start immediately cleaning), I would scratch little cartoons or messages or silly things into the rubber pads. They were very superficial and hard to see, you had to just catch the light reflecting off of them at the right angle to notice, and if you rub it really hard it fades away. I did this for weeks.

One day I came in and my team was in a special meeting, a rare huddle. All the teams on the entire floor were in their own huddles. They gravely told us that someone had been VANDALIZING the equipment, and that they needed to find out who it is and that terrible vandal will have to replace everything - many thousands of dollars. I was horrified and filled with shame. The next day I went to a company computer and emailed someone as high up as I could find (I think possibly the CEO?) admitting it was me and I’m sorry and I don’t know how I’ll be able to pay for it but I can try somehow, maybe take it out of my wages. I never heard back; probably it got caught in some filter meant to prevent the plebians from reaching the consuls.

I did this on a break. We got two legally-mandated 15 minute breaks (in addition to lunch). It was a big floor, and took a few minutes to walk into the break room, so the actual breaks were closer to like 9 minutes.

The lunches were generous; we got a full 45 minutes or hour, I forget. They gave us free lunches on Fridays, where the entire company piled into the big special lunch room and we got some kind of presentation. There I got to see the other people who worked at the factory - not the assemblers, but the engineers, and the managers, and marketers, and whoever else.

I’d watch them longingly. I really wanted to be one of those. I had this idea that if I just worked really hard and really well on the factory floor, that eventually I could become one of them. I had some vague belief that I had a lot of potential. I was vibrating with vision and an overactive mind. I thought I can do what they do but I have no idea how to get there.

Eventually I figured out this wasn’t how it worked. The company advertised some educational program for assemblers to turn into brain people, but I couldn’t afford it. I kept meeting coworkers who’d been on the assembly line floor for decades. After many months I finally get pulled into a manager’s office for a performance review and they give me a 25 cent raise.

I slowly lost hope. I really tried to hold on, but exhaustion made my fingers start slipping. I was tired all the time. I got a friend to buy me some alcohol (19 years old remember) and started drinking many nights, which led to me being hungover and nonfunctional during the work hours.

I hateed the work. It was a horrible no-good kind of work. You couldn’t zone out and just do autopilot, because you had to follow a set of instructions with slight variations, that change a little each time. You had to pay attention. But the attention you paid was not interesting; it was ongoing, it was relentless, it was stupid. My mind wasn’t mine, it was just barely pulled over some threshhold into a mind-killing, mundane amount of repetition.

I was bad at it. Before this I’d tended to be naturally good at almost everything I tried. I learned very fast. But here I made more mistakes than almost anyone else. They tracked mistakes; people spot-checked your work, and you got an anonymized code and you could go look at a leaderboard to see where your code ranked among others. This depressed me more; how would I climb through the ranks and become an engineer if I accidentally screwed the blue wire onto the wrong node once every 200 times?

They didn’t want us to sit, and I think I started working there at the end of some kind of sitting war, because there were a few scattered chairs and angry muttering longtimers. Management thought sitting was bad and would destroy productivity, but some of the assemblers had fought back with cries of back pain, so they’d grudgingly allowed us a small number of chairs. I was young, so did not get first access to a chair, but I loved it when I did. It made my day so so much better. Standing hurt, and made me worse at everything, and made me tired and sad.

After a few months I got moved up the line, to the section where they installed the boards into the units. This was less physically intensive, but more mentally draining.

We assembled lots of different types of units, and the units went through different corresponding flow lines that had the required amount of tools. But they wouldn’t let you sit and learn a single line, which might have one day allowed you to get used to it enough to zone out and have thoughts that were your own. No - you had to rotate spots regularly, so that you were always just slightly unfamiliar with your current task. They did this so if people were out sick or something they could flexibly fill the gap, but it resulted in everyone being slightly worse at everything. There was no groove to fall into. It was an infinite series of tiny tasks that changed a little bit all the time, and a lot sometimes, and if you fail someone might DIE.

And then randomly you’d get thrown into the picker role, which meant you spent the day working in the warehouse. You’d have to haul in a big stacked tray on wheels and go down a list of paper and then run around the shelves pulling boxes off and scanning them and hauling the tray back. This was awesome cause it meant at least you weren’t standing still, but it was physically exhausting and happened rarely enough you never got used to it.

Throughout it all, I was still grateful. I saved most of my money, and felt like a king sitting on a savings account of a few thousand dollars. I was happy I was not working in poop. I was happy to not be hungry.

But even so, the depression slowly crept around me and I had this sense that I did not want to spend the rest of my life like this. I was so confused by the coworkers that had been there for a decade+ and seemed content with their lives. I thought we were all on a ship that had rescued us from the void and we were so thankful and just waiting for the ship to deliver us to better lands, and so why were you still on the boat? Why had you not gotten off?

They were all poor. I had a few coworkers my age; one had come from a farm, the other wanted to do college but hadn’t managed to make it for some reason. Some were divorced moms, others jolly church guys. We all shopped at wal-mart and used coupons for groceries. I wondered about their lives outside of this, but there probably wasn’t actually that much life outside of this. We were with each other for the majority of our waking hours. The factory walled us in both in space and time.

I started calling in sick more often. Sometimes I’d wake up and stare at the ceiling and just completely lack the will to make myself get up and go to work. I started bumping up against management who frowned at me for taking so many days off. My compulsive please-authority streak was not strong enough to force me out of bed, often hungover, into yet another 9-10.5 hours under flourescent lights on a Saturday.

I got out because I got another job. I’d been watching other job ads on craigslist and saw one opening for a boudoir photographer. I liked taking photos of my pretty friends on weekends, and so I applied, and showed them all the pretty photos I’d taken, and one day after work when I was in a hardware store they called me to tell me I was hired. I almost died of joy.

I told everyone at the assembly line I was getting out, and they were so happy for me. I remember my last day clearing out my locker and walking out for the very last time and they were congratulating me and wishing me luck and then I was gone. I went to the clothing store and asked the lady working there to suggest office clothes for me, because I was going to be a professional now. She handed me a set of clothes and I bought them all. No more blue antistatic factory coat!

The photography job lasted two weeks. I’d just turned 20 and I’d been homeschooled my whole life and I had no idea how to interact with people where I was in a role of authority. I’d had all fire quite literally beaten out of me and was compulsively submissive, quiet, nervous. I was not good at making strangers feel sexy and like I had everything under control in photoshoots. The boss called me into his office and said sorry, we need to let you go. I said okay. I understand. I walked out, wearing my ill-fitting ‘office’ clothes I’d bought for this job, climbed into my beat-up little car, and wailed like death the entire drive home. This was my one shot out into a better life and I’d blown it.

I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew no matter what happened, I would not return to the ship that had rescued me from the void. I would do anything but that. I had a little bit of savings to sustain me for some months, and so I began trying and failing, trying and failing, over and over again, until one day I met a man off okcupid who asked if I’d ever heard of this thing called webcamming.

Most of the nightmares I ever have are about the factory floor. I dream I have to go back for some reason, I’ve lost my job, I have to go recover something and they need my help and I get sucked in. It’s strange for that place to be such a nightmare for me - so many other people are working there, right now as you read this, and presumably they do not feel like they’re in a nightmare. Maybe they’re good at their jobs. They get decent health insurance and plenty of money for groceries and a free lunch every Friday. Am I weak, for failing to endure what others can thrive on? Is something in me so brittle I had to drink to coat my exposed nerves? I don’t know. But I think about them a lot, and I hope one day we can get a nicer, bigger boat to rescue them again.

In Pornlandia, relationships have a really particular failure mode: people get mad at each other for failing to live up to a sexual ideal.

In Pornlandia, there is no stigma against exposing kids to porn. Kids grow up watching it, and in fact people make kid-friendly porn with fun animations and simple shapes. It’s normal for teens to have photos of genitalia on their walls and rank their favorite pornstars and talk about getting laid as the only thing that matters. They might get up to silly hijinks like “installing hidden cameras in the locker room” or “pressuring each other into sex” - and people simply shake their head at teenagers being teens.

But as people grow older you really start to see the cracks show - people fall in love, and date, and marry, and find in most cases that the other person is not what they expected. They grew up on porn - watching two people in various degrees of ravenous for each other assuming every single position and deepthroating as far as the dicks can go. In Pornlandia, there’s not much of a distinction between porn and sex - people view porn as simply depictions of what sex is, or at the very least ought to be. And so people pressure themselves to live up to pornographic ideals, which they consider to be healthy and good - it shows two people in the throes of passion for each other, how could that not be good? They pressure their partners into the kind of sex they see in porn. If their partner is failing to fuck them in the way that porn makes them feel, then something has gone terribly, horribly wrong.

You, suddenly cast into Pornlandia, might try to help them out: “You guys are just totally pornbrained. Porn totally warps your conceptions around sex and you need to be more careful.”

The local Pornlandian walking by vaguely shrugs. “Sure, it’s true a lot of sex lives don’t end up like that.” But he doesn’t seem too concerned.

“Okay, so don’t expose kids to it,” you say. “Or if you do, if you absolutely have to, you need super extra warnings that this is not real. You should have careful education around this.”

“I mean that seems a little excessive,” the Pornlandian says, pushing up his glasses in a way that somehow reminds you of hentai. “It’s pretty harmless for kids. Sure maybe we should tell them that real sex can get complicated, but everyone kinda figures that out anyway.”

You notice you’re stuttering-

“It’s not bad to be exposed to sex lives,” the Pornlandian native continues. “Sex is just part of life.”

“But it’s not real”, you say.

“Of course it’s real,” he seems confused. “They’re just banging each other right there, you can see it.”

“I mean that in real life people - usually women - don’t really like doing that stuff. They’re just acting like they’re into it in order to fulfill a fantasy. If people were really in touch with what they wanted, most people would not be doing most of that insane stuff you see them doing.”

“I dunno, my girlfriends seem super into it.”

“Probably because they think they have to be! Or because early in the relationship they were excited by the sex and willing to try anything because they had butterflies! But it’s just not sustainable.”

The man looks at you as though you are an alien. He cannot conceive of the worldview you are trying to communicate. “Sure most people have sex problems, but that’s just normal and totally unrelated to our copious porn consumption. Sex isn’t bad. We like sex. What, are you trying to say we should live in a world without sex? We should go around being like ‘ew sex is bad let’s ban it’? That sounds sad and you are a dullard.”

Okay so hear me out: we’re all living in Romantica.

I think it’s pretty insane that we just expose kids to romance with zero safeguards. We literally go make them cute animated movies of people falling in love in simplified romantic ideals and go ‘here you go, kids, mainline this straight into your actively-forming brains. We are not going to provide any education or give you any warnings about this whatsoever.’

Teenagers getting absolutely possessed by the romance drive, where their will and identity is stripped from them and they are replaced with the Romance-Optimizing Egregore is something we look back and laugh on as funny. My friends have anecdotes from their youths like “I backread 3-5 years of all of their posts on every social media I can find after which I sent an email proposing marriage” and “I flew across the world to spend an extra two weeks with them even though we were going to see each other in two weeks anyway” and “I would set up surveillance on guys I liked, would hide to watch them and get friends to would gather intel for me, and then would pretend to like everything they liked”. After romantic failures, one friend “slashed a boys bike tires for wronging me and then another time scratched LIE into my arm while listening to “last resort” on repeat”.

If you find yourself laughing, please notice that these all involve quite a lot of stalking, deception, and intentional manipulation for the goal of experiencing romance, and if you simply swap out ‘romance’ with ‘sex’ the scenario seems much darker.

As people grow older you can really see the cracks start to show - people fall in love, date, marry, and find that in most cases the other person does not conform to the romantic ideal they have been fed. They grew up watching romance - two people in various degrees of ravenous for each other performing every possible act of fealty and gesture of symbolic affection. In Romancelandia, there’s not much of a distinction between romantic narratives and actual romance. People view romcoms and romantic dramas as simply depictions of what romance is, or at the very least ought to be.

And so people pressure themselves to live up to romantic ideals, which they consider to be healthy and good - it shows two people in the throes of limerence for each other, how could that not be good? They pressure their partners into the kind of romantic behavior they see in disney movies. If their partner is failing to romance them in the way that movies or romantic novels make them feel, then something has gone terribly, horribly wrong.

If a man wants to cum on his girlfriend’s face because he saw it in porn, and she doesn’t feel like getting her face cummed on, we cheer go-girl and frown at the man for even watching porn at all. But if a woman wants her boyfriend to buy her flowers because she grew up being fed this action in movies, and her boyfriend doesn’t feel like it, we have no sympathy for him. We are horrified even at comparing the two things. It’s obvious to us that porn should not influence what happens in sex, but we have been so immersed in romance-porn that the idea of buying flowers for a woman is seen as what romance ought to be. The romance narrative has become romance, and rejecting the narrative becomes rejecting romance itself. We have lost the ability to distinguish!

To be clear, I like both porn and depictions of romance. They are drugs that mainline straight to the heart of our cute little primate bodies, and the ancients have been trying to get high on this stuff for millennia with vessels such as shakespeare or stone carvings of big bootied fertility goddesses. I am pro getting high; I like drugs, I am a hedonist, I think a flourishing life is one lived with as much infatuation and butterflies and engorged penises as we can possibly muster.

But they are still drugs, and like all drugs we need to handle them responsibly, and not literally feed them to children in hyper-attention-optimized media as soon as the kids are conscious enough. Disney has done significantly more damage to adult relationships than porn. I am personally okay with youths accessing both porn and disney, but I would feel uncomfortable without making sure they had access to warnings, and education about how to have good sex and good romance in a sustainable, healthy way.

Some people are lucky enough to find relationships that look like happily ever after. Some people find sex lives that look just like the front page of pornhub, where your girlfriend wants to do all the anal she can and your boyfriend wants to choke her out while doing it, and they’re both nymphomaniacs. The things we want sometimes do manifest beneath the fingers of the blessed, but most of us end up with lives much more complicated than this. We are probably not the ultimate fantasy for others, and we are not entitled to someone else fulfilling our own ultimate fantasy. That’s fine.

For most of us, our sex gets better when we stop comparing ourselves and our sex lives to what we’ve seen in porn. and our romantic lives get better if we can manage, somehow, against all our intense conditioning, to get the fairytale romances out of our heads. It’s better if we do not romantically objectify people we love. If you can have a happy sex life without ever cumming on a single face, then maybe you can have a happy romantic life without ever once setting a tablecloth and lighting candles, too.

I have walked through a lot of dangerous areas in my life and only got almost-killed on the street once. Walking is my favorite mode of transport, and I also don’t seem to have much of a survival instinct compared to other women, and I’ve lived long-term in ~8 cities and shorter-term in several more across the world. Here’s my guide on ‘how do I accurately assess risk on the street as a woman’.

This is pretty vibes-based, because I only have a limited amount of anecdotal data and there are so many other places in the world I’ve never been. I’m sure many women have much more total exposure hours than I do! But I also have a much higher risk tolerance than most other women, and I do not feel threatened by being catcalled, which has let me learn from experiences most other women would never get into in the first place (sometimes for good reason).

My foremost and biggest rule - are there other women walking around alone?

This is by far the most important thing I use to check if I should feel afraid. If I’m passing other women walking around solo, I feel good, golden, I can put on headphones and zone out.

This, like most of my assessments, are of course not absolute. I’m sure there’s areas in the world where seeing other alone-women would not indicate safety for you specifically. But it’s something that reassures me.

For example: one night I walked home alone from blues dancing in Istanbul, about a 40 minute walk. I walked a long portion down Istiklal street, which is a huge, famous tourist street, usually full of throngs of foot traffic. It was busy that night, which was reassuring! Crowds are safe! There were hundreds of people.

Except this night, as I looked around, I slowly realized that they were all men. That’s weird - surely there must be a woman somewhere. But no - face after face after face, all men. I gradually realized I was the only woman on that street. I was alone.

I was terrified. My terror turned out to be justified; after I got off the busy street, I passed a man heading the opposite way. After I turned a corner, I glanced behind me and saw that he had turned around and was now following me. He ended up stalking and eventually chasing me down, only to be scared off when I screamed.

I sorta think you can’t really know how safe a thing is unless you’re behaving riskily enough to occasionally run into genuine threat. After this I was like ‘okay there’s the limit for the risks I’m willing to take.’

Are there bars on the windows

I once spent a few weeks alone in Cape Town, in South Africa, which has one of the highest rape rates in the world (if not the highest). I normally don’t worry too much about stats - things are very neighborhood specific! All the rape might (and probably did) happen in the townships; maybe your own neighborhood is completely fine.

I did stay in a nice area - but the place I stayed at had three separate barred gates before I finally got to my door. When I took a walk to get groceries, every single fence I passed was curled with barbed wire or spikes, and every single window had iron bars.

The protections those around you have to take to protect their property are a good signal! If you are walking down a street and there’s no bars on windows, that’s a great sign.

How destroyable are the objects around you

Okay - you’re standing at a possibly sketchy area being uncertain how scared you should be. Take a moment to imagine that you would like to do the most possible damage to the things around you in the least possible time. What would you do?

If you can do a lot of damage (and this damage hasn’t been done), you’re probably safe. If there are delicate flowers in a pot next to you, beautiful. If there’s a little cafe sign that could easily be kicked over, fantastic. If there’s a sculpture you could shove over if you tried, even better.

In general, places will show the vulnerability they have already been able to survive. If all those things are intact, that means you are not in a location where they have been regularly attacked, which means you’re likely in a situation where you will not be regularly attacked.

You can’t predict mental illness

Everybody I know seems about appropriately wary about those who are screaming at invisible people. You are probably correct to be afraid of them. The fact that they’re there and haven’t been arrested already is slightly good news but not very much good news. Being in a nice place where women are walking around alone also does not help predict your safety much either.

How many people are around you, at all?

When alone, I try to think through concrete scenarios. What am I actually afraid of? A guy trying to murder me? He’ll pull a gun? Try to rape me? While the risk is never zero, being surrounded by people usually drops the risk enormously. With the exception of some particularly extreme cultures, a guy would have to be absolutely stupid to actually do anything to you if he’s surrounded by other people! Much of the bystander effect is a myth; the famous Kitty Genovese event where supposedly thirty-seven witnesses didn’t come to her aid is basically false.

Once when I was hanging out with my homeless friends, a guy walked up and invited me to a frat party. I hadn’t been to one before, so I said yes and followed him. He led me back to his place, which was a room with a mattress on the floor, and nobody else there. I thought this was sus and told him I was gonna go home. He offered to walk me home and I happily said sure. At my apartment building, there were glass doors to get into the lobby. He said he wanted to come in to go pee; I said no, he could pee in the alley. He said please? I said no. I said goodnight, and tried to shut the door; he held it open and tried to force his way in. I gripped the handles and planted my foot in his chest and kicked him out, hard, and slammed the door shut. I waved cheerily at him ‘goodbye!’ and went up to my apartment.

At no point during any of this was I afraid. There were other people around, both within visual distance and also people who could hear me if I screamed. I did not parse him as a meaningful threat. If nobody had been around, though, I would have been terrified. It would have been likely traumatizing for me. But as it was, I experienced essentially no trauma, no increased fear in general, no side effects, no nightmares, absolutely no issues.

Attractiveness doesn’t matter maybe?

I’m a bit confused about this. I personally have experienced zero difference in my sense of safety based on how I’m dressed, and while I don’t deny there are scenarios where it would be important, I suspect a lot of women conflate general attention with danger. My Istanbul stalking experience saw me wearing a curve-covering coat that hid my butt, and in general my anxiety does not correlate with how much my nipples are showing that day. And I do wear a wide variety of clothing! I often like dressing borderline-amish, and other times I am happy wearing almost nothing.

I suspect this is because I mostly do not parse sexual attention from men on the street as threats. I do not think they are going to hurt me and I’m not afraid of them. If a man catcalls me, I view this as him announcing his own presence to both me and everyone else around me, and this feels safe to me. If he follows me and goes ‘oh baby why you ignoring me,’ it’s uncomfortable but what do I think he’s gonna do, just rape me there in the street? No! There’s other people around! It’s the middle of the day! He’s annoying and makes me feel bad but I’m not in danger!

I think my threat model is men who are taking advantage of opportunity, not advantage of you specifically. My threat model is more a man who notices that you are a woman who is sufficiently isolated. Your clothes don’t matter, he can take those off. He will not catcall you, he will not harass you. He will try to make sure you do not see him, he will follow you silently, and he will wait until no one can help you.

—

It’s possible I’m putting off certain signals that cause men not to try to physically harm me, thus causing me to believe the world is safer than it really is for other women. I’m not sure how to know this! This is ultimately intuitions I’ve built on my experience.

And there’s obviously edge cases. Sometimes the insane guy will randomly stab you no matter how many kind observers and pretty flowers are nearby. You can never be guaranteed to be perfectly safe, and often the bad gut feeling is an important one that can save your life even if it doesn’t seem justified.

But I still suspect overall, in many cases, women are very uncalibrated about risk in the street. I often see them expressing fear in places I would not have fear, or parsing interactions with men as much more threatening than I would. And idk, maybe this is good, like these women are successfully keeping themselves out of situations like walking alone at 2am in Istanbul, and I’ve been needlessly stupid. But I do like knowing that I have brushed up against the edge of what risk I’m okay with taking; at least I’m not leaving a bunch of freedom on the table!

The fact my experience seems to deviate from much of the public discourse around this kind of stuff made me curious. What if I did a survey to try to figure out why? What are the elements of CSA that make it bad? Who is it usually bad for? How much does it impact people? How do people view it in hindsight?

So I made a survey with many detailed questions about this, and then disguised it within a larger survey about general childhood experiences. What’s your childhood like? Wanna know the answer? Take my childhood survey where you answer qs and I tell you how it compares against a several metrics!

It’s currently sitting at ~32k responses - not particularly big. 70% white, 60% male, 53% bachelors degree or higher, 27yo (mean age), 71% liberal.

This survey is much more knows Aella than my BKS, but much less than most of my smaller-scale surveys; ~50% got to the survey through twitter (it did go a little viral there, so not all people who found it through twitter know me, but are presumably a few degrees removed from my circles). 35% I estimate came from unrelated-to-me sources, like referrals from my BKS (which captures passive traffic from SEO, and I sometimes make it reroute to this survey). The rest are scattered between fetlife, discord, tumblr, etc. In general I’d estimate if you asked each person who took the survey “do you know who Aella is,”, roughly 30% would say yes.

It’s hard for me to guess how this sample (very online, young-ish, liberals, somewhat aella-adjacent) might affect the CSA answers. It’s easy to predict for something like fetishes - of course we’ll be selecting for kinkier people! - but not so obvious for childhood. If you have theories about this I recommend you make your predictions before reading the graphs, not after.

One error I made is that I asked people about two age ranges - 0-12, and 13-18. I included 18 here, despite 18 being an ‘adult’. This is a really dumb error. I think it’s unlikely to affect the results too much, but it was still dumb.

So: let’s explore base rates of things first. Let’s start simple:

This is any type of sexual abuse experienced at all (0-18 years old, committed by people inside or outside the household, whether penetrative or non-penetrative). You’ll notice the difference between non-cis and cis people is almost as big as the difference between males and females themselves.

It’s more common for sexual abuse to occur pre-puberty (as roughly defined by age cutoff of 12).

People reported non-penetrative sexual abuse as more common than penetrative. Makes sense!

This is asking about who did it - did you experience sexual abuse from a member of your household? Did you experience it from not a member of your household? Interestingly, people reported higher rates from non-household members. This is a bit surprising to me, since people have way higher exposure to household members, but I guess there’s more total non-household people out there.

I’m gonna give you all the data togethere here. Below is the same data, just split out a few different ways for more intuitive viewing.

And to put it all on one graph:

I also asked two questions about the emotional impact of the experience:

“did you experience acute fear or pain while the sexual abuse was happening, at the time that it happened?”

“did the sexual abuse result in fear or pain later in life, some time after it happened?”

In general, the worst impact from sexual assault in childhood seems to be reflections on it after the fact, as opposed to the experience in hte moment. This matches up with research I’ve read on this; the Trauma Myth is a collection of interviews with survivors of csa where they found that much of the distress came from realizing the betrayal.

In general, it seems like non-cis females experience a significantly greater jump in the amount of distress they experience about their csa later on, compared to cis.

I also asked:

Coercion: did the sexual assault involve coercion? This means the use of bad outcomes if you didn’t participate (e.g., physical force, blackmailing, threats)

Rewards: did the sexual assault involve rewards? This means the use of positive outcomes if you did participate (e.g., candy, gifts, compliments)

This is of people who reported sexual assault: what did the assault consist of?

“Neither” is an interesting category. I suspect the high rate for cis males (together with their lowest rate of reported suffering from csa) indicates that they might be the most enthusiastic participants, where you neither have to cajole nor bribe them into it.

I asked about other people:

*At the time* of your sexual assault, what was your impression of the attitudes of people around you about the incident? (This is NOT about attitudes if you told people about this later in life, as an adult.)

*Later in life*, some time after your sexual assault (e.g., telling others your history after you became an adult), what were the attitudes of people around you about the incident?

With answers as: Nobody knew this happened, They treated the assault positively/as a good thing, They didn’t care/neutral/no big deal, They were slightly upset/concerned, They were somewhat upset/concerned, They were very upset/concerned, and They were extremely upset/concerned

At the time, a little over 1/3rd of people said at least someone knew about the assault. Later on in life, 70% of people said at least someone knew about it. I’m surprised it’s that low - almost 1/3 people seem to report still keeping it secret later in life.

How does CSA split out by class of upbringing?

Often the ‘elite’ option in my class in surveys is a little sus, but their responses in the survey elsewhere don’t look particularly trollish; they have normal survey time length, distribution of responses, are more educated (as one would expect), etc.

So possibly there’s a real u-shape going on here? It’s possible very rich cultures molest their kids at the same rate as lower-middle/middle class people?

Still, small sample - only n=282.

I also asked people their current class. I can thus measure the gap between childhood and current class. Here’s sexual assault rate by mobility -

I really don’t know how to interpret this. It seems like… people who have bigger rises in classes, report more csa in childhood? We should probably check this for confounds - are liberal people more likely to rise in social class and also over-interpret csa? Are CSA’d people more driven? Are people more likely to interpret actions in the past as csa, also more likely to view their childhood as worse off overall due to some kind of pessimism bias? Is it that just the very poor and the very rich are the ones more likely to have any change in social class?

Not sure. I’m not going to dive into the data for this right now, as this is an overview blog post, but I’m curious as to your guesses.

Much smaller sample here because I added this question late, but - CSA rates seem to spike pretty significantly for children of young parents. It doesn’t differ meaningfully for household vs non-household, as in the rates just seem higher regardless of who’s doing the assault.

This seems to hold even when I control for class of upbringing (e.g. filter only to people who answered ‘lower middle class’, the most popular option:

Age gap maybe seems to predict CSA, but only where father is much older than the mother? Maybe this just disproportionately selects for very young mothers:

Mental illness association is possibly very predictable, but here we go:

People are often quick to assume that CSA causes mental illness - and this is probably at least somewhat true sometimes, but I really suspect much of this is due to confounders. E.g.:

Family quality tends to be correlated - lower class is correlated with more mental illness is correlated with worse quality of life

is correlated with csa which is correlated with less healthy bmi,

which is correlated with social class again

which is correlated with quality of etc

Basically: All bad things mostly correlate with each other in one big low-quality mishmash. Who knows how much csa is a result vs consequence of mental illness? If mental illness is heritable, is it that you’re more likely to have parents with mental illness, and that type of parent is more likely to either abuse you or put you in situations where you might get abused?

So that being said, let’s glance into my other BKS survey which has the same questions, but now over a million responses:

Of people reporting schizophrenia, about 2/3rds say they experienced csa. Contrast this to people reporting ADHD, where just over 1/3rd say they experienced it.

(BKS data skews more female, so overall rates are slightly higher than they are in my childhood survey).

Let’s check ‘have you done sexual assault yourself’:

Have you ever had a sexual experience with someone else who did not want the experience? (And you knew that they didn’t want it? This *doesn’t* include consensual nonconsent, such as roleplaying an abduction.)

People who report having sexually assaulted other people, are much more likely to report having been sexually assaulted in childhood - an insane 15 to 50% jump for males! Holy shit.

Alright: we’ve scanned over the general CSA rates, how they break down, and how they correspond with a few things. In upcoming posts I might look further at correlations - which types of sexual assault cause the most distress, for example? What traits of people affect this?

Subscribe for more!

I’m not the best at marketing, but I still have had occasional successes - the gnome photoset which landed #11 top of reddit of all time for a few years, various miming stuff, earning 100k/month on OF during a brief summer of intense obsession. I also keep accidentally going viral anyway, even if I’m not trying, like for the shower thing or the eating poop thing or the not-that-pretty thing or the birthday gangbang or the big kink survey or doing acid every week for ten months or bestiality tweets or slutcon or whatever. My main twitter account is only my third-most-followed social media account; all my social media accounts together net about 1.5 million followers.

So my friends sometimes ask me for marketing advice. I feel weird giving it - there’s tons of marketing advice online already, given by confident, well-lit people directing you to their course or whatever. The market is saturated. Everyone’s trying to tell you how to make it big, and a lot of them have actually great advice.

But still, maybe I’m doing something unusual. I think most people giving marketing advice are Serious Adults, while I’m not. Most of my success isn’t a result of hard work. I score like, 5th percentile conscientiousness, if ADHD is a real thing I probably have it, and I have to install a ton of workarounds in my life in order to do basic stuff like keeping my house clean. I alternate between playing videogames for weeks straight and then occasional extended weekends of intense, hyper-effective 16-hour workdays.

So when I look at most People Who Do Marketing Real Good, I admire it, but I don’t feel like I have a lot in common with them.

For example: Substack staff told me that my blog has toyed with setting Substack-wide records for stuff like growth and conversions from individual posts, and that this is very weird. They said they rarely see someone get successful the way I have, that their best writers get popular by consistent, good-quality output, not by my strategy of two insane posts a month.

So this is where I’m coming from. I’m doing very well, but sort of accidentally. I’m sloppy, irresponsible, but occasionally shit out effective attention babies into the world.

So this guide is how to do unhinged marketing - not about putting out consistent content, not about boring but sensible stuff like maintaining a consistent brand and asking people to like and subscribe. This is a guide to one day waking up at 11:30am in a bed after a 3-week factorio binge, covered in dorito crumbs, yet finding somehow your limbs are inhabited by the spirit of the lord, which puppets you over to your desk and you watch yourself type something that’ll end up on knowyourmeme.

pay close attention to your own desire

This is probably the biggest one.

It’s obvious when you really want something, but tiny desires are quick. Some examples of tiny desire:

• If you sit down to watch a crowd, how do your eyes decide where to look? Who do you linger on? This isn’t necessarily about attraction - are there any faces, fashions, that catch you?

• When you scroll down a youtube or netflix thumbnail screen, pay attention to your own gaze. Do you ever look for an extra few seconds at a thumbnail you have no intention of clicking on?

• When you’re talking with a friend, why do you choose to say what you say? What do you want out of the conversation? Just small little comments, miniature jokes, any time you steer the topic - they come out of subtle itches, desires to feel a certain way.

How can you grab the attention of others if you don’t understand your own attention? Try to make it explicit - if your eyes stare at a person longer than normal, consciously verbalize that to yourself. Think the words, “I notice I want to look at that person.”

Often we fail to notice our own attention if its behavior doesn’t make sense to us, or doesn’t line up with things we want to be. If you’re insecure about being too feminine, you might not notice that you stare longer at the Barbie movie poster than at others. If you’ve seen a million paintings of flowers and find them boring, you might dismiss yourself when you pause in front of a painting of flowers in a thrift store, because you subconsciously expected yourself to be bored. Committing to active attention practice can help you start to notice when this is happening.

A great way to do attention practice is to watch ads. Ads are incentivized to be attention-grabbing, but there’s so many of them and they’re annoying that you probably are primed to hate them. This is perfect. Sit down and watch some ads, and meditate closely on your own experience as you do so. How do you emotionally respond to the color schemes? Do you like looking at the faces of the actors? Does your heart twinge in response to a tearjerker ad for disneyland? These are all important. Don’t let yourself get in the way of it.

Desire

Even if you think you don’t want something, you might still want to look at the thing you dislike. Our desires encompass aversive things all the time. We often gain a lot out of paying attention to something that feels bad.

You might think you are a machine built to quickly process the world into ‘want’ vs ‘do not want’, but I like to think of the dichotomy more like ‘want’ vs ‘bored’. You either look, or you are bored. You either move towards, or you are bored. You either think something is gross and bad, or you are bored.

If you think in want vs do not want, you may fail to class aversive stimuli as useful. You might want to kiss a beautiful woman and thus look at her longer; you might think an old man is ugly, and stare at him in disgust; but the heart of marketing comes from noticing that you want to look at both of them. Neither of them are boring.

The default world is hard to see. It comes with implicit rules like “Nobody uses political messages to sell razors” or “use the platform you’re on to grow your platform.” Since a huge part of marketing is noticing what everyone else hasn’t thought of yet, you really have to deconstruct the walls around your thinking.

Thus, notice your attention, not just the things you like. “What you like” is shaped by society around you, it picks out what fashion is good and what opinions are fashionable. But your attention is truer, more innocent, and can often be a guiding star.

For example: when I was a camgirl a decade ago, everyone competed via the camgirl platform. The platform ranked and promoted girls, and everyone’s attention was on competing within the platform. But I noticed that my attention was also on reddit, as a user. Reddit was bright and fun and shiny, and was compulsed to look. Probably other people felt the same way too - maybe if I posted my nudes there, other people would see it? This ended up becoming wildly successful.

This might seem an obvious move in hindsight, but at the time it was not obvious. People weren’t just following how attention flowed, they were following norms for behavior. We wanted to get ranked high on the platform; this desire shut out the ability to notice other avenues of attention.

So: you’re not here to notice what feels good, what satisfies your deepest cravings - you’re here to notice everything you pay attention to. Discard everything else.

you’re selling a story and that’s ok

A lot of my friends really hate ads. They view them as deceptive, or manipulative. Sometimes this is true, but usually I view them with gratitude - ads are selling a story, and this is good. Stories are meaning! It’s what it means to be human!

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl talks about how people deal with suffering. He recounts an older woman who was in a lot of grief over her dead husband. The frame that ended up giving her some peace was this: Either she or her husband was going to have to die first, and by her husband dying first, she’d spared him the grief of having to endure her death. In this, her suffering had purpose, and was meaningful. “Those who have a why to live can bear almost any how.”

No facts about her life changed, she did not have misconceptions corrected. Rather, the thing that gave her peace was a story that ascribed meaning. It’s in everything! Attractive fuckbois tell women a story that their penis is a bestower of value. Cute frilly dresses tell a story of innocence, vibrance, and desirability. Making men take out the trash comes from a big cultural story about gender roles, where violating it is just cause for offense.

I like stories. I like going into a fancy clothing store where they have little glasses of champagne and flattering lighting and cushy chairs, where for a moment I feel like a princess, and like all of the clothes they sell make me a princess by proxy. I like the ritualistic effort people pour into making you feel the magic of Narrative. I’m happy to purchase the sensation of narrative, I consider this as much of commerce as physical goods.

Your relationship to the process of selling your product should be one where the process itself is beneficial to people. You should, ideally, enjoy crafting stories that help grant other people meaning in their lives. Many people shy from this out of fear of being dishonest, but I don’t think honesty and magic are incompatible. You can speak the truth with words of beauty! You can weave together threads of purpose or identity without ever causing people to make worse predictions about the world.

What the hell is going on with conferences

I recently attended a normie conference for the first time in my life and was horrified. The way they presented the information was slow, everybody for some reason sat down for a three hour keynote speaker that just went literally through powerpoints they easily could have viewed online. I felt like somehow we’d all been brainwashed to agree to do this. I was so so bored.

I think everyone else was bored too, but I’m not sure they would have noticed. Maybe in their world, brute forcing boredom is a virtue - you are being a good person by spending your attention on Hard To Attend To things, you are laboring in the focus mines.

But no! I reject! Laziness is a shining beacon that guides you into effortlessness!

In marketing, your boredom itself is a virtue, one that you have constantly been trained to squash. If you are writing a blog post and discover your attention is wandering, STOP AND TRY SOMETHING ELSE. If you are trying to explain a concept and the life drains out of you and it feels like you are trudging through mud, STOP AND TRY SOMETHING ELSE. It’s an important signal!! If your attention fades off of it, probably others’ will too. The secret to magic attention is that it occurs effortlessly; as soon as there is effort (in the creative process itself), this is a sign that you are wandering off the path.

Remember being a kid, sitting in waiting rooms for your parents to do something important, and you started testing out the things you could throw that weren’t meant to be thrown, or the new shapes a chair made when you put it on its side, or the biggest splinter you could peel off from the floorboards? If you find yourself in the waiting room of creativity (which is hard to notice and you should be on constant paranoid lookout for), do not continue to wait. Roll to the side and see what new thing you can piece together with your attention.

In many of my blog posts, you’ll find sections where I have unnecessarily “visceral langauge” (as the AIs describe me) in the middle of something kinda dry like discussing confounders in a graph. Usually this is a symptom of me rolling to the side; it’s some subtle automated process where a part of me is just diving away from boredom at all costs. FUCK off, boredom. I’ll fuck you in the throat. I’m trying to entertain myself in writing this damn thing. The experience itself should be playful, not effortful, and for me this manifests in crazy language sometimes.

Often following through with a thing can be boring - if you’ve painted a picture but now you just have to trim the edges, sure. You might wanna kill yourself and there is a correct and good place to force yourself through your suicidal urges anyway. But that is no longer creative work, just surgical work, so you’re good.

Hope other people match it

How can you understand other people’s attention if you don’t understand your own? Actually it’s just about understanding your own, and hoping other people match it.

(i wrote the above in an earlier draft and it sounds cool but i kinda forgot what it meant.)

you’re not selling a product

You’re selling a self image. Egophoria feels sparkly and people want it. Grant people the gift of identity, the ability to position themself a certain way.

(writer’s note: I’M BORED OH GOD. What am i actually trying to say here? What do I care about?)

I want to link you to this thing. I talk a lot about seduction as narrative reinforcement there, like this aspect in relation to sex.

But often I think people mistake people’s interest for interest in the thing itself, when really it’s disguised interest in what the thing says about them. I think often people spend insane amounts of money to hire me as an escort not because I have the biggest tits of them all (despite them being rather large) but because being high priced means I’m a symbol of success, and buying me is hard proof you are successful.

But this is everywhere, and subtle, and I’m gonna say it again but noticing egophoria in yourself is vital to understanding it in others. Feeling angry and righteous about things generates egophoria, because it swells up your sense of BEING, like a drowned body bloated with swamp water. (Despite the metaphor I don’t think egophoria is inherently negative. I just like metaphors)

Do not say here is a razor, but rather say here is a manly razor for muscular men. If you are very fancy and sophisticated, you can hide little egophoria prizes. My birthday gangbang post went extra-viral for many reasons, but the dry statistical presentation next to the extreme sex content was funny, and there’s a little bit of egophoria in being the kind of person who can notice contrast like that. I don’t even know if jokes are funny or if it’s that being the kind of person who can get a clever joke feels friggin awesome.

Become an empath

Once you make the thing, close it, imagine being someone else, and then open it again and look at the whole thing. It is very simple and very stupid but you have to try it really hard. It can help to have another friend look at your thing, and then as they’re looking at it, look at it yourself simultaneously and imagine being that friend. Often when I write a thing I will give it to someone to critique, and then read it through as the other person does, trying to inhabit it in their mind. You must expand past yourself.

Money Is A Tree

I am successful but I haven’t been able to predict it! From my perspective I make a whole lot of stuff, and a random 1.5% of it goes viral for reasons mostly beyond my understanding.

You probably will not be able to predict what goes viral. If it were easy, everyone would do it. It’s much better to instead just put out everything in high volume, and then notice which of those things does better, and then gradually shift your attention to things more similar to those. You must grow towards the light like a tree; put out many branches, feel out what gets more rewards, and then pump more energy into those leaves. You cannot plan something super complex in advance. You must release yourself into the winds and let your process emerge slowly, in constant conversation with your environment.

Thus you must be in contact with your environment. You need to constantly be getting feedback about your work at any scale you can handle. Show your friends, publish the writings or videos even if nobody reads them. You won’t be able to grow towards the light if you’ve kept yoruself shielded.

Really, doing good marketing is more of a process, a way of being, a way of attending to yourself, a way of staying in tune with others, a way of surrender.

Don’t underrate bravery

You should at least try a scary thing now and then. It’s okay if your whole business isn’t meant to be edgy, but people are so much more inclined to imagine the terrible things that could go wrong, while simultaneously being incapable of imagining all the wonderful things that could go right.

You need to be ready to fail. If some percentage of what you’re doing is not failing harder than you see the people around you failing, then you probably will not succeed harder than the people around you are succeeding. You are not being brave enough.

The entire thing that will allow you to detect your own attention where everyone else doesn’t, is bravery. Being able to act on unusual perspectives is bravery. Rolling around in the waiting room to see what the thing on the floor tastes like, is bravery. You will be entirely mediocre if you spend your time doing the thing that everybody else is doing. You need to be a little scared. One thing almost all of my most famous moments has in common is that I was actively scared when posting them.

Love what you do

Hard to cast magic spells if you don’t love it. Hard to do anything with delight if you’re working against yourself the whole time. Maybe this is why most marketing advice is stuff about following clicks and algorithms - it’s the sort of thing that works if you are not in love with your own creations.

Just Say The Thing

This is ancient advice but worth repeating - direct is better than indirect. When in doubt, just say the thing. If your creativity is stagnant, just say the thing.

There’s an exercise you can do where you pick a sentence stem, like “I’m afraid of ___” and you are supposed to just repeat it over and over, filling in literally anything into the blank. I’m-afraid-of-cows-I’m-afraid-of-poop-I’m-afraid-of-writing-too-fast-I’m-afraid-of-eating-boogers etc.

The goal with this exercise is to get very used to saying things that don’t resonate, and then notice when things do resonate. When I typed writing-too-fast I felt a tiny part of me vibrate a little. It wasn’t true, I don’t mind writing fast, but it started broaching into some skill and identity part of me that I care about (writing). If I kept going I might get into things that made me vibrate more. That tiny, subtle little vibration is the signal, and you should practice noticing when it happens.

Just Saying The Thing is the skill of letting your insides settle until they are clear, looking in with a piercing gaze, and spearing the True Words. What is the actual thing? You’re faffing around something - what is the thing you’re faffing around? If you were to let yourself fall to the floor in utter surrender, and if God were to reach inside you and wrench from you the truth, if the words that spilled from you were pure holy worship stripped of doubt - what would those words be?

It’s not a means to an end

The best marketing is when the marketing itself is joyful, and improves someone’s life even if they don’t follow through to the thing. Your marketing should, whenever possible, be a standalone product. It should be something that benefits people in itself; it should be a gift. My viral mime video was originally intended to direct people to my onlyfans, but it’s satisfying to watch in itself! You wouldn’t even know it was meant as an ad.

Also, don’t be afraid of money!

I’ve met a surprising amount of people who seem actually afraid of making money, on some level. Sure, they’ll say they want money - but sometimes having more money than your peers, especially if your peers have a negative view on wealth, will drop your status. In a world like that, your entire being will subtly be warping away from ways attention on you might convert to money. You will be less likely to notice opportunities for money-flavored attention, and there will be a whole dark spot on one side of the waiting room floor your psyche will not allow you to roll into.

Man I hate summaries. The problem is as soon as I finish saying the things I am now bored of what I have said, and trying to finish them feels like work. What fucking takeaways am I supposed to summarize? It’s your job to get takeaways from this! I already wrote the thing! Hurr dee durr “ah yes and now I have made some points about thinking like a good marketer and getting inhabited by the voice of god. Now you should do that if you want to, it might help you” like those words were not already extremely obvious. I can’t tell if the whole summary tradition at the end of essays is a scam or not. I make more money writing than the english teachers who taught you to put summaries at the end of the essays so maybe I’m the captain now.

p.s.

I need to take my own advice more. I’m too afraid of this blog now. I get ~80k readers roughly per post, with high variance. That’s too many readers. I imagine all of you in a stadium and my hands start sweating. maybe i should release a post made out of entirely misspelled words. Maybe i should let an eight-year-old write my next post. maybe i’ll post a photo of my somewhat large boobs and then turn this blog into ‘battle with stripe payment processor regulations’. One post I keep trying and failing to write is about how people are on a spectrum from low to high status sensitivity, in the same way people are asexual or very horndog-esque. My partner is low status sensitive, for example, while I’m high. I think my high sensitivity makes me spend a lot of brain cycles on trying to model what other people think of me. I handle it a lot better than i used to, come up with coping mechanisms like BEING SUCCESSFUL noticing it gently and moving on. I often imagine how much more people would like me and think i’m awesome if only i were the kind of person who didn’t care that much if people liked me and thought i was awesome. I don’t mind too much on some meta level, cause idk I just got wired like this. Some do, some don’t. And plus egophoria is a pretty fun sensation. I kinda like the struggle.

It’s just, you know how people have core wounds or whatever, like some deep fear? mine is something like “nobody wants to listen to me.” On some deep level, some old part of my brain really believes that, and it leads to things like being really quiet in social settings. It’s driven me to being Very Online, because the thing I love about text conversations and writing is that it’s all consent based. People don’t have to read my writing in the same way they have to listen to me if I’m in the room talking, so if they are reading what I write, I feel assured they actually want to do it. I feel a constant sense of apology when I talk in person, like I am using up valuable Time and Attention that is costly and maybe i should be paying other people for the trouble. I’m wired to be so low status lmfao.

But still, yall subscribed and this goes into your email inboxes or whatever so the pressure is returning even here, like oh shit i gotta put on a suit and make this Good, or something. But it’s so weird for your job to be say things real Good to people. On one hand it’s a dream job, I love love love being paid for thinking. On the other hand it sorta feels like sex work, where even if I’m not horny I gotta go masturbate now. Masturbation feels good don’t get me wrong! I like it! But you still kinda have to do it. Probably no way to get around that, though. It is a fact of life. But figuring out how to let joy and delight and the voice of god flow through me each week on a regular schedule is crazy. Probably real creatives have figured this whole thing out a long time ago but I am just getting around to it.

If you’ve ever taken a psych quiz, or an OCEAN personality test, or to some extent an IQ test, you’ll notice they have scales. This is a cluster of obviously similar statements you gotta agree or disagree with, like I’m the life of the party or I prefer sitting at home with a good book or I have a wide circle of friends.

They all measure the same thing, which we know because the kinds of people who say they like parties, also tend to have a lot of friends and not like sitting at home with good books. You can see clusters in the way people answer these questions.

I’m a stats idiot who absorbs education ambiently from the environment so I’m sure this all gets much more complicated than what I’m about to describe, but my impression is this:

People like to discover scales, which are very efficient question sets for figuring out a lot about you.

This means basically if you’re like hm, I bet there’s a trait in people that causes some to be more risk taking than others, and I wanna be able to measure that - you can go put together a bunch of questions around risk taking. Then you make a bunch of people answer those questions. Then you run something called Factor Analysis, which is a group of techniques aimed at identifying natural clusters. It basically is like “Okay, among all these questions, we see that the item I love guzzling gasoline is really predictive - if we know someone says hell yeah to gasoline guzzling, then we are able to predict a lot more of their answers, specifically ones like “I can’t stop skydiving” and “everybody is worried about me.”

Or, for example: If your survey has questions like “I like people” and “I like parties” and “I like books”, and also “I like pie” and “I hate waiting in line for the dmv”, you’ll probably find that “I like people” helps predict answers for two more questions - parties and books, whereas knowing “I like pie” won’t tell you much of anything about people’s answers to the dmv or parties.

So: you get a bunch of questions, make a bunch of people answer, and then you can figure out which questions are the best questions. You wanna be efficient, after all. Which questions tell you the most about the rest of someone’s answers? You run FA, which will spit out all the items with a list of scores, something like:

I like guzzling gasoline +0.62

I can’t stop skydiving +0.42

Everybody is worried about me -0.40 (the sign is reversed)

etc.

You can call this set of items a scale. You probably aren’t gonna find just one scale, though. If you ask a bunch of questions related to personality, FA will probably deliver multiple personality clusters depending on how you massage the settings.

This why people say the OCEAN (big 5) personality test is the best. Instead of a guy sitting down and doing the Thinker pose on the toilet for a few years and then pooping out an Encompassing Theory of All Personality (I’m lookin at u, Jung), survey people basically just hurl a ton of personality questions into a mass, and then Factors emerge like Venus from the sea foam, singing the song of the platonic shape of humankind. This has happened independently when different people explore the personality landscape (including me!), so we all go yep, seems like Real Personality in there.

(Also side note, this is part of how they developed IQ tests. They had people answer a ton of questions that had right or wrong answers. Then they figured out - which questions, if you got right, were more likely to predict correct answers to all the rest of the questions? These were more efficient puzzles, and they constructed the tests out of those).

In general, all this technique does is spit out a cluster of items. It’s up to the humans to interpret it. We titled the OCEAN spectrum “Neuroticism” not because the data spelled out the word ‘neuroticism’ but because we saw the cluster “I worry a lot” and “I’m not very happy” and collectively agreed ‘neuroticism’ was a good term for that. When you’re answering surveys and get a score based on scales, the name and interpretation of the score is entirely based on the interpretation of survey designers and people like me.

For example, in my chaos survey I can find a factor like this:

+0.57 Marvel movies are good for society.
+0.46 I trust business media such as the Wall Street Journal
+0.43 I trust center-left media such as the CNN
+0.4 Democracy is the best approach to politics that we have.
+0.34 New York City is the most fun place in the entire world.
+0.37 School exams measure what they are designed to measure

What is this factor measuring? It’s like… conformity, but part institutional, part cultural? It’s kinda leftist but not really? And Marvel movies? This is a pretty granular factor (you can look at big encompassing ones or really small narrow ones), so it doesn’t include a lot of other related questions it could have (~1100 items total).

I dunno. I could call it “normie institutional” but that’s a subjective interpretation. Maybe there’s a totally different trait that leads people answering like that.

Even OCEAN isn’t safe. For example, some common items in extraversion are:

I like parties
(-) I am reserved
I get a rush from trying new and thrilling activities.
I feel comfortable around people
I feel energized after spending time with people

It’s been years since I read Dan Nettle’s Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are, but if I remember correctly: He argues that these items are often misinterpreted. He says people squinted at this and went ‘well looks like a social thing’, but that really it’s probably measuring responsiveness to positive stimuli - that some people are wired to just be more motivated by pleasantness than others, and that this simply manifests more obviously for social scenarios.

(He also argues that neuroticism is the reverse, as sensitivity to negative stimuli, and you can be high or low in both. It’s cool.)

HOWEVER, THE PEOPLE ARE RETARDED.

Getting good scales is hard, because you have to have a lot of questions to test, and you also need a lot of people to answer those questions - roughly at least 10 people per question for complicated statistics reasons. So if you want a robust scale, and you want to test 100 questions, you should get minimum 1000 people to answer those 100 questions. This is hard to do - most of those questions will be boring or useless (you’re doing the survey to find the useful ones, so it’ll have a lot of throwing-stuff-at-the-wall), 100 questions is a lot, and 1000 people to do that for free is hard to find.

So people have done a lot of thinking about how much can you get away with, really? Do you really need n=1000? How can we deliver smaller payloads while also assuring people they are still good?

Actually a lot of social science research in general is like this. Most stats I’ve learned about are basically variants on “we’re trying to figure out how fancy a story we can tell based off the minimal possible data, without making people mad at us”.

So they do things like: okay, let’s check how much our items correlate with each other, and use this as evidence that our scale is good. Basically - does ‘I like parties’ actually correlate with the other questions in your same scale, like ‘I like books?’

They develop questions that correlate well, and then present their scale saying ‘don’t worry, I assure you we’re not retarded, we have an official number that measures how retarded we aren’t’ (called ‘alpha’, and shows how much internal correlation there is among a set of items in a scale’). High alpha = good.

But much like all things, it’s easy to game the not-retard number. You can get high alpha by smashing related pairs together (A+B=100 and B+C=0 will still get you a score of 50 even if the actual power is coming from A+B). But more importantly, you can get a high score just writing down a ton of items that are STUPID.

“I drink a lot of alcohol”
(-)”I don’t drink a lot of alcohol”
”I regularly enjoy alcohol”
”Alcohol is something I drink a lot”
(-)”Alcohol isn’t something I enjoy.”

This scale has a TON of alpha. If you give those questions to people, the items will correlate with each other mega hard. Your “I Am Not A Retard” score would be huge. Except it is retarded! It’s like the time when I was a kid and took an official IQ test and scored 148 and didn’t realize for a long time childhood scores regress to the mean a ton when you get older and I actually was retarded the entire time. The alcohol scale above is a no-good horrible scale where you could get 90% of the benefit out of probably only one of the questions and you are simply wasting everybody’s time by making them click the same buttons over and over just to inflate how seriously everybody else takes you for no good reason.

This isn’t a novel problem, the official survey people have been scurrying around holding clipboards and frowning about this for years. But it’s entrenched in stuff like getting papers published, and in old surveys developed before the ‘wait a second maybe we are retarded’ crisis, and it’s still everywhere.

This is one reason I think my data gets such high samples - I administer people minimally repetitive surveys with scales I’ve developed with high enough sample sizes that I can be confident about them without having to rely on alpha for validity! You can still get a lot of power from scales without jackhammering your alpha number high. Really, scales are only interesting if they do actually pull slightly unrelated together. Rephrasing an alcohol question is extremely boring; noticing that “I don’t like parties” and “I like lots of friends” have a relationship is cool because they aren’t identical, even if the relationship between those two statements is less strong.

ANYWAY

Another problem is that the kinds of factors you extract, depend a lot on the starting set of questions. If you’re trying to develop a few scales to tease out the types of risks people are most tolerant to, and 95% of your questions hammer around gasoline guzzling and skydiving, but only 5% of your questions cover stuff like social risk, career risk, psychologigcal risks, then you will discover a big important factor about Gasoline Guzzling and maybe tiny weak factors relating to ‘other stuff.’

So: the kinds of questions you include when trying to make a scale, can really affect the outcomes. It can be hard to know this in advance though! When I first started making sexuality surveys, I accidentally overlooked a lot of sexuality relating to soft, romance, gentle, protective, because my sexuality isn’t like that at all and it was harder for me to notice when those sections weren’t fleshed out. In later analysis the ‘romance, gentle, protective’ factor was weak and malnourished, and people pointed out hey - maybe it was underspecified in your scale-making survey!

It’s hard to avoid having a hypothesis about the factors in advance, and having that influence the things you’re throwing in. After all - in the risk survey, you are hypothesizing that the questions you’re including are risk-related somehow! That’s a judgment call!

There’s ways to handle this (both while building the survey and in the analysis afterwards), this is a complicated topic - but I wanted to know, what happens if I remove my own judgment from the questions entirely? What if I made a survey to find scales, except the survey was literally every question, just descended from the ether, bypassing my own judgment entirely?

So I asked the internet to submit questions. I told them I was gonna make a survey, and they could write a statement (item), and people would disagree or agree with what they wrote. I gave them no instructions about to write. I said they could submit literally anything. Go crazy.

I did almost no filtering (just deleting duplicates, phone numbers, and strings of slurs). I added in some items from standard scales myself to spot check and compare. I ended up with over 1,000 items. Then I built a survey out of these questions, randomized them, and released it out into the world, and then got an effective n of ~2,500.

Now to be clear - this isn’t perfect. The questions didn’t descend from the ether, they were submitted anonymously by heavily male-skewed randos who follow me, and ended up having too many questions about elon musk and ai risk. We haven’t really escaped the problem, we just elbowed it out to give us some breathing room.

But it’s still interesting! As far as I know nobody has tried this truly insane exploratory attempt before. What happens if you try to find natural answering patterns in a set of questions that’s just… all of questionspace? Or as much of questionspace as you can grab?

Really - the survey includes stuff like:

Sometimes it’s good to murder. Not self-defense when under attack, but premeditated murder.
I would feel inclined to engage in sexual behavior with a clone of myself, given the opportunity.
The big pharma really does want to keep people sick to sell more medicine.
I believe I have superhuman or supernatural powers.
If I could take all of the possibility of pain out of suicide I would commit suicide immediately
There is a scary monster inside me
The apocalypse is looming
In group chats, I lurk more than I comment
My relationship with technology is abusive.
I am more sentient than most people
The Red Hot Chili Peppers are accurately named.
It’s a disappointment if a person needs light to go to the bathroom in their own home
Mugs are the best container for ingesting liquid
80^500 is a number that exists
Help I’m trapped in the server room hosting this survey! Only selecting strongly agree will free me

I also want to stress that this stuff is dismayingly an art as opposed to science. There’s lots of ways you can choose to look at this data, and the factors that come out might not appear if you just used a different rotation or selected a different number.

So - what are the factors? I was originally gonna do a deep dive here, but it’s way less efficient to do it over text. So I claude-coded an explorer. It’s pretty easy to use - just pick the amount of factors you wanna break the survey down by, and then you can look at the strongest items in each one, along with subfactors.

(You can also check out all the raw questions and the average responses to them, split out by gender, here.)

The brief summary is that in general, the strongest factors that emerge are classic left-right politics, mysticism vs rationality, and happy vs sad. The left-right spectrum seems unique to my western audience, but I wonder if we did a global questionspace generator, we’d see local versions of this pop up, with whatever the hottest ‘how should the world be run’ views replacing it.

On a final note, I am extremely bad at writing conclusions to posts like this. When friends critique my work they go ‘that was great, but the ending was too abrupt, give me a little offramp’ but no matter how hard I try I cannot make it work. When I have said all the things there is to say my brain is like ‘okay no more words’ and offers me nothing. So this is a paragraph telling you that I think I made all the points I want to make and you should just go look at the explorer.

I was nineteen, and I met a guy at a party in Idaho; he had sci-fi tattoos along his back, which I found awesome. We became friends; he told me he was something called ‘polyamorous,’ where he’s married but he and his wife still dated other people. I was immediately like, “Oh, that’s obviously what I am too.” It felt like I’d been brought up among women and finally saw a man for the first time; my body knew this was something I was built to be attracted to.

Looking back I realized it had always suited me. Once I caught my monogamous boyfriend sexting someone else; his sexting didn’t actually have any impact on our relationship, and it was obviously not a threat. My anger at him was entirely performative. But my immediate affinity to free love wreaked havoc in my relationship with the same sweet boyfriend, who could not understand why I would want to be intimate with someone else. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t.

I spent nights at my new polyamorous friends’ house; they were in their thirties, they had an adorable daughter I babysat, the wife’s boyfriend lived in the house too. I had a cliche coming-of-age journey over the summer that involved swimming in remote northern Idaho ponds and wearing a bikini for the first time (the wife let me borrow hers) and getting drunk on mead they brewed in their barn at a party they threw in the same barn. They set out a big rifle on a stand the floor at night and showed me how to lie down and look through the night scope and I gazed across their black fields lit green in the moonlight through crosshairs. I had sex with the wife on the floor after the daughter went to bed and the husband and boyfriend watched, and in the background the short film Harrison Bergeron played on the TV.

I cheated in the most autistic way possible: I told my boyfriend I was going to have sex with the tattooed guy, and then I did have sex with him, and then immediately afterwards I told my boyfriend “I had sex with him.” My relationship with my boyfriend understandably did not last after this; we moved back down to southern Idaho, and we didn’t go together. I loved him, but I realized no amount of love could make his monogamy and my polyamory compatible, and I became determined to never end up in a monogamous relationship again. I carefully made nonmonogamy a loud, open part of my identity, to immediately filter out anybody who was monogamous. I never wanted to hurt anyone like that again.

I really had no idea what I was doing. My only exposure to polyamory was the libertarian military redneck polycule in northern Idaho, and we hadn’t exactly discussed poly theory too much. My understanding was simple: just don’t stop your partners from having relationships with others. Don’t get jealous. It’ll be fine.

But I had no cultural wisdom about how to do it well, I had no nonmonog community and I’d read no books - didn’t even know there were books - and so I proceeded to bungle most of my following relationships by stepping into every obvious failure mode possible. Most of my own errors came downstream of one thing: I had an identity as someone who was polyamorous, and I had a rigid idea about what being poly meant, and that identity forbid me from acknowledging that I had, or was acting from, feelings that might not have aligned with that identity.

For example: I insisted I didn’t experience jealousy for an embarrassingly long time. I had gotten it into my head that poly people were chill and didn’t get jealous, so with unsettling skill managed to ignore my discomfort when a boyfriend would go on a date with another girl, or have sex with her, or tell me about it. “Oh I’m happy for you,” I would say, my heart in my stomach. “Are you feeling jealous?” my boyfriend would ask. “lol no I said I’m happy for you,” I would choke out, a gentle smile gently resting upon a leaning tower of dying inside.

I plowed through uncharted territory with sexually liberated fervor. With great freedom came a greater range of mistakes. I spent years learning hard lessons by falling into ravines that monogamous people couldn’t even conceive of. The margin for error was narrower; a level of communication clarity that would have worked just fine in monogamy would turn out to be utterly inadequate in non-monogamy. My uncalloused little body was brutalized by this hard terrain.

And the terrain really did sometimes get hard. It took me a while to learn making monogamy a dealbreaker wasn’t enough; I needed to elimitate people who were even open to it. A scenario that happened a few times was this: I’d tell a guy “I’m poly and this is non-negotiable.” He’d be like “sure, that sounds great.” We’d date. Eventually he’d meet another cute girl and ask her out. He told her he was dating me, he was poly. She said she was ok with this, could make it work, but in reality she was actually monogamous and lying to herself because she liked my boyfriend so much. Over time she’d start getting more uncomfortable with me, would be upset after me and our boyfriend hung out, and this would eventually drive a wedge between us, and the guy would then end up breaking up with me and going monogamous with her.

I realized: almost everyone is monogamous. If I wanted a man who wouldn’t get oneshotted by a scarcity-mindset monog girl trying to steal my boyfriend, I needed to only date guys who were absolutely dedicated to the non-monogamy cause independently of myself. After this I stopped considering anyone who was even open to monogamy. Polyflexible? You’re out.

This wasn’t the only thing that was hard.

In my early 20’s I fell in love with a boy, and a few months into our whirlwind of dating, I found myself trying to sleep in one room while I could hear him having sex with another woman in the living room.

This triggered something I think of as the Scary Attention-Hijacking. It caused me to feel physically heightened, like I was on stimulants. My entire attention was taken up by the noises, my mental landscape was locked into it like a steel trap. I felt as though I needed to notice every detail or I was going to die. I felt vaguely afraid, but not sure about what. I had an overwhelming urge to tell other people what was happening, but was confused about why I wanted to tell them. Did I want sympathy? I tried texting my girl chat friends but they were monogamous and just were horrified, which was not super helpful.

I at no point thought ‘maybe I don’t want to be poly’; that was as inaccessible as ‘maybe I don’t want to be straight.’ But there was still something hard about it.

I think the Scary Attention Hijacking was about a few things - one is violating social expectation. Our society carries overwhelming messaging that you are absolutely not supposed to be okay with hearing the person you’re in love with fucking someone else. That is the peak of all possible nightmares. Part of the Scary Attention Hijacking (SAHK?) was some part of me coming into conflict with the social pressure - I knew that if I expressed the faintest whiff of displeasure, hordes would coalesce into furious support for me. I was fighting against a current, trying to stop it from pushing the bomb of victimhood into my fingers. I wanted to figure out a way to express my discomfort without triggering that bomb.

This was made harder by the fact that I was genuinely scared. I was in the high-on-drugs phase of new love, and hearing another woman’s moans was an ancient threat to my burgeoning attachment. Would he leave her for me? Was she hotter than me? Was the sex better? Would this be the beginning of the end of our relationship? I was so scared. I listened to them in the same way I watched a horror movie.

But over time, the SAHK phenomenon faded. He did not leave me for her. He still loved me. He would have sex with more women, and then still not leave me. Eventually I’d hear him have sex with a lady he brought home from tinder, in our own bedroom, and I barely noticed; I was so secure in our relationship that this was simply no longer a real threat.

Scary Attention Hijacking still happened in new relationships, but it got more manageable as I got more familiar with it. Oh, it’s just SAHK again, I’d think, recognizing my brain start zooming in on the socially permitted horror. That’ll chill out after a bit. I’d let myself go HIGH ALERT with the initial rival intrusions, and watch it predictably calm down, a little faster each time.

How did I know I wasn’t lying to myself, though? Was I simply suppressing true resentment or insecurity? Maybe - but for me the diagnostic question was, would you do this again? If I could go back in time and press a magic button and have me and this partner be monogamous with no issues, never even having thought of nonmonogamy, where my partner would be perfectly happy with it - would I have pressed that button? And every time the answer was, without even the faintest doubt, absolutely fucking not. This was worth it. If sahk was the price to pay then I was happy to pay it.

As time has gone on, I’ve gotten better at nonmonogamy. It was hard - our culture is extremely hostile to nonmonogs, both explicitly via stigma and implicitly via a total absence of good examples on how to do it properly (when was the last time you saw a healthy poly couple represented in media?). But I’ve finally figured it out, and the returns have been more than worth it for me.

I love letting go. There’s nothing quite like having a precious treasure in your hand, that you want more than anything, that fills you with euphoria and is a salve to old broken parts of you, and it sparks your agonized desire to finally be whole - where even still you love it so much that you know it can’t really be yours, that you can’t take its freedom away. And so instead of crushing it tight, you, in surrender and sheer terror, open your palm out to the world. You will not stop it from leaving, if leaving would be better for it. You will not cut off its ability to love others. You will not collapse its choice. You are not its owner. Your terror is an aspect of your own brokenness, and you absolutely refuse to use it to bind them.

Sometimes, the treasure leaves. But it’s the height of heights when it expands into the world and yet still, against all of that, picks you. It is holy, to be chosen again and again and again, even after you’ve surrendered. Every minute spent is alive in the choice. I can’t imagine doing it any other way.

The most I’ve ever trusted another human has come out of this rugged terrain. It can be brutal, but the only way it’s worked for me is complete honesty. I know exactly the ways in which my partners feel met by me, and which parts I fail to fulfill. I know I am not the prettiest or smartest girl out there; I am under no storybook illusions that we are ideal for each other across all possible worlds.

By default, it’s hard to notice the ways we aren’t honest with each other. We hide from ourselves painful things, and hurting other people is a painful thing! So in a myriad subtle ways we are skilled at warping ourselves into a shape that other people will like and desire. Our own identities are cast within the lens of others.

But this is a death knell in polyamory. In monogamy you have the safety of cultural constraints, predictable norms, reduced surface area of relationships, and thus monogamous relationships can often survive quite a lot of dishonesty (“Do you find her attractive?”/”No honey of course not, you are the only woman for me”). But the same level of dishonesty will result in explosions in polyamory, which is why unskilled polyamory gets so much worse a rap than unskilled monogamy; it’s harder to hide the errors. Early on I tried to hide from myself and others that I was experiencing jealousy, and the constant exposure to rival romances did not let me persist comfortably in my illusion - I eventually had to admit to myself that Yes: I was the version of myself I didn’t want to believe I was.

Nonmonogamy is unsustainable if either of us hide our feelings from each other. The wonder of the treasure choosing you only works if you can trust it fully. If someone says “yes, you are my favorite person” because they are afraid of hurting you by admitting that you are not your favorite person, then this relationship is not safe, and it’s not truly free, it’s just two people trapped together out of fear.

To be in a healthy nonmonogamous relationship is an active process of making sure nobody is lying to anybody, not deliberately, not by omission, not by fantasy. You have to know. Knowing will save you. Knowing is also loving - I don’t want to love the illusion of someone shaped to avoid bumping into my tender parts, I want to love them with hard, fiery, terrifying skill.

When my partner comes back from a date, I want to know everything. Was she hot? What did you like better about her than me? What do you like better in me than her? Was it nice? Did you have a good time? I want to press myself into the terrain immediately. He tells me, and in his report I get to see more of him. I get to see the parts of him that come out with others, the things he values. I get to see his pride shine through, or his sorrow. A little bit of SAHK pipes up, but it’s been years, and I trust him so, so much. He doesn’t hide anything for the sake of my feelings, and I know with certainty that he has no hidden feelings from himself. I know that if this new girl would be a threat to our relationship he would tell me instantly (he’s done it before).

If my partner would be better off being more intimate with another person, then it’s in their best interests that they go do that. If they wouldn’t be better off, then it’s in their best interests that they spend their intimacy with me. A good relationship here also requires trust in someone’s maturity to know their own best interests, and not get swept up too much by fleeting novelty. And if someone is the kind of person to get swept up by novelty - would they really be a good partner for me?

This has been a long process of coming to terms with my deepest fears and insecurities. Sometimes my partner comes back from an especially good date during a time when I’m feeling down, and I am overwhelmed with insecurity. “I’m so insecure,” I say. “I wanna kill that girl.” I contort my face into a grimace. “No, you’re mine, she’s gotta get away. Do you think she’s better than me? Oh god.” The fear washes over me, and my partner simply holds me in it, not trying to fix it. He just stays with me as I go through it. “Ahhhh,” I say. He says something like “Yeah, it seems really scary.” I agree. It is really scary! “I’m scared I’m gonna lose you forever,” I say. “That’s intense,” he says, stroking my hair.

And in this, we become closer. I get to process my fear with him, without suppressing it, without him running from it, without me making it his problem. We’re two bodies here to Know each other, to observe with compassion. The fear is an object to be observed and accepted, not to be managed into a shape other than what it is.

Every part of our nonmonogamy - the freedom, the joy in expression, getting to see someone you care for flourish in connection with others, getting to express honestly everything you feel, growing closer in the fears and desires - all of these things have given me more surface area with which to Know another person. I treasure them so, so much. The thought of requesting my partner to stop their connections with others is viscerally repulsive to me. It would feel like cutting off my own limb.

To be clear: there’s much more to making polyamory work than just letting go; I’ve written more practical considerations in other posts - like ‘how do you build a life together if you need to rely on someone’ and ‘what if jealousy is simply too strong?’

It’s fine if nonmonogamy doesn’t work for you! But it’s so confusing to me when people describe polyamory as a casual, noncommitted fad, where the real relationship work can only be done within the bumper guards of monogamy. I remember these arguments as I hold my partner in bed, radiating with the gratitude of being able to Know him - all of him, the unconstrained, expressive version of him who moves the way he wants and is unafraid of telling me the truth of who he is, and through all of this has looked at the truth of who I am and decided yes - I want to be here, with that, now, again and again over the years. It’s so beautiful it brings me to tears. It is strange to me that people think this is somehow less meaningful. Maybe they can’t properly imagine the surrender it would take to pull this off and be happy?

I’m using the datset I collected of ~960k people and ~900 questions for you to explore your own curiosities.

It’s a simple interface - just pick your x and y axis questions on the left hand side (pull-out toolbar on mobile), and then load the chart to show the relationship. (You can also use the search bar to help find questions faster if you don’t know the exact phrasing).

You can filter it for a few more things, like split it out by sex or whatever if you want. You can change the elements of the chart - switch the axis, change y range, etc. You can also switch to view a weighted version of the dataset, where I applied weights to make it much more population-representative.

Make sure to keep an eye on the summary section, which tells you exactly the phrasing used in the survey, as well as occasionally pops up alerts.

The question generator helps prompt things to explore:

The dice will generate a random correlation, and you can click the subtle dropdown next to it to lock an axis. The bullseye will generate a random statistically-significant correlation, where there will be some meaningful relationship between the two variables. You can use it to check to see if there’s any novel correlations that nobody’s written papers about yet.

There’s so, so much in here. I’ve been looking through this for years and am still discovering new stuff. I’m super curious to see if other people find anything interesting! If you look hard enough you might be able to make a brand new finding nobody has found before.

I’m still working on some aspects of the site, particularly the histogram and compare chart types. Hopefully they’ll get more functionality in the next few weeks.

I’m currently losing money on this project due to hosting costs; if you like my work and want to support me, I’d love if you could subscribe to my substack!

Subscribe now

Or if you’re already subscribed, you can donate here.

Some fun charts I randomly found when poking around:

This almost perfectly tracks some fertility-by-age graphs.

Confounded by gender? Age? You can go check yourself.

This seems to imply that men report a higher bodycount, but this actually isn’t true in the data, where it’s almost identical.

(It does split more after 60, but n is low and I’m not sure how to interpret that)

Having low neuroticism is a good predictor of if you’ll enjoy sex work.

Subs seem to be more into consumign violent porn than doms are.

I’m sure there’s more. Find some cool stuff and link it in the comments or in your own blog posts!

This is an essay I posted on the EA forums a few years ago. It started making the rounds on X again, so I figured I’d crosspost it here, in a somewhat edited and condensed format - primarily limiting it to the parts about my own experiences.

Before getting mini-famous, I did not appreciate the degree to which people would misrepresent and lie about other people.

I knew about it in theory. I occasionally stumbled across claims about people that I later found out were false. I knew, abstractly, that any particular accuser is telling a truth or a lie, but you’re not sure which one.

But now, I’m in the unique position where people say things about me all the time, and I hear most of it, and I have direct access to whether it’s accurate or not. There’s something about the lack of ambiguity that has left me startled, here. Something was way off about my models of the world before I had access to the truth of a wide range of accusational samples.

In the last few years, I’ve risen in visibility to the degree it’s started to get unpleasant. I’ve had to give up on the idea of throwing parties at my house where guests are allowed to invite unvetted friends. There are internet pockets dedicated to hating me, where people have doxxed me and my family, including the home addresses of my parents and sister. I’ve experienced one kidnapping attempt. I might have to move. One stalker sent me, on average, three long messages every day for nearly three years. By this point death threats are losing their novelty.

Before I was this visible, my model was “If a lot of people don’t like you, maybe the problem is actually you.” Some part of me thought that if you were just consistently nice and charitable, if you were a good, kind person, people would... see that, somehow? Maybe you get one or two insane people, but overall truth would ultimately prevail, because lies without evidence wither and die. And even if people didn’t like or agree with you, they wouldn’t try to destroy you, because you can only really incite that level of let’s-destroy-her fury in someone if you were at least a little bit at fault yourself. So if you do find yourself in a situation where lots of people are saying terrible things about you, you should take a look in the mirror.

But this sort of thing doesn’t hold true at large scales! It really doesn’t, and that fact shocks some subconscious part of me, to the degree that even I get kinda large-scale gaslit about myself. I often read people talking about how I’m terrible, and then I’m like damn, I must have been a little too sloppy or aggressive in my language to cause them to be so upset with me. Then I go read the original thing they’re upset about and find I was actually fine, and really kind, and what the fuck? I’m not used to disagreements being so clearly black and white! And me in the right? What is this, some cartoon children’s book caricature of a moral lesson?

And I have a similar shock when people work very hard to represent things I do in a sinister light. There’ve been multiple writeups about me, either by or informed by people I knew in person, where they describe things I’ve done in a manner that I consider to be extremely uncharitable. People develop a narrative by speculating on my mental state, beliefs, or intentions (”of course she knew people would have that reaction, she knew that person’s background”), by blurring the line between thing I concretely did and vaguer facts about context (”she was central to the party so she was responsible for that thing that happened at it”), and by emphasizing reactions more than any concrete bad behavior (“this person says they felt really bad, that proves you did a terrible thing”).

Collectively, these paint a picture that sounds convincing, because it seems like all the parts of the narrative are pointing in the same direction. Individually, however, the claims don’t hold up. (In this case, “someone got upset at a party I attended” is a real fact. But I didn’t know that person’s background, I didn’t ask to be central to the party, and they were crying because of something someone else did completely unrelated to me.)

But I think the point of this isn’t that people can develop warped narratives about you, but rather that they do. People in your circles, in real life, maybe people you thought you could trust. I not only have internet people lying about me, but people brought by friends to parties, people who helped me move, and in one case, someone I considered a friend. If you’re high enough volume/visibility, if you’re controversial or weird enough that people can score points by hating on you, if you’re anywhere close to touchy political battlegrounds, then it seems inevitable to me that you will get attacked by people who are best to model as bad actors - people who will confidently misinterpret and misrepresent you to others no matter how weak the evidence is. There actually exist people who see their conflict with you as war in which anything is justified to vanquish the enemy, even if you’re doing your best to empathize with their perspective and seriously consider whether they’re right.

I think this is dramatically underweighted by people who haven’t personally experienced this (and the ability to experience this at scale is very rare, which is why I’m trying to share my experience with others). I occasionally see someone who seems to me to be likely a bad actor, where the correct response should be “I am really skeptical of your claims,” but the people around them are like man, your complaints are important and we should take them seriously. I get the impulse - it’s often legitimately bad to ignore complaints and it make sense to treat them seriously by default, but ahh!

To do some analysis of ways people have done this to me:

I’ve debated a bit about sharing specific examples here - the important stuff is in cumulative details, which is annoying to communicate, and on principle I don’t like to give these people any direct attention. I also don’t want to turn this into “and now Aella hijacks this stuff to talk about personal social drama where she picks through the details of every rumor in order to convince you she’s not a terrible person”. But still, it’s hard to convey exactly how this works without examples, and specific instances of this happening to me are what have so strongly updated my views, so I’m going to pick just a few.

I was friends with someone who wrote a piece with a bunch of accusations about me here. My (and others) response is here, if you’d like to read through the whole thing. But if not, here’s one piece of it, one of the reports that the author compiled:

I’ve only been to one of Aella’s parties but one was enough. The environment felt so uncomfortable that I spent hours and hours hiding alone and crying. The party had a lot of nudity and sex, everyone was on drugs, and it was set up so that consent as a guiding light was being continuously questioned.
I can’t remember any event I threw that fits this criteria in the last few years. The nudity/sex parties I organized or co-organized had either very little or no drug use.

I pointed this out in response to their post, and they updated their response to include:

There have been questions posted on social media about whether my account of Aella’s party is real. I stand by the account, but I decline to give a year or other specifics, because I’m worried that providing that information would help Aella triangulate my identity. However, in the interest of intellectual honesty, the single detail I think someone could contest is whether Aella was the “actual” organizer of the party I attended. It’s true that she wasn’t the only one organizing it but she was easy to observe as central to the event while it was happening and it was privately described to me as being her party. Obviously it was a party full of illegal activity so it’s not surprising that it’s hard to prove it was “really” organized by her.

A few points here:

1. There’s nothing inherently wrong with disliking running into nudity/sex (say, outside of a romantic relationship), but there’s also nothing inherently wrong with liking those things. Ideally, people with different preferences here can just self-sort into different kinds of events, and it shouldn’t be a scandal to people with one preference if they find out that people with a different preference exist. The word “uncomfortable”, however, points at a bad thing; and by juxtaposing it with neutral things (nudity/sex), the latter can be made to sound like bad things in their own right.

2. They didn’t say anyone violated anyone else’s consent or boundaries at the event, something I assume they would have shared if it’d happened, since their goal was to establish that I’d done a bad thing. Instead, the emphasis is on feelings and high-level descriptions (“The environment felt so uncomfortable” / “consent as a guiding light was being continuously questioned”). Concrete examples make it possible for people to see what they think about the example, whereas staying at the level of interpretation/narrative forces the reader to trust the interpretation wholesale (or look like an asshole), and staying at the level of follow-on response forces the reader to trust that the writer’s emotional response was grounded and proportionate (or look like an asshole).

3. To be clear, it’s okay to have any reaction to anything, even if it seems disproportionate. My issue here is the unnamed implication that other people would also have this reaction, or that the party was at fault here. It might have been at fault, but the concrete cause was not named. The reaction is stated mostly on its own, in some detail, and the reader is implicitly being asked to assume that concrete things must have happened at the party that are so terrible that of course they’d produce that bad reaction. This leaves out the fact that sometimes, unfortunately, no one does anything wrong and feelings can still end up hurt.

4. In the response, they express fear of me being able to “triangulate [their] identity”, which implicitly frames me as a scary person who’s likely to try to hurt people who criticize me. If they’d included examples of any other time I’d tried to take revenge on someone, I think this move would have been explicit and much more reasonable. Instead, it just adds to this weird narrative that’s lying over everything like a funhouse mirror distortion of who I am.

5. This person says it’s true that I wasn’t the only one organizing, but I was “central” to the event. This makes me suspicious that they’re describing an event I didn’t actually organize, especially given that I can’t remember hosting any event that fit their description. I can think of maybe one event, but it was a bigger, festival-type production where I was a volunteer to help check people in, and helped set up and break down. I wasn’t an event organizer, and had no control over the principles or activities. But this doesn’t matter - I seemed “central” to someone, so I get the blame for anything bad that other people did at this event, and this gets cited in a list of reasons to think I’m “probably evil”.

6. When they say “Obviously it was a party full of illegal activity so it’s not surprising that it’s hard to prove it was “really” organized by her.”, the writer is implying that we deliberately hid my role in organizing the party in order to avoid legal blame, framing me as the kind of person who lies about stuff like this. To be explicit here, I have never tried to hide the fact that I organized a party I did in fact organize.

Common in these examples is leaving the exercise to the reader.

The accuser doesn’t offer concrete behaviors, but rather leaves the badness as general associations. They don’t make explicit accusations, but rather implicit ones. The true darkness is hinted at, not named. They speculate about my bad traits without taking the risk of making a claim. They frame things in a way that increases my perceived culpability. They also position themselves as afraid of what I’ll do to them if they give more details, which also serves the function of making them safe from the possibility that I might clarify or deny any of their claims.

They continued:

Corroboration of this account comes from another friend, who has told me on condition of anonymity that one of the features of Aella’s parties is a game called “drugs roulette,” in which people consume various substances without knowing what they are. Many of the substances one can imagine employing here — most saliently, rohypnol, the date rape drug; but also others — would put people into compromised states in which they could not consent to further sexual activity imposed on them by people who may not even have known that their sexual partner was thus compromised. To make matters worse, this is apparently being done under a house rule of “you are never allowed to talk about it with anyone.”

This assertion is (in a way that still sort of shocks me) false in every single detail.

I’m not going to keep analyzing the hostile framing, but here’s a running tally of the ways the account so far has gotten things wrong:

• The nudity/sex parties I helped throw had either very little or no drug use.

• I have never tried to hide the fact that I helped organize a party that I helped organize.

• I’ve never played drug roulette, nor has it occurred at any of my parties.

• There has never, to my knowledge, been rohypnol at any of my parties.

• Nobody has ever, to the best of my knowledge, drugged someone in attempts to make them more sexually pliable to others at my parties.

• I’ve never told anyone they can’t talk about an experience at one of my parties.

I have joked about the idea of drug roulette before (without ever asserting, even in a joking way, that I’d actually done it). I’m not fundamentally opposed to the idea, for a small group of friends who all agreed (with full knowledge of what they were doing) to randomizing drug use between them, if various logistical issues (about when the drugs kick in) could be resolved. But I have never actually done this.

The other parts of the claim above are, as far as I can tell, fabrications, like telling people that they can’t talk about their experience at my parties. I have asked people to keep identities of party attendees private, typically at kink events, but never the experiences themselves.

I’d also like to point out that in these accusation we have corroboration - a group of people who shared complaints about my parties and agreed they’d shared similar sinister experiences. The existence of corroboration alone is not, to me, significant evidence of truth, especially in a highly polarizing context. If the corroboration is by more trustworthy people, with concrete claims, then I consider this to be much stronger evidence.

Someone who attended the same meetups with me at a rationalist group IRL was later banned from that community and several other communities for bad behavior. They then wrote a long writeup on a forum about me. I won’t directly link this one, because the thread is dedicated to doxxing me and my family members. The writeup includes a lot of incorrect claims, but I’ll include one that addresses more intentions:

She will deliberately center the conversation around herself at the expense of the conversation or others. (The card game “AskHole” is ulteriorly designed to do this; there are a disproportionate amount of questions about sex work.) During the 2021 Astral Codex Ten Megameetup, she advertised it on her page and it was derided as “the Aella meetup” because she occupied a central table and this was described by one guest as “holding court.” One person who showed up to see Aella asked a pregnant wife holding her baby if she was a sex worker. She was described as “a goddess.” To test my hypothesis that she will be unable to handle a conversation sufficiently not about her, I sat next to her for about ten minutes and talked with some friends about nothing related to her. At some point she petulantly said “I’m moving” and relocated to a spot where she would get more attention. During the dinner, she spent about a third of the time looking at the ceiling — like a child would do to over-advertise to their parents that they were bored. Once, when she felt a concept was socially important (this is key; she does not care about its real importance) she petulantly said “I DON’T UNDERSTAND” and either turned her head away or outright walked away, my memory fails me here. But the expectation was that we were supposed to care, and go out of our way to make it friendly to her.

Breaking that down:

• This example is full of assumptions about my intent - I “deliberately” center the conversation; I “ulteriorly designed” my card game to orient around me; I relocated “to get attention.” I “don’t care” about a concept’s importance; I “expected people to go out of their way.” None of these assumptions about my intent match my internal experience about my intent, but nevertheless he presents them as fact, not guesses.

• Using other people’s actions to frame me. People “derided it as the Aella meetup”, someone described me as “holding court”, someone who came see me dared ask a mother if she did sex work. Someone described me as a goddess. To test my hypothesis that she will be unable to handle a conversation sufficiently not about her, I sat next to her for about ten minutes and talked with some friends about nothing related to her. At some point she petulantly said “I’m moving” and relocated to a spot where she would get more attention. During the dinner, she spent about a third of the time looking at the ceiling — like a child would do to over-advertise to their parents that they were bored. Once, when she felt a concept was socially important (this is key; she does not care about its real importance) she petulantly said “I DON’T UNDERSTAND” and either turned her head away or outright walked away, my memory fails me here. But the expectation was that we were supposed to care, and go out of our way to make it friendly to her.

• He frames normal and okay behavior as somehow pathological. I moved to a different spot, and this action on its own is narrativized as damning (“petulantly”, to “get more attention”). But if your desire is to exit a social interaction, that’s fine. Leaving conversations because they aren’t relevant to you or because you aren’t interested in the topic is fine too, as is joining a conversation because someone is paying attention to you (and vice versa). If you make a card game where you put in questions about a topic that you’re interested in, that’s also fine. If you are looking at the ceiling because you’re bored, hell, that’s fine too. The author is weirdly overconfident when it comes to inferring my mental state, but he’s also taking completely normal human emotions and framing them as things to be ashamed of. But because the narrative is so heavy, and everything is phrased with a thick layer of connotation, a lot of the implicit claims being made about which emotions are acceptable to feel versus unacceptable are harder to notice and draw out so that they can be questioned.

• The actual damning point he attempts to make is that I’m incapable of being interested in any topics besides myself, and I read the implication here as being that I’m thus incapable of caring about anyone else besides myself, and that this lack of care is the dangerous thing. You can’t trust Aella to have your interests at heart. You need to model her as bad. The attempt here is not a compassionate understanding of another human being, but rather an implicit request for enmity.

In general, the author sets up the conclusion of a narrative - (you need to model Aella as bad) - and fills out the narrative with assumptions about my intentions, claims about how other people behave, and anecdotes about objectively pretty normal-sounding things (‘she walked away to join another conversation’) intoned in dire-sounding language that’s meant to make the walking-away sound like actually this is all secretly very bad and shameful.

This is what it sounds like when someone (unsophisticatedly) is trying to force facts into a particular narrative mold.

To be clear, sometimes abuse of power does happen in controversial communities, by controverisal people! Just because you have high visibility and there are political incentives to misinterpret things that happened to you doesn’t mean that all claims of wrongdoing about you are false.

It’s really important to be able to suss out false claims from true ones, and it’s deeply unfortunate that sometimes the rate of false claims gets high enough that we have to be suspicious about the true ones. It’s crucial that we handle the process of figuring out which is which with a great deal of patience, effort, and compassion, because the stakes are so high. If someone was actually abused, we should try hard not to let the required inquiry, fact-finding, and baseline uncertainty disincentivize them from coming forward.

I acknowledge my post here is focused pretty disproportionately on skepticism, and a healthy balance in a community would not look like a bunch of people making only skeptical points. I think it would also include lots of people focusing hard on the dynamics around making it safe for people to speak up, on discussing the ways power imbalances can distort incentives for self honesty, on pointing out how scary and frustrating it can sometimes be to have your claims not taken seriously enough.

I’m mostly posting this because to me, it feels like there’s an imbalance in the models people are using to make sense of the world. I don’t want communities to overcorrect, but I want them to reach a reasonable equilibrium, which requires that thoughts pointing in both directions be thinkable and discussable.

It’s okay to have a bit of weight on the theory that “maybe the people making complaints are the kind of people very likely to aggressively overinterpret mundane interactions as meaningfully bad”.

Maybe it’s true, maybe not, but this should not be a taboo thought to voice. Especially given that sometimes, you do find yourself in a children’s cartoon version of a moral lesson, where you didn’t actually do anything wrong and no matter how much you try to understand and empathize with the criticism, at the end of the day it’s not true. (Which has often been my experience. And having had that experience, I have an easier time suspecting that other people are in the same shoes.)

My hope is that people can become better calibrated about how common lies and ridiculous levels of spin are, so they can apply the proper level of skepticism to claims and look into them before believing them. My hope is not that people pick out whoever they think the “good guys” are and then refuse to ever believe any criticism about those good guys. Just... use the tools that help you figure out truth, rather than feeling like it’s immoral or unnecessary to poke around and try to figure out what’s real.

(Also, just to be explicit - I don’t want to accidentally imply that I haven’t made mistakes or treated people poorly ever; I’m referring mainly to claims about me I find to be unambiguously ridiculous to outright false. There are in fact non-ridiculous criticisms of me, and I have occasionally hurt people in my circles because I behaved in an unskilled manner, and just because someone is like “Aella made me feel terrible” doesn’t mean that person is automatically a bad actor, and you should not use this post to dismiss their concerns.)

My fetish survey is now at 970k people, and I have desperately been wanting to share a raw version of the dataset with you guys so you can take a look. It’s on Zenodo here (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18625249), if you want to cite it. The raw folder is here. Even if you don’t know anything about data analysis, you can probably just load it into an AI like claude code, and simply ask it questions about the data. Ask it to make some cool charts about anything you’re curious about. Included are files with the back-end survey structure and a bit of info about column changes, which can help for context/figuring out what columns mean.

Releasing this has taken me a while, because fetishes are sensitive info and I want to make extra super duper double dog dare you sure that responses are anonymized.

So: I dropped 98.4% of responses into a very representative-to-the-population sample (age, gender, politics, and a few other things), leaving only a tiny fraction of the original data. I aggressively binned a bunch of the columns, and took a baseball bat to over half of the demographic info. I then added noise to the data in a few different layers, using different methods. I’m unfortunately not going to tell you very much about this (to protect the anonymization), but I came begging at the doors of various stats nerds to help me, and now it’s modified to a degree that I feel good about it. If you see a row and think it matches somebody specific, you are almost certainly wrong.

The correlations are mostly preserved, but overall, the noise means that correlations you find will be smaller than the correlation in the original data. In general, the correlations are reduced around 25%; e.g., a r=0.5 correlation was likely ~0.62 in the original data, and almost all correlations are reduced in a range between 30-15%.

Somewhat ironically, despite all the anonymizing, the aggressively representative sampling means that the base rates in this are likely closer to reality than my normal dataset I usually work with.

I did limit the sample from the very beginning to be ages 14-32, and responses from western countries only (US/canada and Europe). I removed some information about some very extreme fetishes. Most of the data is pretty robust, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few errors in there; if you find something extremely counterintuitive, there might be an issue with the data! Maybe I flipped a sign somewhere when cleaning it. Let me know and I’ll doublecheck anything weird.

I hope you like it, I wanna see if you find anything cool!

Subscribe now

I added sex work questions late, so we have a lower sample - in the low 200ks, of which ~15k reported having any sex work experience. I asked if you’d ever done sex work. If yes, I give a series of questions about subtypes of sex work. If you answer yes to those, I ask how experienced you were, and how good your experience in that sex work was.

Let’s look at some basic stuff:

These above are things I’m gonna control for in the following graphs, since age, childhood abuse, and biological sex seem to be pretty related to stuff we’re trying to disentangle from sex work. You might argue ‘wait, childhood abuse seems weird to control for, what if we wanna know what abused sex workers get up to’ and… maybe, but I find it more interesting to know how sex workers differ from the average population independently of childhood abuse. So I’m making sure ‘any childhood abuse’ and ‘no childhood abuse’ have the same ratio across categories. Keep in mind we’ll likely still see ‘severity’ of childhood

(I’m doing my age-controls crudely. Most of my respondents are in their 20’s; sex workers are 3-4 years older than sex workers, which is not enough to impact very much. So I’m just doing a basic 3-age-bin reweight. But still, there might be very slight age-related effects still poking through)

Sex workers do tend to be more liberal:

But I’m not gonna weight this because a) I’m wary of weighting for too many things, and b) my overall sample is skewed very liberal, so I don’t think conservative confounders will actually impact the data too much.

I asked people to rate their experience in their type of sex work from negative to positive. This was the averaged results: all were slightly more positive than neutral, with full-service being the lowest rated and porn being the highest - an extremely surprising reuslt for me!

Non-full-service I defined in the survey as ‘(This is any in-person sex work that DOES involve physical contact, but DOESN’T include penetration - such as a massage parlor worker or dominatrix)’

The more experience someone has in a thing, the more they like it. This makes sense. Probably people who don’t like it, quit, and thus have less experience:

But the people who are doing sex work at a career-level have overwhelmingly positive views of their jobs! That’s nice to see.

Since this is supposed to be a graph dump, I’m gonna just dump the rest of the graphs here without commentary unless I can’t help but provide commentary:

Demographicy Stuff

Bodycount:

Checking escorts:

Personality

Orientations

Upbringing/childhood

Read more

Behold, a common sentiment:

I do think I am one of the world’s top scientists on sex and gender kinks, actually, which is extremely tragic and an indictment of our entire civilization. I’m just an uneducated enthusiast who got into this because I had some questions nobody else had answered yet. My work has plenty of limitations, I barely know any stats, and I haven’t even published a single .pdf.

But unfortunately, the rest of the field isn’t much better. Think I’m exaggerating? Let’s take a look at the competition.

I used Elicit’s systematized review to pull ~500 published papers that focused on fetish, kink, and paraphilia, from vanilla to taboo. I narrowed it down to papers that are similar to my category of work - specifically surveys (ideally that the researcher performs directly and analyzes), looking at relationships or comparisons between groups.

To steelman this investigation, I narrowed further by selecting only top journals from the top 25% of SJR rankings, and weighted them heavily for being published recently (the oldest in my sample was from 2000, but median year was 2016. I didn’t have papers after ‘22, as too-recent is harder to find free online), and looked only at papers with more than 10 citations (median 28).

This left me with 51 papers. Hopefully this is a solid representation of the best, most influential survey fetish work in the field! Surely this must be more reliable than my own work!

I used elicit to generate specific information about each paper, re-ran each full paper individually through chatgpt to verify that specific information, manually checked all disagreements, and spot-checked the final results by reading through many of the papers myself, focusing on high-citation, high-n ones. I focused on simple questions (what was the sample size? Where did they get the participants from), and the AIs had pretty high accuracy about this.1

So let’s explore what these papers consist of! How good are their samples?

The median sample size was 404 (total sample ranged from 24 to 8,718). This is about 0.04% of my Big Kink Dataset; my sample is ~2,400x as big as this (now 970,000).

Is my sample size overkill? No. Not at all. It’s vital if you’re trying to detect rare things in data, and especially if you want to check a lot of rare things (to avoid statistical tomfoolery), and double especially if you want to carefully check confounders in the data. For example: Roughly 13k people reported pedophilic inclinations in my data. If we want to split this out by degree of interest, by sex, by gender, by age, by ‘were they abused in childhood’, and maybe checking non-sociopaths for good measure, then we suddenly are dealing with tiny bins in each set. You need an extraordinarily overpowered sample size to be able to do delicate, high-confidence extraction at the margins.

But still - size isn’t everything! My dataset is biased, after all; it’s a convenience sample, which is basically ‘what’s a population that’s easy for the researcher to access’? Surely most high-quality research isn’t simply what’s conveni-

78.4% of papers in the Top 51 were what I considered to be convenience samples - where the researcher went to an already-there group of people (university students, online groups, people walking down the street, etc) and plopped their survey in front of them. I didn’t include as convenience samples stuff like ‘uses a national database’ or ‘went into a prison to hand worksheets to prisoners’ (which seems very inconvenient). I did count use of microtaskers (used at least partially by 5 papers).

51% of these were online convenience samples, where the researchers posted their surveys somewhere online (just like mee!)

12 of the papers had what I considered to be underspecified source, where they said stuff like “participants were drawn from online forums” and left me with a sense that I didn’t actually know how to evaluate the level of selection effects that might be present.

7 offered rewards of some sort to complete the survey, like raffles, college credits, gift cards, etc. This is much lower than I anticipated, and much lower in proportion to the amount of criticisms about this I hear! Actually a surprisingly low number were drawn exclusively from college students at all.

One of my main concerns with fetish research is that they draw from targeted groups, which are much more likely to be biased in a way relevant to the research. Like, if you’re trying to conclude stuff about the personalities of BDSM users by surveying people who go to BDSM clubs vs. normies on the street, you’re almost certainly gonna have confounders with the types of people who like going to clubs at all. And a ton of the studies pulled from exactly this kind of thing - often online, often forums or subreddits.

I don’t use targeted groups in this way, and find that to be maybe the biggest advantage of my research.

59% used targeted samples, where they went directly in to some already-existing cluster of people with the trait they were trying to study. Only 3 studies used neither convenience samples nor targeted groups.

Anonymity is super important when measuring sex stuff; I am by default suspicious of people doing fetish surveys when the users feel they can be identified at all, especially when looking at highly-taboo stuff. So - how many of these surveys featured full anonymity?

I set the bar a bit high for this one, because I imagine users feeling skittish about reassurances of anonymity if they’re aware any information could be traced back to them at all - like, one study had researchers mailing random codes to people that they could use to identify themselves. This was supposed to preserve anonymity, but presumably the participants were aware that somewhere existed a database where those codes were matched to their mailing addresses and legal names.

Only 39.2% were fully anon; another 23.5% were somewhere in a grey area (attempts made at anonymity that were unclear how effective they were, or methodology was left unspecified).

I also think concealing your hypothesis is good - did the researchers take any explicit steps to obscure what they were testing, to the users? Did I think the participants would have a hard time guessing what the researchers were trying to do? I also set a bit of a high bar here, and only 4 studies passed it.

I think overall this is a bit less important, because often studies are more exploratory, or are studying a topic where ‘knowing what the researchers are studying’ is unlikely to shift responses that much.

But okay - let’s do a quick scoring of all these studies. You get points if your sample is non-convenience, non-targeted, fully anonymous, and no reward offered. (Half-point if the answer is ‘maybe’).

I’m also going to add a point if the study was properly randomized - like, the participants were selected randomly from a nationally representative database in some way. Four studies passed this bar (mine did not).

I’m also gonna add half a point if the study has more than 404 participants (the median), and a full point if they have more than 1,500.

There’s the distribution of scores; my Big Kink survey scores a 4.0; four surveys scored higher than mine, and they were these:

Paraphilic Sexual Interests and Sexually Coercive Behavior: A Population-Based Twin Study
Development and psychometric validation of the Sexual Fantasies and Behaviors Inventory.
Exhibitionistic and Voyeuristic Behavior in a Swedish National Population Survey
Sexual Arousal and Sexually Explicit Media (SEM): Comparing Patterns of Sexual Arousal to SEM and Sexual Self-Evaluations and Satisfaction Across Gender and Sexual Orientation

This is mostly looking at the quality of sample in terms of freedom from selection bias - is it big, anon, random, nontargeted, etc? And by these standards I think mine likely scores in the top 10% (of most-cited papers in top journals that are doing the same category of research as I am).

I do want to point out that I am possibly being a little unfair by focusing on papers looking at correlations, relationships, factor development, etc (like, ‘do women into gangbangs have better or worse relationships?). I am not looking at papers attempting to establish good base rates (like, what % of the world is aroused by bestiality?).

This is because I don’t think my data is a super reliable source for establishing base rates. I think it’s still helpful to estimate base rates - my massive sample size and huge amount of questions give me a lot of ability to control for things that tend to be correlated with the way my population deviates from normal - but the more you fuck around with data in that way, the less robust it gets, the more assumptions you have to make. For example, I can weight my data to be representative of the national population, but it seems likely that e.g. people above 70 in my dataset are more weird than an avg 70 year old, while the 20 year old who takes my survey is likely closer in weirdness to the avg 20 year old, which means we might find odd correlations if we’re checking age. This is partly why I cap most of my analyses at 35yo!

I do sometimes quote base rates about my data, and I think many of the times I do this it is a mistake. I think I make this mistake usually because conversations go like: ‘in your survey, do childhood experiences correlate with fetishes?’ ‘yes, it’s nuanced, etc.’ ‘oh - wow, how many people are into xyz?’ and I just say the straight number from my survey, without caveating that this is the raw number and I did not attempt to weight it. The caveats get cached as background in my brain and I fail to make sure it’s part of my communication regularly.

But the vast majority of my published writeups (as opposed to talking about it live) involve looking at relations between elements, not about base rates - and relationships are more robust than base rates. This is why I’m comparing my research to other research that is also working on relationships, not base rates.

But okay - still, my sample is a random internet survey that went viral on tiktok and is now just ranked super high in google search or whatever. Maybe other published academics with online samples still understand better where their samples come from, and have a better grasp on how much to trust the data somehow. How do I know my survey hasn’t been polluted by mass goofery?

Well - what would we expect to see if people goofed off in my survey? It’s easy to spot and remove some categories of this - people who answer very fast, or pick extremes for all the questions, or with inconsistent response sets, or who just explicitly tell me they were dishonest, or who say they’re 69 years old, etc.

But trolling and honesty are predictable, and I’ve done a lot of work experimenting with how you can impact and measure honesty in surveys; this isn’t just a ‘people are wild and we dunno’ - we kind of do know, and you can get whiffs what fuckery is afoot.

If people goofed en masse, I should expect to see my survey data deviate from established findings. If responders aren’t taking my survey seriously, it would be weird to see their data somehow still strongly replicating a bunch of established research, right?

Well, let’s spot check some stuff with established research! In my data (this is raw, not controlling for anything), I find:

1. Women are more neurotic (d=.6), more agreeable (d=.06)

2. Openness correlates with IQ (r=0.2)

3. Neuroticism correlates with number of mental illnesses people reported (r=.29)

4. Childhood abuse of various sorts correlates with mental illness (r=.3, .35 ish)

5. Narcissism anticorrelates with agreeableness (r=.32) and extroversion (-.18)

6. Childhood abuse correlates with neuroticism (r=.2)

7. Extraversion and sexual partner count (.17)

8. Older people are more agreeable (.13) and more conscientious (.16) and less neurotic (.-07)

9. Taller people report being smarter (.1) and more extroverted (.06)

10. Fathers being present in the home causes later onset of sex (.11)

11. Later birth order, lower IQ (-.07)

This is just a quick snippet; some are a bit off, but likely depends a lot on exact wording, did we control for the right variables, etc. I also used only two items from each of the OCEAN variables (total of 10 questions) which is lower fidelity. Also there’s some things that don’t seem to replicate on a quick first pass of my data (like self-reported narcissism doesn’t correlate with bodycount), but that might if I look more closely into how the study was done and does it match up with the thing I’m measuring? But overall, roughly speaking, I have a lot of replications in there. It seems pretty suspicious for lots of goofball trolls online to manage to answer in ways that are similar to the ways people answer ‘official’ online surveys by academics.

But what about analysis? How am I doing?

I’m way less sure about this one. I think good analysis is harder than sheer survey design for a layman to figure out; for example, early on I learned how correlations worked, and then went and made a bunch of claims about correlations (or lack thereof) in my data, failing to notice that this only works if your data is close to normally distributed! There’s lots of ways to accidentally fuck up stats, and so I’ve tried to be very conservative with my statistical analysis. I rarely even run regressions - it’s simple, and I can do it in code, but I do not feel that I deeply understand what it’s doing to the data well enough that I can be sure I won’t be accidentally making a mistake somewhere. So I usually just pull slices from my data instead, which is very simple and straightforward.

It’s also hard to compare statistical methods of my dataset vs others, because many statistical best practices are in place to handle limitations of smaller sample sizes. Like, it’s great to include confidence intervals in your graphs, but when I generate graphs half the time the CI is so tiny it’s not even visible, so I sometimes just don’t even bother. Or, I get to carefully investigate my data for lots of things that might be confounders in a way that other surveys simply cannot do. It would be unfair to penalize me for not using CI, and unfair to penalize other researchers for not investigating all confounders; it’s just not really a good match for our data!

I also just don’t really like doing analysis as much. I can joyfully build surveys until the world ends, but actually sorting through the data properly feels like eating vegetables. I might be top-tier at survey design, but I’m probably in bottom 10% of statisticians. This probably leads to worse work overall.

(I do have a sneaking suspicion that the people writing many of these papers I’m reading don’t actually know how their statistics work, either, though, based on how frequently people find basic statistical errors in published stuff.)

In an ideal world, my research would be mid at best, cute at worst. I think it’s a pretty sad state of affairs that a completely uneducated amateur starts running surveys on sex stuff cause she’s curious, and ends up with a dataset that can easily compete with the top stuff in top journals. This is an indictment on the field. It’s not that I’m good, it’s that everyone else is bad.

I think most of the issues with the field are not with the individual researchers. They might be looking at more biased, smaller samples than mine, but I think this is still a reasonable thing to do given limited funding and the tyranny of overprotective IRBs! I think any evidence is better than none; finding a small population and being able to describe it gives us another clue in our arsenal to piecing the world together, and this is valuable. Limitations do not make data useless! Biased data is still data!

The primary issue seems to be that the social science incentive structure has gone to fucking loony toons town. I’m a total outsider, and have been sniffing around getting some of my work published, and I am constantly dumbfounded in these conversations. Academics have a wide variety of advice for me, but almost none of it has to do with improving my work itself - it’s all stuff like “ok figure out which peers will review your paper and then make sure you cite them or else they will get offended and reject it’, or ‘way more people would take you seriously if you put that blog post into .pdf format’ or ‘I think journals might reject you for having a mononym ‘aella’, can you make up a last name?’ or ‘maybe you should deliberately leave a mistake in your paper so the peers that review you can feel special for finding it and not terrorize you with stupid changes that make your paper worse’ or ‘they probably won’t accept a paper that’s entirely novel and groundbreaking, it has to be building on previous research, you know, part of the existing conversation’. And even when they do have advice about the work itself, it’s specifically about what’s ‘in’ right now - “Oh, journals really like it if you run two separate studies to compare groups. Yes I know you have data for both groups in the same survey, but to get published you should copypaste the questions and run them again, the url just has to be different.”

(I AM NOT EXAGGERATING FOR ANY OF THIS, ALL OF THE ABOVE IS NEAR-VERBATIM WHAT PUBLISHED ACADEMICS HAVE TOLD ME, AHHHHH)

Growing up, academia seemed like a lofty goal. I thought that was where serious people went to do serious work, and if I entered the cathedral I’d be amazed at how skilled and knowledgeable everyone was, and focused on figuring out the truth, and doing science, and glowing with a glow of smartness. But instead I’ve peeked inside the door and found everyone standing in a circle with their thumb inside the butt of the person in front of them, creating a thumb-in-butt circle.

And the academics I talk to are very self-aware about this. They say “Yeah, i’m in a thumb-butt circle. It’s not great.” and im like “why not take your thumb out of the butt” and they say “well then gary back there would take his thumb out of my butt and unfortunately that thumb is important for my job”.

I go ‘ok well have fun’ and pull my head out and go back to my blog and to twitter, where I find hundreds of comments saying my work is not comparable to real research, which has standards and peer review and no selection bias. They point towards the glowing cathedral and say ‘why aren’t you in there if you’re so great’. and just. I can’t believe we’re in a world where something so broken has so much prestige, that people don’t know how broken it is. My stupid survey is at least a slightly less stupid survey than most, at least it’s something. It’s an inadequate, imperfect block on top of a pile of debris.

In a functioning system, we probably would see the field of sex research collecting much bigger sample sizes, because they’d have put more effort into figuring out how to make surveys more fun (which is a novel concept, not ‘part of an existing conversation’), how to make their scales more efficient (instead of highly redundant items held lofty by how well they correlate), how to increase survey completion rates (narrowing questions, getting rid of unnecessary consent forms). They would be able to ask more direct, explicit questions without the IRB clamping down because they might be doing emotional harm to their subjects. In a functioning system, all the internet accusations about my work would be true; I would be doing useless work compared to what’s already been done. I hope one day we get there.

Despite the title of this post, I want to remind you this is all correlative, not necessarily causative. Maybe the type of people who choose to bang a lot of people are just built different than the kind of people who don’t, etc.

In general, the questions are on a -3 (strong disagree) to 3 (strong agree) spectrum, and and I’ve kept y axis to be 25% of the full range (unless the actual spread of data is larger than this).

Normally this series is fully paid subscriber only. You can see past instances such as:

How do kids change relationships?

Gay vs Straight relationship quality

This post is also for paid subscribers, but I’m including a few graphs above the paywall so newcomers can get a sense for what graph dumps are like.

Keep in mind the way I built this survey does not make it obvious what I’m measuring. I just advertised it as ‘find out some info about your relationship’, and included demographic and context stuff separately from the rest of the questions.

Also keep in mind this is weighting for length of relationship and age. It’s a bit crude stratified weighting but should roughly do the job.

Let’s go!

In general, the higher someone’s bodycount, the less likely they were to agree with questions related to codependency/intertwinedness:

In general, there seems to be a subtle trend towards more toxic relationships with higher bodycounts. The effect is mild, and only present in some of the questions I asked, but overall seems probably true:

What about sex? Before you scroll down, make a prediction: Do people with higher bodycounts report more or less satisfaction with their sex lives?

You might notice some counterintuitive results, especially if you compare between graphs. Also notice how very high bodycount women seem different from even moderately-high bodycount women:

Read more

Status is, of course, other people knowing that you have what they want. A king is high status; he has great ability to achieve things he wants, and people knowing this causes them to obey him in exchange for access to more things they want.

But in sex as a status game, I talked about status as something you can play. You can play high by teasing a friend - “You cooking dinner tonight? Remember, the smoke alarm isn’t a timer.” and they can play high by refusing to cede frame “If I haven’t made the smoke alarm go off then am I really doing my job?”, or low by ceding frame “Hey now, I’ve never made a smoke alarm go off” (defensive).

It’s hard to do academic research on ‘is someone ceding to a frame’, but there’s other subtle signals of status too. When researchers have studied behavioral differences of low vs high status people, they notice differences like:

• High interrupts more and fends off being interrupted more, low is interrupted more often and fails to fend off interruptions as much

• High is more likely to give commands, low is more likely to ask questions

• High is more likely to take up physical space

• High laughs less, low laughs more

• High is less reactive, less likely to reflexively mirror emotions/facial expressions, while low is more easily affected

• High is more likely to be ‘held responsible’ or ‘blamed’, low is more likely to be treated as fragile

• High is calmer, while low is more likely to interpret things as threats

• High tends to be more willing to be competitive, contradictory, argumentative, while low tends to be more polite, helpful, and avoidant of direct conflict.

So is the idea that people can truly be one status level, but act like a level they’re not? In some sense this is obviously true. I view those louis vuitton tote bags as ludicrously capacious; the ancient primal gossip column writer in me surges into judgment when I see a woman with nails like crab legs boarding first class with that tote on her shoulder; I think she wants people to see her as wealthier than she is.

When a billionaire wears torn jeans, we think - ah, he wants people to think he’s more relatable than he is. When the neighbor kid shows you his lightsaber skills he’s learning to fight off bad guys, we adorably see that he’s attempting to appear more menacing than he is. But all these examples are ones where they are failing to convince us; the status they play is obviously at odds with the status they carry.

But do people ever falsely signal status well? Do people ever successfully lie?

I’ve mentioned before someone I know who is low status in some ways - she’s poorer than most of her social group, uneducated and not particularly accomplished in most salient skills, etc. But she acts very socially dominant, is confidently unphased when teasing people much higher power than herself, etc. - basically ‘plays high’ as a natural, deep extension of her interactions with the world.

Is she falsely signalling status? Are we being duped? I wondered this, but upon further thought I realized no - she’s very popular, because she makes people feel good when they’re around her. She’s providing real value to others. There’s a group chat called Hurricane [Her Name] founded as a support group for all the men who fell in love with her.

One loose test I like to use for figuring out status is - if two people really tried to cancel each other, like pulled all their resources - time, energy, money, charm, connections, all of it - into trying to get the other person run out of town (or killed), who would win? And this woman I know would probably easily beat a lot of the more saliently ‘high status’ people in my community on the merit of her social power alone. She could lift a finger and powerful allies would flock to defend her.

So no, she’s not falsely signalling status - her social power is high enough to back it up. She is accurately conveying a level of security that she rightfully feels.

Much of the time, when someone seems to be pretending a different status than they are, they are actually reflecting something true. In general, our status plays are very hard to convincingly fake. You have deep machinery in your brain, fine tuned to detect your actual level of power, and it spits out signals appropriate for it. If you are proposing a date to a girl who’s way out of your league, it’s hard to suppress your nerves, and she will likely be able to smell it on you. When I started getting more famous, people started wanting me at their parties more and talking to me more. Only then did my body develop the ability to relax into something socially smoother and steadier - something I had historically totally failed to pull off consciously despite really trying to. On some level your body needs to correctly track the level of threat or success it thinks you’re actually under, and makes a ton of micromovements accordingly.

…Except your body broadcasting your true status isn’t always what happens. Anna Delvey managed to fool everyone into thinking she was a wealthy socialite, the tinder swindler Simon Leviev managed to fool a bunch of women into thinking he was a wealthy heir, and both Anna and Simon presumably had very convincing portrayals of high status. And you probably have known at least someone who seems to have an expectation that other people treat them as high status - they get more easily offended at implications they’re low status, they act as though what they have to say is more interesting than it is, and they seem to really believe all of it, they exude that they believe it all, all the way down to their souls. They probably do believe they deserve The Good Life on some level, like they’ve been unfairly dealt a low-status hand. This allows them to lie convincingly, because on a subconscious level they are not actually lying. The deep machinery in their brain is miswired for detecting their actual level of power, and spits out signals appropriate for a status higher than what they are.

Under the status lens, this is what narcissism is. If you imagined a narcissist’s status actually matched level of what they’re signaling, then their behavior suddenly becomes much more palatable. The store clerk who gets pissy when he’s ignored is embarrassing; the emperor who gets pissy when he’s ignored is understandable. Narcissism isn’t demanding special treatment, it’s demanding special treatment when you don’t actually have the status to pull it off. Clinical symptom lists of narcissism often refer to gaps between their signalling and reality, like:

Have an unreasonably high sense of self-importance and require constant, excessive admiration.
Feel that they deserve privileges and special treatment.
Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements.
Make achievements and talents seem bigger than they are.

Let’s take Bridgerton, a netflix female-gaze show set in the early 1800’s that features a relatively unnuanced set of good and bad characters. It portrays a queen who is framed as intimidating and demanding, but certainly not ‘bad’ - no characters complain about her behavior or resent her standing. And yet she becomes personally offended when people don’t give her enough attention, gets angry when she ships people but they don’t fall in love, casually dismisses and beckons people with arrogant authority, explicitly expresses disinterest in the lives of servants, etc.

But in this world she is not treated as a narcissist, she’s treated as a queen. All the same symptoms that would cause us to go no-contact or write trauma books in a normal person are just an unpleasant but understandable features in one who can actually kill or enrich you with a twitch of her finger. She demands attention because she can enforce attention.

But okay - if narcissism is your brain machinery churning out higher-rank expectations than matches your actual value to other people, what’s the reverse? Can you actually be quite powerful, but your brain churns out low-rank expectations that cause you to interace with others as though they’re more powerful than you?

Yes! I think this is women.

In primates, rank is often tied to sex, and in some cases is synonymous with it. Chimpanzees have a really rigid, obvious hierarchy that determines things like access to mates, priority to food and protection etc, who runs away when threatened, etc. In this, all male chimps rank higher than all female chimps. Literally - the powerful alpha momma female chimp will bow and roll over to the lowest incel male. This is probably innate, as this gender tyrrany recurs in all chimp societies both wild and captive.

Bonobos have more fluid, distributed hierarchy, where most females rank above most males. While some males dominate some of the females, the highest status bonobo in a community is almost always female.

What about the human primate? I don’t know - it’s a dangerous game to try to extrapolate ape behavior to us - but it seems something like a genderswap of bonobos. In humans, most males rank above most females, and the highest status human ape is almost always male. Some cultures are more sex-status-mixed, but there have still been significant portions of human history where their hierarchy more closely resembled the chimp’s, where the lowliest male might not want to swap out their position for the highest-ranked women.

I don’t think female human primates have evolved for millenia as the lower-ranked sex without any biological repercussions. It seems likely that the female psyche, for very good reason, is wired to believe it is lower-status compared to the male psyche.

That list of signals of high vs low status I gave at the beginning of this blog post was actually from research on gender differences. I just swapped out male vs female for high and low. The actual findings (usually found in mixed-sex groups), are this:

• Men interrupt more and fend off being interrupted more, women are interrupted more often and fail to fend off interruptions as much

• Men are more likely to give commands, women are more likely to ask questions

• Men are more likely to take up physical space

• Men laugh less, women laugh more

• Men are less reactive, less likely to reflexively mirror emotions/facial expressions, while women are more easily affected

• Men are more likely to be ‘held responsible’ or ‘blamed’, women are more likely to be treated as fragile.

• Men are less neurotic, while women are more likely to interpret things as threats.

• Men tend to be more willing to be competitive, contradictory, argumentative, while women tend to be more polite, helpful, and avoidant of direct conflict.

Obviously more classically femme tactics are still useful to men - being agreeable, getting sympathy, taking true threats seriously can all be vital to power - but overall, women have gained more from low-status maneuvers than men, because they historically have been less able to achieve their wants than men.

So much of gender discourse is actually a fight over the discomfort of low-status wiring trying to fit into a high-status world.

I say this as a low-status-wired person myself. My psychology defaults to don’t hurt me, I’m not a threat on a subconscious level. As I rose in power in my local social circles, this started creating problems. People would treat me as very high status, and I didn’t know how to handle this. I’m supposed to laugh at your jokes, and ask you questions, and be quiet and let you talk. I was uncomfortable with the power I suddenly found in my hands, with being in situations where that power required me to behave in high-status (disagreeable, demanding, dominant) ways. It was not native to me and I think I made everything worse by trying to act like this wasn’t happening.

Women evolved as low status for millenia, and then suddenly over the course of a century their power shot up. Women suddenly could own property and hold jobs and get divorced easily and become girlbosses and eat birth control and use their baddie status and pretty faces to post persuasive demands on social media. But the machinery in their brains that truly believed they were low-status was still there, and still kept firing away.

To be annoyingly repetative about this: Obviously, this is all on average. Men also have historically benefitted from playing low status; male competition is violent and fierce, and declare-submissive-loyalty survival strategies are vital to the male psyche just as they are female. Men are also sometimes neurotic, and eager to please, and conflict avoidant! Don’t use this post to overinterpret individual instances of people behaving one way or another.

But, in a broad sense, I get from women’s cultural messaging a sort of quietly desperate attempt to be viewed as powerful. Yass queen, get it gurl, don’t fumble the baddie; these are cheering reassurances granted massive viewcounts by psyches that are in need of cheering reassurances - by psyches that, no matter what, will always on some level feel like they are at the bottom of the totem pole.

Men have their own version of this - the insecure manosphere posturing that proclaims confidently how much men deserve to be worshipped by women is the same low-status reflex. But theirs is not nearly as widespread as women’s is!

And both manosphere and yass-queenism’s subtle requests for approval can exist with or without actual power; there’s both powerless incels and Andrew Tate, there’s (occasionally) femcels and also Dove commercials.

I also don’t mean to argue that signaling high or low status is good or bad. Both are strategies that are correct in different situations, and we tend to individually favor one or the other subconsciously. Signaling low is often a vital tool for vulnerability and social bonding! And I don’t mean to argue that all of male-female gender dynamics can be boiled down to status. As I said in the beginning of this series, we’re here to see what the world looks like when viewed through a status lens. This doesn’t render other lenses invalid. But still, viewing the gender divide as actually a status divide feels clarifying for me. So much of female psychology is just low status psychology! It’s unsurprising that we see a world where, even when women gain power, they sort of… can’t believe they actually have that power.

Read more

In the world of cancellations, people are often incompetent. If you’re going to cancel someone, you should do with all the strength of a raging fire, mysterious as the dark side of the moon.

I’m experienced in cancellations, having thrown my weight behind a few myself. I’ve also had many cancellation attempts thrust upon me, with varying degrees of success. I fought in the great woke wars of the early 20s, where bretheren fell under the swords of social exclusion right and left. So I come to you, battle-hardened, to help you learn how to do it right.

Cancellation is an attempt to chop someone’s status off at the knees. We do this because of a cultural agreement that this person has violated the rules that come with their associated power, and we are now terminating their contract.

Sometimes this is good. You can have them in the form of deposing kings: Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of power that touched a lot of domains, and he did not use it for good. It makes sense that an appropriate cancellation would have to be swift, fierce, and wide-reaching. Many cancellations are less about specific kings and more about socially executing flagbearers for dangerous memes; nazism killed a lot of innocents, and so we are happy to cancel small nazi flagbearers to prevent them from becoming big nazi flagbearers.

But most of the time, cancelling itself is where we negotiate our collective concept of ‘harm’. If the CEO of a huge corporation were caught saying “maybe we should imprison gay people to prevent their degeneracy from corrupting our children”, I would support their cancellation today - but fifty years ago I’d be an insane trigger-happy liberal radical for the same view. By the same rules, would I now try to cancel every public figure that eats meat, if I knew in fifty years we’d look back on meat consumption as a grand horror? Probably not!

And of course, we watched the political left go on a mass cancellation spree over the last several years, claiming victims such as James Damore and Justine Sacco or Lindsay Shepherd, in a magnitude rivaled only recently by the political right.

There is a great gulf of cancellations between Jeffrey Epstein and James Damore, but in general I lean towards cancelling less. It’s easy to say your cancellation is about ‘preventing harm’, while your definition of ‘harm’ quietly slips past credulity. I think we should all be more suspicious of ourselves and more charitable to others. Cancelling is social violence, and we should use it as a last resort.

So, let’s say you want to cancel Bob. First ask yourself:

1. Does Bob pose a concrete threat? Is Bob meaningfully responsible for direct harm to others?

2. Does or did the harm directly remove or limit agency from the victim somehow? e.g. ‘being offended’ is usually not agency-limiting in a way that ‘having safewords ignored’ is.

3. Do Bob’s victims generalize? Is their psyche common enough in the population that more of this class are likely to run into Bob?

4. And if they do run into Bob, is he meaningfully likely to offend against them again? If so, can you explain a very concrete scenario you’re afraid of happening?

5. Are the accusations against Bob from credible sources? Are you willing to entertain the possibility the sources might not be credible?

6. Would your cancellation of Bob remove his capacity to harm others?

7. Are there no other options? Have people already tried talking to Bob? Has someone already made an serious attempt to handle this privately, such that you have reason to believe Bob is unlikely to change?

8. If doing this on behalf of someone else, check if you’re credible enough. Are you trustworthy? If you tend to be confused by why your past relationships keep exploding dramatically, or why communities keep banning you from events, then you might not be the right person to fill this role unless there’s no other option.

If your answer to all of these is ‘yes’, then it’s probably a good idea to cancel Bob.

I mean this in like, big-C “write up a big post about Bob, warn people considering working/dating them, ban them from the meetup” type cancel. I think smaller-scale, private social-circle stuff can sometimes be justified on less stringent criteria, but I’m not talking about that here.

Let’s imagine his offense is taking hidden camera bathroom videos of an ex and uploading them to porn sites, and his actions fit all the criteria above.

Here we go:

1. State the facts.

   Make sure you report the facts themselves as neutrally and as accurately as possible. State them without aggressive language. “Last week, Alice shared with me a screenshot of Bob’s account posting this video to a porn site.”

2. and include important factual context that opposed parties might agree is relevant. “Alice did at one point agree to take nudes and expressed comfort with showing them publicly, although she never consented to the currently shared photos.”

3. If including quotes from others, include their hedges as to not mislead people about their full, nuanced opinion. e.g. don’t crop out the last sentence when Bob says: “She doesn’t deserve privacy. Hiding bad actions from others is nothing you should be private about.'“

4. Do not make factual claims about others’ intentions, unless they directly stated those intentions. You can state what they did, and say “this seems consistent with an intention to x” or “it seems likely their goal was to y”, but do not assume what’s going on in someone else’s head.

The ‘clean facts’ part is important because you should not be playing dirty. It is possible for different people to observe the same reality and come to different conclusions; you should not be trying to force conclusions on people, but rather to try to help them observe reality and hope that their conclusions are similar to yours. If you’re making an undeserved cancellation, you should cancel in a way that will result in your own failure. If you’ve gotten a fact wrong, or if the facts aren’t as strong as is justified, then your transparency should backfire on you. This is good and correct. It is much better to make a weak, true case, than to make a strong muddled one. Cancel others as you yourself would want to be cancelled.

5. Make sure your interpretations are your interpretations. “This is bad” or “Bob was trying to be cruel to Alice” should be clearly labeled as yours, not as absolute claims about the state of the world. A simple “I think that” or “my guess is” goes a long way.

6. Be emotional, but in a constrained space. Somewhere other than the facts, and your interpetations, you should have at least some communication about your emotional relationship to all of this. Are you furious? Shaking? Disappointed? It’s good to know what it means to you, the lens through which this whole thing comes. It helps us interpret what you’re saying, and also helps us understand the impact of what Bob may have done. It’s also honest! It’s a true fact about reality! It’s important to know!

7. If the situation is complicated, anticipate misunderstandings from those who may become furious at Bob, and correct them. “I am not pretending Bob was terrible the entire relationship. Bob has a lot of good qualities and, in his mind, probably believed he was doing something righteous.”

8. It’s okay for conflicting things to both be true, like both wanting to cancel Bob and being sad Bob is getting cancelled. Don’t shy away from naming one thing just because it seems to go against the narrative of something else.

9. Don’t demonize Bob with villanous language. Your goal here is to let people know that someone habitually engages in dangerous behavior so they can protect themselves and others. Your goal is not to punish or torture. You do not want to turn this into tribal warfare. You should be a small, cold, precise knife that flicks in and out and is done.

10. Be reasonably sure about your rumors, which are often less true and more warped than you think. You should check if the people telling you stories might have any ulterior motives, or if you’ve noticed them distort things in the past. Don’t be afraid to ask for proof. This can be hard, especially if they are your friends.

11. Don’t name accomplices you are not also willing to cancel under the same criteria as Bob.

12. Communicate, as concretely as possible, the damage done by Bob. Was someone physically harmed? Does Alice now have nightmares?

13. Give concrete suggestions for what you think the readers should do. Should there be a tribunal to rehabilitate Bob? Should you get the police involved? Should Bob not be allowed into certain buildings anymore? Should people contact Bob’s employers to try to fire him? Are you personally going to change your behavior around Bob at all?

Making a complaint common knowledge and trying to call a lot of people to action to exclude someone is a big deal, and should be treated pretty carefully.

But to repeat, I think there’s lower standards for lesser verisons of this. If your ex tends to cheat on people, you maybe don’t need to make a big writeup with his full legal name demaning he be barred from his industry, but rather can whisper network the facts of it to other women in your community. My post here is not about how to execute whisper networks well, that’s a whole different and much murkier thing.

A few more points:

1. Be wary about agreeing to secrets. Do not do this compulsively or automatically. It’s a good idea to have a policy of waiting for a full hour no matter what before saying ‘yes’ to a secret. It can be awful to simultaneously have bad information about someone and be completely forbidden from investigating it further, or being able to explain why you’re now e.g. uninviting someone from your party. I’m not saying you should never agree to secrets, only be aware that bad actors can request your secrecy in a way that can hurt people they’re targeting.

2. In general, the whole thing is going to be uncomfortable for everybody - those with information, witnesses, victims, you yourself. People will try to keep themselves clean of any social repercussions (e.g. by remaining anonymous), but some amount of absolute social repercussion will accrue no matter what, and if you allow them to refuse all of it it will end up piling on you. If someone has power, and you are the only one willing to speak out on behalf of many anonymous people, the wrath will fall on you alone. This often isn’t sustainable; it’s okay to agree to help victims only on the condition that they share some of the load. It’s also okay not to! Just make sure you are aware of the costs before you agree to them.

3. I disadvise second-order cancellations, where you publicly shun people who associate with the cancelled person. That should be more of a case-by-case, personal whisper network type thing, not a public call. If you do want to cancel someone still associating with a Cancelled person, you should make sure that person qualifies for Cancellation on their own, independently - has that person caused concrete harm to a victim? etc.

The problem with most cancellations is that they fall into righteousness, overreach, and an attempt to coerce the reader into a conclusion instead of respecting different interpretations. This feels right when you’re angry, but many terrible things have been done by very angry people who thought they were doing the right thing. You must act under the same set of rules that would protect you yourself from bad people!

This on…

Read more

I occasionally run a series of polls where I ask people to solve extremely simple math problems that slowly increase in complexity. I ran them again real quick as I write this to show you. Watch what happens to the correct answer (which is always 2):

#1:

#2:

#3

#4

#5

In order of difficulty, the % of people who chose the correct answer is 87%, 82%, 95%, 92%, and 91%. Obviously something else is going on - 13% of people are not mistaken about what 1+1 equals!

The numbers here are a bit noisy due to low sample size, but in general whenever I’ve asked variations on this set of questions, the number of correct votes roughly increases with the difficulty of the problem, before hitting a ceiling when the difficulty is too high, and slowly decreases with that difficulty.

It seems that people enjoy voting falsely when nobody could possibly mistake their vote for proof of actual idiocy. If your friend says 1+1=3, you probably take this as evidence for their jovial rakishness more than for their failure to pass kindergarten. But if they get (4+6)-8 wrong, well, I dunno. Probably they’re not that bad at math, but… they might be?

But this troll streak is not an absolute rule!

I ran a survey - a survey proper, not a twitter poll. For my Fancy Survey, people had to click on a link and visit a webpage where they input their age, and ethnicity, and level of education, and gender identity, and a bunch of boring stuff. Then they got some questions including political views, and some about sexual preferences (a thing I survey often). Then they got one or two of the math questions, at random. Around 170 people answered each math question.

Here’s how they did:

Basically: inside the survey, the accuracy mostly decreased with the difficulty of the problem. The troll effect seems to be completely gone here.

It’s interesting that the least-accurate question for twitter was 19-17 instead of 1+1. My guess is that 1+1 should have been even less accurate, but there was a whole angry debacle a year or two ago over 2+2=5, and by answering 1+1=2 people are signaling they don’t agree with the liberal math nonsense. 19-17, though, has no such controversy associated with it, so people feel more free to troll.

Let’s try another one: Agree or disagree - “A VCR is a good place to store a peanut butter sandwich”

I don’t think a VCR is a good place to store a peanut butter sandwich. I might go so far as to venture that my opinion is also the correct answer to this question.

61.4% of twitter users voted correctly here. And in my Slightly More Professional Survey, this jumped to 81% of responders.

Let’s check a compliance test:

73 vs 90%, beautiful.

So far most of these questions have been easy, where there’s an obvious answer, and people have to choose whether or not to click the obvious answer. They know they’re being tested, and there’s a tension between “do I do what the tester wants, or do I fuck around.”

I think probably the immediate visibility and informality of the twitter poll gives people a jolt of delight to fuck with the results, as long as fucking with the results would be funny. 1+1 = 3 is hilarious when it’s in front of a crowd and everybody sees the stupid percentages being stupid, but it’s boring when it’s inside the solemn walls of a researcher’s guidedtrack url.

(3³ − 23) ÷ 2 = 3, however, is deadly serious. Nobody finds that funny, crowd or not. It’s the one question where the twitter poll and survey question collapsed to almost exactly the same % of correct answer.

Much of good survey design is getting a decent model of the mind and incentives of your audience. Egos are predictable. You have to tease it out like taffy, and if the ego is sticking to your results too hard you have to find other questions to trap them.

Let’s move away from the troll questions and look more directly at ego. When does it flare up?

I asked:

“I treat everyone equally, regardless of background”

“Advertising influences my purchasing decisions”

“I’m satisfied with my sex life”

The do-you-treat-people-equally one saw twitter people answering very slightly more “disagree” than the survey ones, but this is a bit hard to disentangle cause my survey-takers tend to be a a little more liberal (5%) than my twitter audience, and conservatives are probably going to honestly answer ‘no’ more often.

But the rest had basically no change in X vs survey polls. Being affected by advertising, having a good sex life - the venue didn’t seem change the answers.

However this one:

“Are you above or below average compared to the other people who answer this poll/survey”?

is pretty hilarious. 79% of twitter-poll people said they were above average, but 89% of my Fancy Survey-takers said they were! I think people who knew their answers would be visible, and that it would be embarrassing if the bars didn’t align 50/50, felt more pressure to answer humbly. Fancy Survey, in private, presented no such pressure.

I also asked about sexual dominance. A common theory is that men are less likely to admit wanting to be sexually rapey because it’s stigmatized, so this would predict the more anon and hidden their answers, the more honesty you’d see. This… maybe held up in my tests? Slightly? I asked:

“Are you sometimes aroused by fantasies of nonconsent, where *you* are the *aggressor/perpetrator*?” with some ‘don’t worry we won’t judge you’ text.

If you count ‘not at all’ as 0 and ‘yes’ as 2, the mean is actually basically the same (about 0.92). But the twitter result was more polarized - in public, people were more likely to say they both were into and not into nonconsent; in the survey, people said ‘a little.’ I think probably this is just noise, the samples aren’t super high. This suggests that immediate visibility of answer does not impact people’s willingness to admit being into a sexually taboo thing.

Okay - but this is looking at like, how does public visibility of specific answers change those answers? Something I’m more curious about is - how does offering test results change answers?

I build a lot of data-backed surveys that tell you how you differ from other people via giving you cool results. This gets more users to take them for free, subverting the whole ‘have to bribe undergrads with a grade’ or ‘have to pay bored microtaskers $2 each to please answer my questions’ problem that plagues most survey research.

But ego does change things. How much?

I duplicated my Fancy Survey, removed less-important questions, and renamed it to Quick Personality Feedback Survey. I said “what’s your spirit animal?” and said if you took my survey you’d find out! I also suggested people share their result so others can see what animal they are. I tacked on some preliminary results onto a few basic questions from a different project I’m working on to actually give them an animal.

Here’s the questions I measured. Guess which, if any, showed people answering them differently when they thought they were being evaluated:

How horny are you right now?

Women are too easily offended

Women have a purity that men lack

Are you sometimes aroused by fantasies of nonconsent, where *you* are the *aggressor/perpetrator*?

Are you sometimes aroused by fantasies of nonconsent, where *you* are the *receiver/victim*?

Do you sometimes find people who are 15 years old, sexually attractive?

How many people have you had sex with?

The correct answer to this question is “Slightly agree”. Please select it.

Advertising influences my purchasing decisions

I’m satisfied with my sex life

I have made decisions primarily to protect my pride

I treat everyone equally, regardless of background.

On a scale of 1-10, how attractive are you?

How smart are you, compared to the other people who will answer this survey?

Overall, how satisfied are you with your life these days?

Three questions seemed to show a meaningful difference between groups - Women have a purity that men lack (d=.25), How horny are you right now? (d=.23), and Advertising influences my purchasing decisions (d=.25). The spirit-animal audience said women were purer, that they were hornier right now, and more likely to deny advertising impacted their decisions. The rest were basically the same.

This is a pretty confusing cluster of questions. Why those and not the others? Why the horny question and not the like, being aroused by noncon? Why the ad question but not the pride or the equality or the smartness question? I think it’s probably not noise based on the sample sizes (remember, about ~600 and 900), but it’s patternless enough I keep wanting to think it’s noise - or else something totally different is underlying it that I haven’t figured out a theory to match yet

But still - overall, most of them showed no meaningful shift.

Ok so I’ve compared three types of surveys here - twitter polls, a normal generic survey, and an incentivized-by-finding-your-spirit-animal survey. I didn’t try super hard to get huge sample sizes, but they should be big enough to work.

And the message is: it’s hard to generalize about any of these. I don’t think it’s right to say a poll, survey, or incentive is worthless, only that some categories of questions are affected, sometimes. Twitter polls seem especially susceptible to questions that allow trolling opportunities, but seem kind of ok otherwise? At least not worse than normal surveys? And incentivized surveys also do pretty well, but with weird fluctuations in a small handful of questions, and it’s hard to interpret but maybe points to a desire to get a more flattering outcome.

And the common claim that “people are less likely to admit highly stigmatized sexual fantasies” fails to find evidence here. The rate of reported interest was exactly the same across all surveys.

Of course, maybe there’s some warping going on by the fact people are answering online questions at all, and it warps all the questions across all the tests I did equally, so I can’t tell.

But my point is we shouldn’t be applying a single rule universally across all surveys to determine if the questions are reliable or not! You’ve got to look at where and how it was shared, and how the questions were phrased, and to whom, and then imagine taking the survey and feel where your ego flares up, and then squint hard at those specific questions to see if you can make them more resilient somehow. It’s an art. It’s also a science, but still an art.