It’s difficult to ordain beforehand what sort of sexual content is fit for LW, because it’s just as much how you write it as it is about what you write about. Rationalist culture emerged from rationalists on LW1.0 discussing experimenting with alternative lifestyle choices, and the ones which worked for some rationalists tend to spread. To be fair, polyamory and other sex-related behaviour are more viral among rationalists in this regard: when a bunch of single people who have difficulty relating to most others around them suddenly find they can relate to each other very well; are willing to make the otherwise taboo tradeoffs that sex-positivity introduces into one’s life; and tend to have be (relatively) deprived of sexual/romantic expression that’s anywhere close to what they get out of relationships with other rationalists or rationalist-adjacent people, they’re going to be more open about this sort of this. That’s not going away.
Since the rationalist diaspora is going to be talking about sex somewhere anywhere, I’d prefer conversations intending to match the map to the territory on sex-related topics take place on LW, if the likely counterfactual would be them taking place somewhere else and having a toxic impact. Just because everything seems hunky-dory on LW doesn’t necessarily mean they’re aren’t other schisms in the community borne over epistemic disagreements over charged issues. What’s more, if we can bring epistemic discussion of sex onto LW, while keeping separate the interpersonal and political aspects of it in our lives, it’s not so muddled we can’t be confident there are non-zero conversations among rationalists where intellectual progress is being made and recorded.
LessWrong aspires to be like academia in quality, but not necessarily like academia in culture or content. Much discussion of sexuality in academia probably either sucks or is too dry and abstract to be useful for much, to say nothing of how the research quality may have declined with the replication crisis, and how LW should aspire to do better than that.
So some conversations about sex can take place here. I don’t think anything is inherently wrong with it. I don’t think there’s anything inherently right about it either. I’d like conversations about sex on LW to have rationality be the focus, and sex the object of discussion rationality is being applied to. The examples provided in ‘The Typical Sex Life Fallacy’ were relevant to illustrating the point, but personal anecdotes about your favourite kind of tea don’t add much. Also, not that I think Ozy would do this, but they’re close enough that others might see what was written and mistake that for using intimately detailed examples from their own personal lives on LW, including the nature of their private relationships with other community members. I think this is a mistake. I think at least switching out some of the details and replacing the names of real people with Alice and Bob and Charlie and Dana so nobody’s privacy is even remotely close to being compromised without their consent is a good idea.
Content warnings seem appropriate, and when and for what they’re used should be up to the user posting, unless someone in the comments indicates a preference for content warnings on a particular topic going forward after that, or even just signals they found coverage of some content offputting.
Cursing, except in cases where it’s hard to find any suitable alternative for describing the thing (e.g., “genderfuck”), seems like an unnecessary aesthetic flourish. I guess “fucking” is less icky than “humping”, but “sleeping together” seems to fit just fine. If we’re writing about sex on LW, I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to write it as SFW as we can, except for when changing up the tone might be key to the theme of a well-intentioned post.
I think if we write about sex, we need to remember this is *still LessWrong*. If we’re writing about sex, is for nerds, by nerds. If the information value of a post about sex is high enough, it’s fine if it’s written in a boring rather than titillating fashion, and it might have better results that way.
Evan, you know I adore you, but you will tear my random tea digressions from my cold dead hands.
Strongly agreed on the importance of privacy. All individual human beings in my posts have had incidental and unimportant details changed, and they are often composites of multiple people.
It’s difficult to ordain beforehand what sort of sexual content is fit for LW, because it’s just as much how you write it as it is about what you write about. Rationalist culture emerged from rationalists on LW1.0 discussing experimenting with alternative lifestyle choices, and the ones which worked for some rationalists tend to spread. To be fair, polyamory and other sex-related behaviour are more viral among rationalists in this regard: when a bunch of single people who have difficulty relating to most others around them suddenly find they can relate to each other very well; are willing to make the otherwise taboo tradeoffs that sex-positivity introduces into one’s life; and tend to have be (relatively) deprived of sexual/romantic expression that’s anywhere close to what they get out of relationships with other rationalists or rationalist-adjacent people, they’re going to be more open about this sort of this. That’s not going away.
Since the rationalist diaspora is going to be talking about sex somewhere anywhere, I’d prefer conversations intending to match the map to the territory on sex-related topics take place on LW, if the likely counterfactual would be them taking place somewhere else and having a toxic impact. Just because everything seems hunky-dory on LW doesn’t necessarily mean they’re aren’t other schisms in the community borne over epistemic disagreements over charged issues. What’s more, if we can bring epistemic discussion of sex onto LW, while keeping separate the interpersonal and political aspects of it in our lives, it’s not so muddled we can’t be confident there are non-zero conversations among rationalists where intellectual progress is being made and recorded.
LessWrong aspires to be like academia in quality, but not necessarily like academia in culture or content. Much discussion of sexuality in academia probably either sucks or is too dry and abstract to be useful for much, to say nothing of how the research quality may have declined with the replication crisis, and how LW should aspire to do better than that.
So some conversations about sex can take place here. I don’t think anything is inherently wrong with it. I don’t think there’s anything inherently right about it either. I’d like conversations about sex on LW to have rationality be the focus, and sex the object of discussion rationality is being applied to. The examples provided in ‘The Typical Sex Life Fallacy’ were relevant to illustrating the point, but personal anecdotes about your favourite kind of tea don’t add much. Also, not that I think Ozy would do this, but they’re close enough that others might see what was written and mistake that for using intimately detailed examples from their own personal lives on LW, including the nature of their private relationships with other community members. I think this is a mistake. I think at least switching out some of the details and replacing the names of real people with Alice and Bob and Charlie and Dana so nobody’s privacy is even remotely close to being compromised without their consent is a good idea.
Content warnings seem appropriate, and when and for what they’re used should be up to the user posting, unless someone in the comments indicates a preference for content warnings on a particular topic going forward after that, or even just signals they found coverage of some content offputting.
Cursing, except in cases where it’s hard to find any suitable alternative for describing the thing (e.g., “genderfuck”), seems like an unnecessary aesthetic flourish. I guess “fucking” is less icky than “humping”, but “sleeping together” seems to fit just fine. If we’re writing about sex on LW, I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to write it as SFW as we can, except for when changing up the tone might be key to the theme of a well-intentioned post.
I think if we write about sex, we need to remember this is *still LessWrong*. If we’re writing about sex, is for nerds, by nerds. If the information value of a post about sex is high enough, it’s fine if it’s written in a boring rather than titillating fashion, and it might have better results that way.
Evan, you know I adore you, but you will tear my random tea digressions from my cold dead hands.
Strongly agreed on the importance of privacy. All individual human beings in my posts have had incidental and unimportant details changed, and they are often composites of multiple people.