Ivy Astrix has followed up with a blog post.

A male kinkster and coder responded: “This is a tough one, but I’m going to fall on the side of the OP because the event is heavily gendered. Any event that embraces the concept that men are inherently predatory and women are inherently prey teaches the wrong things about roleplay, or human beings.”

I hope that anyone who wants to explore rape fantasies finds people who can help them explore safely, and that anyone who gets physically or emotionally hurt at one of these events can find help and support.

• We have worked to emphasize harder that choking is not on the default consent list.
• We now have reports that prey who have opted into choking are going under-choked.
• …while still having occasional reports that prey who didn’t opt into choking sometimes have people reach for their throats.
• We’re trying to resolve this with things like cheatsheets, but the process is ongoing.

I would like to hear more from experienced kinksters, but I think this shows why negotiating who will do what in advance while everyone is fully dressed and sober is a big part of kink culture (and so is demonstrating skills and building trust in less risky scenarios). If you want to be ravaged in a specific way, your pursuers can give you that if the focus of the day is on you, not on you and dozens of other people with beautiful individual desires and boundaries in a chaotic environment. It also sounds like many of the predators are not very experienced.

I think Hallquist had a short-lived blog with criticisms of LessWrong and EA between his time on FreethoughtBlogs/Pantheos and his run for office and Medium blog. Possibly https://topherhallquist.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/reply-to-scott-alexander/ In the original Twitter post, Hallquist described Alexander as “a vague internet acquaintance at the time (when he sent the emails)” and it sounds like after 2014 Hallquist explored LW and EA and decided they were messed up. (Hallquist’s post also suggests that if you want to sound like a bold contrarian, see what a median expert at a university think about a topic rather than reading blogs).

I like to remind myself that I see what happens online, but the offers of money and the sexual propositions probably mostly happen in person or between people who have met in person. So I don’t know as much about the LessWrong or EA communities as I think.

Making general statements about the risks and benefits of medication is different from proscribing them. The George K. Lerner, MD who was FTX’s resident pill-pusher seems to be based in San Francisco and wants potential patients to know that inter alia “Dr. Lerner specializes in the treatment of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD) in adults. He has extensive experience in treating adults who have been successful in their professional endeavors but have found attention deficit symptoms to be an impediment to achieving their full potential.” (nudge nudge)

His website does not mention a connection with the hospital in Michigan which is the only one where I know Alexander worked. I would like to know more about possible connections other than their mutual connections to the FTX gang. I have not done shoe-leather reporting in SoCal and almost all of the things we know about Alexander are things he posted voluntarily under his main handle.

Lerner’s site shows what Alexander’s site might look like if he were focused on psychiatry rather than writing and peddling racist lies.

That is very possible although I would guess that was earlier in his career given that he does not advertise as treating ADHD or similar. He has two small children, a writing job, and side projects like writing end-of-the-world stories for AI 2027. His practice has a name drawn from Lord of the Rings like other things in the Thielsphere.

Yes, Scott Alexander is an unusual rationalist blogger who had a credentialed professional career as a psychiatrist. After Substack became his patron, he opened his own medical practice, but the website has said “not accepting new patients at this time” since 2022. So he seems to live off gifts from fellow travelers with a side hustle in psychiatry.

In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound (he went overseas for medical school, and failed to get medical residency on his first try, ending up in a small Midwestern city). So I wonder why he is sure that in a world with fewer university degrees, he would have gotten as far as he did (medical schools in the USA used to limit admissions from people of his ethnicity).

Likewise with immigration restrictions: he knows that they often blocked Jews, many Europeans. and East Asians not just brown people right?