“What I personally find so frustrating is no one is ever given an ounce of grace for the understandable ways these conversations might blur. Whereas, men who act poorly are given a delusional amount of cover & protection. They say illogical things and get polite responses.” - on sexism in AI spaces.

WHAT, and I mean this from the bottom of my creative heart, THE F*CK

jakeup is fucking delusional

😡

“the purpose of SlutCon is to help men who are scared of women to start liking women, by putting them in proximity to women who like men and aren't scared of men” where to even start unpacking THIS

I recall a case in Texas in the energy industry where a woman sued for gender discrimination/harassment because she was required to take drunk customers to strip clubs while drinking heavily with them. She lost. It was a real problem “in my day” and still is.

Cheezus fukkin krist.

Reminds me when I was casually invited to a Burning Man spinoff event (just some camping in the woods!) and when I contacted the organizer to see about tickets, I realized I was being evaluated to join an assembly line of topless women to serve food there. Naked food “service” was the price of entry

It's called "SlutCon", and people are trying to rationalize it?

Women who like men and aren't afraid of them: most women you meet just about anywhere if you get out of the house. Women (and men for that matter) who are OK with strangers making intimate requests are indeed not ubiquitous. Is that what we're actually talking about here?

Thank you for taking time to add AltText to this important discussion.

I’m sorry, the purpose of…slutcon…is to make pathetic men feel not pathetic. Okay. Sounds indispensable.

@elisewho.bsky.social @jenafriedman.bsky.social are you aware of this? The modus operandi seems ...familiar.

The implication that women who aren't into something like SlutCon don't "like men" or "are afraid of men" is seriously sick.

It doesn't matter what you're into. This kind of thing will ALWAYS work against women. ALWAYS. The point of it is to put women down to the level of a blow-up doll. It's not about kink or any kind of sex. It's about subjugation.

#Thehandmaidstale in Silicon Valley. Totally disgusting.

Wait - is this threads? I remember taco belle. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time

cnc being used casually is terrifying to me. people want to be kinky and don’t understand it can be very jarring to do things counter to the norm & the consequence of not having an experienced partner to understand the good feeling dump that happens after these parties.

when incels start a cult...

This goddamn sucks for so many reasons but partly it makes me feel stupid for thinking the 1990s trend for women to at least seem to be greatly advancing in tech would continue developing, with good societal effects, versus launching the shitty anti-modernist bigot sexist weirdo reaction it did.

It's giving me strong vibes of the 60s male credo of "The position of women in the Movement is in on their backs." Like "we're changing the world and if you question our sexual politics you're a buzzkill trying to bring us down." Except WAY more money and influence behind it.

Congratulations, rats, you reinvented “you have to go to the strip club after the work dinner to advance at your job” but you somehow made it worse

Is there a German compound word for something that is horrifying & yet also feels inevitable? Once we found out about the sex parties, the Kalshi odds that this story would follow must have been short.

This is an attempt to "offshore" sexual harassment by distancng it from the premises of the organization. No one is fooled.

“the purpose of SlutCon is to help men who are scared of women to start liking women, by putting them in proximity to women who like men and aren't scared of men” Regardless of how much they may like men, only .01% of women “aren’t scared of men” in some way and those women are brainwashed idiots.

theres a lot to unpack here regarding the nature of slutcon but based on everything ive learned over the past week, i think we should just throw the suitcase away and maybe incinerate it too for good measure

Um, "slutcon"?

"mandatory work orgies" is such a fucked-up concept.

gotta love how he casually equates "prefers not to be sexual cannon fodder" with "doesn't like men / is scared of men" 🤦

Heaven forbid these men who are afraid learn that women are human beings, rather than objects to fulfill their sexual urges 🙄

These are companies that need to be sued out of existence. Or shut down permanently by legal authorities.

Sounds an awful lot like how women in Hollywood were expected to hook up with creeps like Harvey Weinstein and other industry bigwigs if they wanted their careers to go anywhere. Every group of oligarchs finds a way to reinvent sexual exploitation of the women in their industry.

It's so that later, when they have some success, they can be dismissed for sleeping their way to the top

I mean the whole point of AI is to sidestep how creatives might refuse your demands- so you create a way of violating them, so them having a warped view of consent doesn't surprise me

We’re still using the term “effective altruism” as though it is a thing?

This is so gross.

Ian K. Duncan's "Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse" article you had linked to earlier expresses so well why when sex is mixed with business and friendship, refusing sex means refusing career opportunities and social membership: www.iankduncan.com/personal/202...

"The purpose of our sex parties is to help awkward straight men talk to girls" I want to sink my head into the sand like a cartoon ostrich 😬

God they call it SlutCon. It’s insanely insulting. If it’s meant to help these hapless men shouldn’t it be LimpDixcon?

Sounds like AI boy-gods trying to reinvent & reassert the Trump/Mad Men ethos, where the work world is their sexual happy hunting ground & women the prey. Plucky career gals are advised to update their resumes to include that non-consensual consent kink. No wonder they wanna keep the GOP in charge!

The men are the sluts, right? The men? That's why it's named that, right? RIGHT?

exactly like damn we already have sex parties now they’ve invented _sex parties with your boss_

also they're *literally* surrounded by sex parties! Folsom and The Citadel are literally right there!

When would you say it began to appear? I've been around quite a while but I guess I'm considered too square to ever even hear about any of this stuff.

This. “AI safety“ should just be good old fashioned data privacy and security, but with LLMs thrown in. Instead it is rapey shitheads who think they’re Odd John but are actually just deeply stupid.

Yep, I linked this in the thread!

With the minimum amount of cover to prevent lawsuits, I would suspect. Open invites, language vetted to not be anything actionable, lots of soft power. 'Anyone who's anyone will be there, it's voluntary but you'll miss out if you don't go' sort of thing.

…or decisions about anything? 🤷‍♂️ Clearly judgement impaired.

Glad that was resolved amicably at least.

Is this the silicon valley sex cult version of the Last Ditch Bar drama?

so now when ppl want to use gen ai, i ll ask them if they would have done the same with epstein, since altman and thiel are like epstein

In some ways it’s worse in that these women now feel pressured to attend weird orgies just to have a career…

Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, Admiral Grace Hopper, and Countess Ada Lovelace are all spinning in their graves at high velocity over what the computer field has become

I seriously wonder if this is why I have had such difficulty with my career (I got married in grad school to my college sweetheart and we ride a tandem bicycle together)

Knowing it was engineered by Epstein means his gross DNA is in the silicon valley Rationalist movement.

Sadly, this whole thing takes me back to my 20s & the problematic sex & gender relations in the bleeding-edge tech scenes of the 1980s. Same personalities involved, but there’s a *lot* more $$$ & power at play now, making things even more fraught.

same people behind it

There’s no actual attempt at creating a better industry here. Just creeps using the first bit of power they’ve ever had to extract sex from women

Definitely this. I got *into* code because I had a family and my old career couldn't provide for them, but I knew I could code I'd never even apply. I guess they don't want old curmudgeons like me who don't take their bullshit - they want maladjusted manbabies who can code but not defend themselves

And they probs live in Boise (there was a whole lit about parts of SV getting older and moving to ID, etc).

Yes! And wisdom.

also gay male devs, many of whom are probably enjoying much more consensual play at Folsom

This is always my favorite example, but they abound: www.courthousenews.com/critical-thi...

I want to blame Robert Heinlein for this. There are likely examples of prior art but I know Heinlein really pushed that whole 'Geniuses make their own rules about sex' narrative.

Nearly every branch and tribe of the Extremely Online Right can trace its roots so some section of the ”Manosphere” deeply mad about not getting laid enough.

Wait, it's all just workplace sexual harassment? 👩‍🚀🔫👩‍🚀

No, because the men hold the majority of power, money, and jobs. if you can't work safely with them, that's a huge roadblock to your career.

I can't even imagine AI as world changing technology when it bundles itself to something as stupid as "slutcon" as a major networking event instead of, like, a conference. It's weird and gross and you don't have to be a prude to think these are all just horny teens with no sense of propriety.

I'm going to become Ayn Rand. I'm kidding, I'm kidding ..

Deep cut and I’m here for it

Lighthaven, yes. Ran/running since Friday through tonight

Unfortunately they are the leading figures in what’s called “AI safety” right now (which I agree is nothing of the sort) Wrote about that here: little-flying-robots.ghost.io/why-we-cant-...

P.S. I commend this prompt to your attention.

I sure think so - I recently wrote this about the topic: little-flying-robots.ghost.io/why-we-cant-...

the Venn diagram is basically a circle time.com/6252617/effe...

I was and continue to be a complete and utter asshole, from the age of 13 on, and I've managed to love and be loved by others. These fuckwits have not been able to do so, but want to bestow their hate on all of us for never having been able to get laid. If my horrible self can manage to be given

See also: "We're all going to this strip club after work, you're welcome to cone!"

"it's just an optional after hours event that just happens to have all of your colleagues in positions of power"

Not to say everything is MeToo backlash but a lot of this is MeToo backlash. We had, as a society, already decided sexual harassment was bad. But then we tried to actually hold people accountable and men said that was simply too much to ask

Isn’t that basically just the cost of us existing at all?

They literally do? Red is in the name of Red Means No.

Practice holding hands at 3, “CNC” at 4!

can you creeps stop comparing copyright infringement to rape, holy shit read the room

These guys would get kicked out of a real sex club, the kind with consent and harassment policies, in about 5 minutes.

Normalize taking a boltcutter to slutcon.

And who actually knows if I have an extremely sharp scalpel in my boot? Wanna find out? This is why I don’t get invited anywhere.

I used a version of that for crowded bars and subway cars in my 20s. Very effective.

That was how my late wife dealt with a couple of handsy coworkers, she had a black belt in Aikido and they were lucky to get their hands back without broken bones…

If you aren't making your philosophy clear then it usually is one or two things: your message is terrible OR you don't want people to understand it so they can't call you out.

Sounds like using autism as a cover for coercion 🤷‍♂️

A quick Google suggest the main organizers for slutcon are aella and chesed? I don't think either are men, did I google this poorly and miss the men organizing this event?

He got "rehabilitated" as a fandom commentator without ever apologizing for the OSBP -- or for his fiction, which was misogynist and transphobic -- thanks to a certain "male feminist" in fandom.

That's exactly what I was thinking of! and how I got derided as being "vanilla" because I am a monogamist didn't want to participate in group sex situations with that exact crowd

'Hazard pay' doesn't sound right. 'Squick pay' does, but.. Does the EEOC have an exemption from the Convention on Certain Weapons ban on incendiaries? Because flamethrowers would seem like a must-have.

"Those men decided, in screening about 1,200 men and 200 women, that good programmers don’t like people - that they have a complete disinterest in people. These tests were widely influential and used at various companies for decades. What happens with that is that if you 1/

Yup. I was at Stanford for a year getting a masters from 2013 to 2014 and I remember.

No. Those were not work events

Swingers clubs still exist? And they are a lil scuzzy but, in general, not nearly this rape-y.

Except the swingers clubs were attended by people who wanted to be there or not people who felt coerced to be there to keep their job jobs.

She should report this to the police

its about power, always is like this. that the men in power should get a 'reward' for being successful & that it should be done by force. like, the people pursuing 'AGI' to become a digital warlord that can control humanity... they arent a 'necessary evil', they are just evil.

I really like this post.

This is 'an in-group whom the laws PROTECT but do not BIND' flaunting their power and clout.

I just felt my soul leave my body reading the words “Bay Area AI safety scene”. If AI safety is a “scene” to you, you’re in a creepy-ass incel cult

Same with autistic men. Teach them to talk about their autism when meeting people and teach them ways to ask questions about other people's interests. Slutcon is just going to teach them about doing tgings in the context of an event that won't work outside that event.

Sent a 🐁 to counseling once. They at least bright enough to reach me before doing the ultra dumb shit. Didn't do it for them, I did it for the others that would have got hurt. Told them that. Sometimes you have to tell them str8 they are weak/fragile souls and send them to therapy.

Because the abuse of power and control is part of their enjoyment.

Pretty prevalent or so it would appear from the outside!

*finding her substance* yes, yes it is.

so here's the fun thing about neurodivergent men. they're kinda like pokemon... if their first evolution, cute, clueless and just want to do their special interest and/or play. then comes the second evolution, when they realize that sex and other people exist and then they get awkward

Me: that's a ridiculous concern, autistic men like me are perfectly capable of understanding consent. Also me: never initiated kissing, it's always a thing where I need it made excessively clear that she wants to be kissed. And that's just fine. Girls are capable of doing that, if they want.

So many sex pests get excused by defenders saying they could be autistic, never do they think that autistic people are capable of not being sex pests or that women can be autistic too.

i think there’s a straight line, from SSC guy lowkey dissing Laurie Penny over this exact same point, to this (iykyk; otherwise, content warning: eternal 2014)

Some of the scariest experiences I’ve had with men were on occasions I said no and they “respected” that particular boundary. Instead they got aggressively angry and, in one case, screamed in my face as others just stood by looking on. I’m sure he felt “shamed” And that’s what we have to deal with

I’m not going to steal autistic valor without a diagnosis but I’m definitely not the most neurotypical person who’s ever lived and you know how I solved that problem? Saying “hey sometimes I miss social cues, would you mind if I kissed you?” at the end of a date. It worked just fine!

There's more than a little crossover.

What OP is describing is explained perfectly well by (nerdy) neurotypical people engaging in bog-standard rape culture, let's not drag a minority here for the actions of some male rapists

Your inference is not their insinuation

I would say a more common autistic situation would be to totally miss cues that someone likes you. It's the sense of entitlement that differentiates these people, not whether they're neuro typical or not.

Maybe you want a seat at that table so you can say, "Look, you evil sick fucks, stop it!" No reason for it to be a DMTS. Scan grocery fliers, compile best deals/coupons, & easiest/best car/bike/bus route to get them. Bonus? Link me to neighbours who need help picking things up b/c illness/childcare.

This is very sketchy and opens up so many risks... AND, this reminds me of nothing more so much as Monty Python's Argument Clinic sketch. I say this with derision.

Separate from the sex stuff, "gaslighting kink" describes half the Trump admin officials. They're turned on by lying, especially when their targets know it and can't get the truth out of them. (All WRT the wider admin, not Trump personally, who is delusional and often thinks his untruths are true.)

The context was apparently a "torture party," & Aella's pitch was "Ever been at a party and thought "Man, I feel too good right now"?" No, this is a thought I've never had. But here's someone who heartily agreed: sashachapin.substack.com/p/notes-on-a...

It is NOT POSSIBLE to exercise a "gaslighting kink" ethically. Someone might indeed have one, but there are many things that, if you find them arousing, you just have to learn to live without them because they can't be done safely and with true consent... and this is one of them.

This wasn't a kink. This was a nonsexual torture party where the goal was to have unique unpleasant experiences. Include the full context. I encourage you to link to the post.

Can hardly picture how "consent" and "gaslighting" would work together What's the article screened?

yt women are wild

(Or, from what I've heard, driving off smart POC who are alienated by "aren't neo-eugenicists so delightfully transgressive uwu", but that's a separate issue.)

But coercive…? 🤷‍♂️

I fully confess I'm just asking cause I never liked the guy or his schtick, but I figure it's worth at least an ask since everyone else is making decent headway on far more important problems here

Women shouldn’t be forced to make that choice!

Jesus God in Heaven shut it down

I think everyone should be free to enjoy their sex life with other consenting adults without judgement, but this is like taking everything BAD about the office holiday party and turning up to 11.

And those lads will end up going nowhere in the industry because their parents raised them well? Dodgy parties for recruiting, networking, grooming and (presumably) gathering blackmail material; effectively freezing out women, H1B-holders, religious ppl, LGBT ppl, wife guys and decent, kind men.

most AI companies are not frontier labs, and this clique intersects heavily with both of the major ones

"Of all places"? That's on brand for Slate

I was thinking castration

My thoughts were just to do EMP bursts over the Bay Area, but I like the cut of your jib!

Is it even kink shaming if they’re doing kink wrong

Presumably "flirtgirls;" a status that attendees who lean towards being/are women may take on to 1.) signal deliberate consent to being hit on, 2.) offer direct feedback to people who take them up on offer 1., 3.) are invited to attend a small number of events exclusively for this group

I wonder if it's because he's a well-known/valued skeptic - i have no doubt Adam Ruins Everything has way more reach than anything these weirdos put out.

"Aella" and "train" in the same sentence is a choice

Less direct, wider scope, but.. the same basic power imbalance. With a side order of kompromat because Bog only knows how many cameras are running.

I don’t say ’rationalist circles‘ automatically means rationalising being a weird sex pest but we are rationalising animals after all. FWIW my pal H is maybe the most determinedly moral person I know but at 17 she did tend to believe everyone else was as honest and well-intentioned as her.