thank you <3
from my perspective (which is being on twitter long before visa / life coaches showed up, i'm friends with some status451 blog people which had scott alexander in their blogroll) some people are in existing kink communities but for the most part it organically comes out of Rationalism.
I can only speculate as to why, I think the presence of high profile sex workers / the general fact that hedonism follows money and privilege. The Bay is polycule central and I think Rationalist communities just philosophize about it a lot more visibly. So I guess the tl;dr here is that there are probably a few experienced kink people but a lot of it is just organic rationalist practice, I think Slutcon is attempting to start more of an organized thing around that area.
So, substances: In general I think these communities lean towards psychedelics, but Ketamine is huge in the bay. At one of the parties I was at I ran into a notable AI researcher who told me we needed to postpone hanging out because they were in a pretty deep k-hole.
I think there's not a lot of overt / public facing harm reduction / responsible use, but some individual people know about things like testing for fent. From my experience Vibecamp has a GHB problem and I don't know what credentials their current medic has.
No drug shaming here but I think it's just not a priority for people, early on Vibecamp faced the 'what do we do about substances' problem and I can only speculate on what happens now but at least at the time of Vibecamp 2 I felt like there wasn't a really good handle on it.
TESCREAL is a good place to start from wrt conceptualizing these communities, there are differences between EA and Rats and what they do but there's a ton of crossover. TPOT has been many things since the pandemic but basically the group of Twitter users for mainly rationalists / post rationalists, with some woo people who don't talk about rationalism a lot.
Vibecamp population has also been a lot of things, it was really ambiguous at Vibecamp 1 and 2. Hereticon is an event series put on in Miami by Founders Fund, it became something different (and I didn't go to 2) but 1 was basically a gathering of a lot of cool internet people / some personalities you folks know about who did talks on various things.
Talk about things as you folks want to! I'm in a much better place now and honestly it was that bizarre reaction from these communities that did most of the damage closer to when everything happened.
Not really, I wrote what I did because I thought it needed to be said and it's one perspective on things so as I said above, talk about things as you wish.
I don't know if anyone's watched this clip of Alex Jones' condensed views on things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDa0q9-hmTE but I kind of view Sneer Club has the counterstrike against Rationalism's current unfettered playground (in the circle of truth I don't know a ton about you folks). I respect the difficult job CFAR, CEA and even Vibecamp have to do but their communities are so insular there's just not any accountability when something goes wrong (I would be ousted as a board member from my festival if I ever had done something like ignore someone reporting SA for 2 years).
I guess the only other thing is maybe that I don't think most people in these circles, even the ones I have differences with are intentionally evil or whatever and I wish they had a better way of governance or accountability than public Twitter / LessWrong / etc posts. These social vortexes are really intense and I think if they had more robust internal systems to deal with conflict a lot of stuff wouldn't happen / would get resolved a lot more cleanly.