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I was SA'd by Rationalists, AMA.
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this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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I thought about it, and I don't think I have any real questions, first I hope your are ok. But that isn't really a question. And secondly I was thinking about how a lot of questions I could ask feel more about me wanting to after a group I dislike than helping a victim out. Even a question like 'Did their internal processes give you support and some justice at least?' is answered by you coming here and offering this AMA.
So, the questions I more have is are you ok? And do you currently have a support network that is helping you out with things?
And for the rest I just think that if you feel like there are things you want to share you should share those (I think looking at your post you seem to want to talk about the harm reduction methods at those events, but not sure. Any important lessons we could take from that?) but don't want to pressure people into that, and also don't think I personally can totally do justice to the severity of situations like that. (which is of course on the problems with the discourse around SA).
thank you <3
I do have a lot more support now and have kind of come to a good steady state with things for the time being
I obviously have opinions on how Vibecamp handles things and the most direct thing I've ever heard from leadership (separate from this new safety team) is seeing a tweet about how they don't take reports at face value
and again, I would expect to be dragged on social media if I ever said that after someone was SA'd at my festival, I think the main problem is the bubble of unreality that surrounds the bay and that a lot of people there are really sheltered, and often people in positions of responsibility were just the first to put their hand up versus being qualified or able to do the job
ie the eventual safety team reach out included one of their ppl asking me to tell them what investigation vibecamp did, and i found out that they don't tell 'junior members' of the safety team about past things
so i mean imo just really fundamentally unserious and unwilling to admit they need outside help (I think CEA is in this same boat with what happened to Frances Lorenz) and I wouldn't ever bother reporting stuff if I was someone else who was going
wrt harm reduction it's something I've done for many years owing to being involved with canada's drug policy scene and cannabis legalization here, there's so much help available (there are local dancesafe orgs in a lot of places) that I think once your event gets big enough it's negligent to not have a plan around it
I think the thing to take away, if anything, is that you should decide your policy on it early and make it clear: are you searching bags of people who attend or are you providing drug testing on-site? these are extremes obviously but your strategy will flow from one end or the other
you might have to do it creatively based on the current vibe in your state wrt recreational drug use but people openly talk about it on twitter so i don't think there's any excuse for don't ask don't tell policies, those are how people get hurt / die
my big problem, i guess, with how vibecamp is run is this 'illegibility' thing which imo leads to negligence, like you're running a festival where attendees do programming that is a mix betweeen burning man stuff and a rationalist unconference, take that seriously instead of writing manifestos about memes
Anna Salamon confessed to hiding information from subordinates at CFAR before COVID to control them, and Duncan Sabien complained about a former employer (probably CFAR) making promises to keep him onboard then secretly breaking them. One thing that pisses me off about this space that there is the refusal to learn and change after people got hurt. I don't know what happened between Yudkowsky and his live-in protégé, or him and Jeffrey Epstein, but someone with those experiences should not be talking about sexual misconduct and abuse of power like he talks about it in 2026.
ty, I've heard her name here and there but didn't look too deeply into a lot of CFAR internals.
My master theory has become that there are really two groups of people, impressionable children in adult bodies, and a lot of people who have become post-economic via something else (startup exits, sex work, poker championships) and that gets used as social proof when it comes to convincing people they know what they're doing in other areas.
That is why it is important hearing from people who have been in these spaces, because my impression was that the leading writers and organizers rely on wage or freelance income, often funded by grants and donations but sometimes by venture capital like when Substack gives bonuses to Scott Alexander. Many of them have jobs they love which pay USD $100k-600k/yr but I thought that below the very-rich (Thiel, Tallinn, McClabe) only Curtis Yarvin was both living off capital and someone anyone outside the scene has heard of. However, I don't want to lead this conversation away from your experiences of sexual assault and poor responses by rationalists.
I think it's an important thing to be generally aware of; MIRI pays Yud ~600k/yr as chair of the board, emergent ventures gives out a lot of grants to adjacent ppl, etc
There's a lot of in-network stuff that happens too ie chaosprime was in a position to give vibecamp 18K, so I think the money part is important as it might allow some of the worst ppl to buy their way out of trouble
yikes
that feels/across as an intentional way to set that team up for future failure (and, at a guess, sets up a plausible excuse to yeet participants when they fuck up, combined with making things disappear)
It's possible but I think they just don't know what they're doing.
I think for event organizers there's a point at which you realize 'this is beyond us' and one of two things happens: you take some money from the nice to have pile and use it to make up that gap, or you learn at the expense of other people and I've never really been able to understand the decision process that leads to the latter.