https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...
My takeaway is SlutCon has successfully re-skinned The Argument Clinic. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpQlyUjp3vM). Someone enters a commercialized, scheduled space to pay for a raw, spontaneous human experience, only to get trapped in an infuriating debate over the technical definition of the experience itself.
Or am I missing a read-between-the-lines that this event is really to facilitate successful Autistic people in flirting, dating, and relationships?
It's made by Aella, a self-described "probably autistic" sex worker well known in the LessWrong/Rationality circles owing to her nerd speciality turning out to be getting really good at doing large-scale sex surveys right*.
So, yes, I think?
* or at least, if you'll excuse the phrasing, less wrong.
Nobody should be tolerating this, let alone celebrating or venerating this. It's a misogynistic sex cult with a thin veneer of science. Incels but with fancier words. Repulsive to the core.
aye, and if this isn't the core issue for pretty much everyone who feels out-of-place, unloved, and had issues dating
I think there was a small chance in my past that I might've tumbled down the angry atheist / LessWrong pipeline. I actually knew a guy who did. I have to thank an English teacher who had us read Slaughterhouse-Five for steering me clear and leading me to secular humanism. that moral philosophy meant anyone as low and terrible as me (at least as low and terrible as I thought I was) still deserved to be treated with compassion and it made me feel loved for the first time in my life
I'm one of those people who benefited immensely from therapy (CBT at the time though I'd probably try ACT now). the me before therapy had the emotional maturity of a teenage boy, who thought you could and should rationalize away feelings, that they were fundamentally illogical. I'm decades beyond that now, in the best relationship of my life, equal partners with someone I deeply respect and love, and who everything feels natural with even after ten years. the key to all of this has been the fact that we validate one another, that we give each other the grace we would want for ourself. it's a real change and a watershed thing for me - realizing that you don't have to internalize your experience of having your feelings invalidated
that sad version of myself, who thought you could somehow extrinsically 'solve' despair and loneliness through some kind of scripted performance, that's the multi-verse version of myself that needs someone to tell him that he can be loved, that he doesn't deserve to suffer. here's to hoping these attendees are able to grow out of that same phase I had once been in one day - it's sure to do the world a lot of good if they did
Somehow I got lucky. Somehow I read Terry Pratchett, Frank Herbert, Immanuel Kant to name a few.
And somehow knowing that "humans are never means to an end" or "humans are more than things", truly putting that as a cornerstone is great immunity against these viruses.
Look at this event. It's not seduce con. It's slutcon. Reducing women to an object of desire. That's what's inherently repulsive.
This is undoubtedly very clever writing — perhaps I’m missing an ironic in-joke, even? — but the intractable density of syllables renders its empirical tractability incalculable.
It’s a shame. It would be cool to get the simplified version. There’s something interesting here for sure, nestling under the pile of words.
“Many of the panels were organized with the idea that being attractive/desirable can be reduced to a numerical value. Higher scores can be obtained by learning what traits are desirable and which are not. Using experience, you can learn which types of people desire which traits and improve their perception of those traits in yourself.”