In short
Podcast Episode Notes: "How does a rationalist make a baby?"
Episode Overview
- Podcast Title: Search Engine
- Episode Title: How does a rationalist make a baby?
- Description: The episode explores the journey of a member of a unique Bay Area community who seeks to have a baby through unconventional means by offering a substantial prize for someone to help her find a mate. It delves into the influence of the internet on individual decision-making and rationalist beliefs.
Key Characters
- Ayla: A sex worker, researcher, and writer who experiments with unique methods in her pursuit of a partner to have children with.
- PJ Vogt: The host, who engages with Ayla to unpack her thoughts and experiences.
Key Themes and Discussions
Rationalism
- Definition: An intellectual subculture focused on rigorous thinking, probing the truth, and avoiding cognitive biases.
- Contrast with Religion: Ayla compares rationalism to her previous experience with Calvinist Christianity, noting that rationalism encourages open inquiry rather than dogmatic beliefs.
Ayla's Background
- Upbringing: Raised in a strict Calvinist household with a focus on debate and rhetoric, which influenced her later rationalist approach.
- Transition: After moving away from her religious upbringing, Ayla discovered rationalism through meetups and the "Less Wrong" community, leading her to rethink her views on life, love, and parenting.
Unique Pursuit of Parenthood
- Decision to Offer a Bounty: Ayla posts a reward of $100,000 for anyone who can help her find a partner to marry and raise children with, framing it as a crowd-sourced matchmaking experiment.
- Rationale Behind Offering a Prize:
- Inspired by a matching service that would charge her $100,000 if successful.
- A way to attract serious and compatible candidates by raising the stakes.
Methods of Finding a Partner
- Surveys: Ayla employs surveys to assess compatibility with potential partners, including demographic, sexual, and personality-based questions.
- Prediction Markets: She invites others to bet on the likelihood of her romantic outcomes, using the outcomes to gauge her own feelings and assumptions about her love life.
Reflections on Love and Relationships
- Optimization Over Romance: Ayla reflects on the idea that relationships can be optimized and analyzed, contrasting traditional romantic ideals with a more systematic approach.
- Struggle with Uncertainty: She articulates the anxiety of potentially never finding a suitable partner but maintains a positive outlook on the process and its value, regardless of the outcome.
Community and Support
- Rationalist Community: Ayla finds a sense of camaraderie and support within the rationalist community, where discussions focus on thought processes rather than rigid beliefs.
- Experiments in Social Norms: Ayla attempts to shake up the rationalist social scene by hosting unconventional events, like a naked party, aimed at encouraging more spontaneous and embodied interactions.
Conclusion
- Pursuit of Knowledge: Ayla emphasizes the importance of learning through experimentation, even if the results are not what she hopes for. Her journey reflects a commitment to understanding oneself and making informed choices about life, love, and family.
Key Takeaways
- Rationalism promotes rigorous thinking and open inquiry, contrasting with dogmatic beliefs.
- Ayla's unique methods of seeking a partner highlight a blend of traditional desires (parenthood) and modern, analytical approaches to relationships.
- The podcast captures the tension between romantic ideals and rational choices, showcasing how individuals navigate complex personal decisions in contemporary society.
- Ayla's story serves as an exploration of personal identity, societal expectations, and the evolving landscape of relationships in the digital age.
Additional Resources
- Ayla's Substack: "Knowing Less" – where she shares insights and updates on her journey.
- Less Wrong Community: A platform for discussions on rationality and decision-making processes.
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For more information and to listen to the episode, visit [Search Engine](https://searchengine.show).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
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2:30Can you just introduce yourself? Yeah, hi. I'm Ayla, and I am a sex worker, researcher, writer, among other things. What do you think of as your primary thing that you are? On the internet, I mean. I mean, I think it depends a lot, right? Because usually you identify as whatever is sort of most distinct about you, or has the greatest social impact. And that is either sex worker or writer slash researcher, depending on what circles I'm in.
3:03Ayla is one of the, there's no perfect word for this, but one of the characters of this chapter of the internet, one of its personalities. She's a writer. She writes mainly on her sub stack, which is called Knowing Less. Sometimes she writes about her life as a professional sex worker. Sometimes she conducts surveys about sexuality, polling internet strangers to find out about their habits and desires. She ran one survey about people's fetishes that garnered over 700 ,000 responses. Sex worker who does online surveys about sex, frankly, to me, sounds like a description of a person I would ordinarily find pretty boring.
3:40People who talk a lot about sex publicly, To me, often just sound like they're strenuously working overtime to remind me that they've had it. But I deeply enjoy Ayla's writing. She provokes, but she reads to me as someone who is sincere about her beliefs. Who genuinely has looked at the big questions. How to find meaning. How we're meant to live. And discovered for herself some strange and unusual answers. Some of which challenge my own. But there is a specific reason I wanted to talk to her this week. She'd made a big and, to me, weird life decision, and she'd gotten there through a process I was curious about, which had to do with her rationalist beliefs.
4:23Rationalism is an intellectual subculture, a group of people who hang out and influence each other, largely based in the Bay Area. These are people who try, through various methods, some smart, some silly, to just think more rigorously, to try to catch their own brains being biased or stupid or wrong.
4:44In the mainstream press, when you read about rationalists, the coverage is often pretty negative. That's partly because there are culty splinter groups of rationalists who are legitimately insane, sometimes even violent. But mainstream rationalists, to me, read as overthinking nerds, who overthink themselves to conclusions that sometimes seem very reasonable, and sometimes seem a little nutty in a way that delights me. The conversation that follows, truly one of the more surprising ones I've had in a while. It's about Ayla, about rationalism, about how in a world where a lot of people have lost faith in institutions or religions, someone just figures out how to make their own life decisions, almost from scratch.
5:27What is rationalism? Well, it depends on what you mean. The community is like a scene, but usually it's around some principles around like what does it look like to actually try and figure out what's true? Because a lot of people really want to and they sort of include it as a side effect of a lot of their thinking. But it's rare to have a very concrete, like how do we actually think more accurate thoughts? And so it's just like various strategies and techniques to try and figure out how to do that. And so it's funny. I mean, like if you ask most people, do you care about finding out what's true?
5:57There's not that many people who would say that they don't. But for rationalists, it's a group of people who have really decided they are going to care about this in a more deliberate, consistent way. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Were you raised in a rationalist household? No, I was raised very religious. Which type of religious? I was Calvinist, evangelical, homeschooled. It is a professional evangelical family. My dad is a career Christian debater. So I learned a lot about, like, debate and reason, but through a very Christian lens, and it was generally quite warlike. Because realistically, Christians aren't that curious if they're wrong.
6:35The whole strategy is more how do you defend how right you are, which I think trained a lot of sort of poor rationalist techniques into me, or rather a lot of rationalist sins, if you will. And just, I don't want to pretend like I know this. I know that Calvinism is like a severe, in my mind, branch of Christianity, but what does it mean to be a Calvinist Christian? Yeah, it generally is associated with more severe social technology, but the five points of Calvinism are a tulip, which is total depravity, which means that you are born sinful, like babies are inherently sinful, for example. Unconditional election, which means that God picks you to be saved, not based on anything that you do or any aspect of yourself, but rather to his unknowable decisions.
7:13Limited atonement, which means that Jesus died only for the elect. He did not die for the unelect. Irresistible grace, which means that if God decides to save you, you cannot say no. and perseverance of the saints, which is once saved, always saved. These things have been programmed into you pretty thoroughly. Yeah. Go to the grave with those things in my brain. And so what did it look like, if you don't mind my asking, like your dinner table in a professional Calvinist household as a kid, being somebody who's trying to figure out what's true and what's not true and what's right and what's wrong, like what were those conversations like?
7:48It was a lot of like training for war. I would say we would have Bible study every night when I was a child at our family dinner, where we would read the Bible, and then my dad would drill us on theological concepts, and then give us a lot of examples of what enemies of the faith would say, and the correct answer to respond to this. So there's a lot of what the arguments are and how to recite them, in a sense. And there was a lot of lip service given to true doubt and figuring out what's going on. It's like, oh, we are actually interested in the truth, is what people would say, but this was not realistic.
8:20But at the time, for a while, it felt realistic to you. Yeah. And I think that's part of the reason why I'm no longer Christian. Like, in it, I remember being quite young and then realizing, wait a second, there's a bunch of other religions, and they all seem very convinced about it themselves. Should I be worried? I noticed that I am in a religion that I'm very convinced about. And so I remember promising to myself, okay, the only way that I can make this fair and truly believe that the other people are wrong is if I myself am open to being wrong. So I really promised that within myself. And it took a very long time for me to actually figure out that I was wrong still because like social incentives make it very difficult to figure out what's going on often.
8:59How old were you when you were making that promise to yourself? Like probably early teens. And so what would you're like, when you say that you were being prepared for war, it's like you were being prepared for intellectual war with people who didn't believe. And the idea was that, like, you're being given, like, an operating manual. Like, they'll say this, but then you'll say this. And if they say this, then you do this. It's almost like law school. Yeah, very much. Do you know the great Atheist Wars of the 2010s where everybody was on forums being angry at each other about this? A bad chapter on the internet, I would say.
9:32Yeah. Well, that was very much. We were, like, training for the Atheist Wars, although I didn't really know it at the time. And, like, this was my dad's profession. He would, you know, make these arguments very easily available online. You'd go to his website, and you would download, like, oh, if somebody says this thing, he can copy-paste these argument singers to say in response. So when did you realize that you were going to go on a different path? Like, what happened to make you drop out of those? It took sort of an embarrassingly long time. I think it was very difficult to actually think properly because I had such massive social incentive to not think properly.
10:05Like, I didn't know anybody who wasn't Christian. I was homeschooled. Like, I was in a bubble, and everything I knew about the world was filtered through this. thing. And so I would always think like, oh, I could not believe if I thought it wasn't true, but I don't think I actually had that option available to me. Like my brain just wouldn't let me consider it because the consequences would have been massive. And so it was only after I got old enough and left home and for the first time was surrounded by a bunch of people who weren't Christian that I think this started to give me a little bit of space in my mind to think that possibly I could disagree in some way.
10:37Like, especially seeing other people who weren't Christian and they had functioning lives because we've always been sort of told that, But, I mean, there are good people who aren't Christian, but, you know, their goodness isn't deep in some way. And they don't actually have any sort of moral guiding light. It's going to actually be hard and you can't really trust them. And so to finally start interacting with people who seemed normal or kind or even kinder than a lot of the Christians I knew, I was like, huh, that's not what I expected. And was this college? Yeah, it went very briefly for like three months before I couldn't afford it.
11:06But it was like college and then also when I had jobs around college and the factory and stuff like that. And I knew that you dropped out of college. I didn't know why. It was just financially, you couldn't afford to be there? Yeah, my parents made too much money for me to qualify for any aid, but they also refused to help or co-sign any loans. So I couldn't go. Like my whole childhood, they made it very explicit that they would not help me financially whatsoever after I turned 18, and I was completely on my own. And so how did you support yourself? I worked at a factory. I'm on a factory assembly line floor.
11:39What was the factory making? This was in Pullman, Schweitzer Engineering, and I made electrical relays. How was that? It sucks, man. We had to wake up at like 4 a.m. and go for, you know, nine, ten-hour shifts and work weekends. It was really awful. And what would you think about when you were on the line? I think I tried very hard to be happy with my situation, which I kind of was, because being out of my upbringing was kind of great in some ways. but I definitely was in some absolute amount of pain about it and I wanted to get out. And was the pain, like those are hard jobs and you seem like a person with an unusually active mind.
12:20Like was the pain boredom? Was the pain the hardness of the job? Like what was the pain? Yeah, I think it was just the fact that it sucked up your whole life. It was just so many hours I basically just lived to work and it was really sad. And I sort of had some sense that I could do something more. Like, I felt very motivated. I was like a vibrant, creative person who just like really filled my life with a bunch of cool shit. And I loved learning. And I kept thinking like, okay, well, if I do super, super well, maybe I can race through the ranks and like be a cool engineer or something. But I didn't know that you had to go to college to get off the factory floor.
12:52There was no way to actually become successful in that system at all. And so I felt like trapped and I didn't really know what to do about it. And so what did you do? I moved back down to Boise and got into sex work. I became a cam girl, which was great. I loved it. How did that idea occur to you? I was dating a guy who got off of Cupid, and I guess he did some sex work. And then he was like, well, I'm a cam boy. You can sort of join me and make some money that way. You can ride on my coattails a bit. But then I ended up breaking up with him before we tried that. And so I was sitting there. I'm like, man, well, I need money.
13:28And he told me about this camming thing. So I guess maybe I'll try that. And then I had no idea what I was doing. And I logged on and I got drunk because I was scared. And then I showed my boobies and whatever. And then I made$60 my first night, which was insane money for me for that kind of work. And then I just got addicted. I was like, ah, all this vibrancy and energy, like desire to build something finally had an outlet. I was like, ah, I can channel it into this thing. I can work on it. And actually, like my efforts will have payout. And then I became really obsessed with it. Were you, you were doing something that was very against the, like, moral instruction you'd been given as a kid.
14:01just the first time you ever like disrobe for a camera for internet strangers did you have fear like did you have like did you feel like you were overriding something or was it just like I'm not going back to the factory like how did it feel uh weirdly no I think I just sort of have a very sociosexual disposition and wait what's a sociosexual disposition it's like a type of personality metric that measures sort of how prone you are to basically casual sex like how easy it is for you to separate like emotion from sex that kind of thing i see and so for me i think that's just sort of the way that i'm wired it's like a kind of a biological thing and so a lot of like my training to you know be sexually not promiscuous was very ingrained and social and i followed it really well very religiously um but like once i left my religion i sort of had to throw everything out i was like okay religion gave me a script for how to deal with like morality and family and like my personal body and my job and my life.
14:58And I know that the religion is wrong, so I have to start from scratch. I have to throw everything out. Forget everything it told me. I need to figure everything out from first principles. And that involved throwing out like everything I knew about sex. And so I didn't have like the secular conditioning and I threw out the religious conditioning. So from first principles, I was like, hmm, I noticed I'm horny. I noticed I would like to have sex with someone. I will then go have sex with someone. It was just very basic and simple. And so I got pretty promiscuous pretty fast. So by the time I was camming, it wasn't that hard.
15:27Like men had seen me naked by that point. And it was definitely scary to do it publicly. But I was always very good at like taking risks and doing things even though I was terrified. And wait, the way you're describing your interior monologue sounds like a person who has already become a rationalist. Like, I imagine that at that point in your life, a phrase like first principles was not in your internal monologue. That's true. But you were thinking that way. Like, it was just like, that's the way your mind works for whatever reason. Yeah. I mean, I think I am well suited towards rationalist thinking in this way.
16:03Okay, so you do this, and it's like you've been this ambitious person trying to figure out the world, struggling with the low ceiling of a factory job you don't enjoy. this blows that ceiling away and now you're just on the internet a place where you can try things and test them and notice what happens and you're applying your intellectual curiosity and your curiosity about the world and your curiosity about the internet to camming what does it look like to do that like what does it look like to go in front of a camera that's attached to your computer and be naked, but to do that analytically?
16:42Well, I was very bad at it for a long time. It turns out that applying analytics to things does not always turn out to be sexy, as many men probably figured out. And also, I came from a very isolated world where my parents didn't want us to watch movies that had too much romance in it, for example. So I didn't really see a lot of what flirting or seduction was. And so I didn't really know how that worked at all. I would get on cam and I'd be like, well, I got boobs. Look at them. Please give me money. And that didn't go super well. But so it took a lot of trial and error. Did you feel like an alien?
17:22I think a lot of other people describe me as an alien. You didn't feel like one, but people were reacting to you as if you were one. Well, I didn't know that I was out of place. I knew that I had come from this other world and now I was in the outside world because those were very separate when I was growing up. So it was very difficult for other people to understand how alien I was, even though I could feel that I was alien to them. And so that communication, like the one-way thing was really hard for me, and people just thought I was like really weird for a while. But so you're both learning camming and you're learning flirting, and you're learning like secular social interactions, and you're trying to do it analytically.
17:57Like what did your misfires look like? With camming, you get money per hour, basically, or you see tips come in. And so you can sort of figure out over time, like, if you engage in this kind of body language, do you get more or less money? So I did a lot of iteration and eventually figured out that I made more money when I talked slowly and I used simpler words and I just smiled a whole lot. So, like, I basically had to go into sort of a gentle, feminine, slow sort of persona to earn. And my big mistakes in the beginning were just being exactly the way that I was, which is like talking really fast and then talking about, you know, kind of conceptual things.
18:34or something. Wait, how conceptual? What were you talking about? I don't know. I would talk about whatever I wanted. I mean, camming, it's like Twitch streaming, just the girl gets naked a bit. So there's a lot of time where you're just chatting at the camera. It's just anything. I don't know, philosophy, religion. I used to do like a religion role play because I was super good. I would just quote Bible verses of people while I'm getting naked. But I was also really goofy. And so I did a whole bunch of performance shows like Miming or Gnomes. And then this is eventually what led to the gnome photo set, which was very famous on Reddit for some period of time.
19:06Wait, sorry, what's the gnome photo set? I just, I really like the internet. So I was a big Redditor and they had a subreddit called Gone Wild where girls posted sexy photos. And then I'm like, well, nobody's posting sexy photos that are also funny. So I did a photo set where I was like getting strip tees, which was common, taking my clothes off. Then I got abducted by gnomes that slowly invaded. That's the photos progressed. It was like silly and dumb, but it was like the 11th top post of all time on Reddit for some time. Wow. Yeah. Was that the first time that you had viral success? That is, yes, that was correct.
19:38What did it feel like? Oh, it was great. I put my pants the day I posted it, though. Is this related or is this a thing that happened? It was just, it was like a nice combination of me trying to get home and then shitting myself while my phone was blowing up as I like went viral. Wait, but I don't, I don't understand the significance of you shitting yourself. You're like, was the lesson for you, like, don't pay so much attention to your phone or just another interesting thing that happened? No, it was just an extremely memorable day because I was like experiencing like a stressful, humiliating thing as well as like becoming famous and everybody loving the art that I had made like simultaneously.
20:13It was lovely. Okay. Okay. Okay. It got me like a good fan base, but it was not a very vast fan base that paid me a lot of money, unfortunately. And that was like something I had to come to terms with over time, which was very sad to me. It was like, it doesn't matter how much effort or intelligence or creativity I put into my show. I will never, ever make as much money as I do as if I just am a kind of dumb sweet woman who masturbates well.
20:42Okay, so you'd grown up with a religion that was also like, here is a map for how to look at the world. That map was no good for you. You threw it out. You were camming. You were figuring it out. It was getting boring. So what do you do with that? Well, I did a whole bunch of acid when I was 22, and that completely changed me. And I didn't do very well camming because I lost my motivation to cam. And then the year after that, I got into rationality.
21:14After the break, what happens when a former Calvinist turned cam girl discovers an unusual new process for making decisions?
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24:03Welcome back to the show. Okay, so you were already getting bored with camming. You were taking a lot of acid, which if you don't like your job, seems to underline for people the meaninglessness of their job. acid gets you to rationalism? No. Well, I did the acid. I lost my motivation to Cam. And then I was dating a guy who read Less Wrong and then... What's Less Wrong? Less Wrong is a website that Eliezer Yudkowsky originally wrote the sequences on, which is like a series of blog posts or sequences about like how to think more clearly. And I usually say the rationalist is like a scene of people who really like reading Less Wrong.
24:43Like right now, Less Wrong is no longer just the sequences. It's a forum. It's a pretty active and pretty good forum where people post general research or science or rationality takes or opinions about emotions and people comment on it. And it's great. Less Wrong is set up like an old school message board. Text heavy, dense. The premise of the website is that you can get better at thinking. You can be less wrong. If podcasts attract a certain kind of overthinker, Less Wrong is another place they might find a home. A place for overthinkers to overthink together and find new vocabularies for their overthinking.
25:22People here love a Bayesian probability. They're always updating their priors, working from first principles. Past the jargon, that just means they're doing what overthinky people usually do. Puzzling out the answers to questions about life and meaning and whether AI is going to kill us all. It's like if one of the message boards where people obsessed about bodybuilding was instead devoted to people obsessed with figuring out how to think and how to live, but without the guidance of a religion. When I read Less Wrong, the part of me that reacts to things gets very confused. Like, my brain actually doesn't know whether to make jokes about all this, or admire one community of people online that seems to be earnestly trying to better itself, instead of just finding new ways to become mutually insane.
26:09But when Ayla found Les wrong, to her, it felt like a new home. And so I started reading that, and then I knew that there were meetups. And there was a local meetup, and so I went and I tried it, and I fell in love, and I kept going, and I've been going to rationalist meetups ever since. Huh.
26:31It feels so different from religion to me. I know a lot of people describe rationality as a religion, but I've been part of a religion. This is nothing like it. Like, partially because religion is curiosity stopping. It's like we're giving you a set of answers and you have to, like, adhere to this set of beliefs. Otherwise, you are no longer part of a religion. But for rationality, it was more like a process. And it's like, how do we arrive at the answers? And so you get a pretty wide variety of, like, disagreeing beliefs inside of people who like rationality. Like people will disagree with each other about like very important things like politics or, you know, existentialism or AI or something.
27:06But the shared thing is like how do you arrive at these beliefs in like a consistent and rigorous way? And the thing that really caught me for rationality, the thing that I really liked is I remember, because I had been trained in this really warlike religion thing. And I had a lot of identity wrapped up in my beliefs. Like I had identity wrapped up in my politics. And I was like, okay, I believe this thing and I'm kind of cool. And if you don't, I'm going to kind of dunk on you, that sort of you. And then I remember going in and then being like kind of like subtly antagonistically trying to initiate a conversation about feminism.
27:38Because at this point I was like an anti-feminist, which I'm not anymore. And then I remember asking somebody like, well, are you a feminist? And then they said, well, what do you mean by feminist? It's just such a simple thing, but they meant it earnestly. They were like, oh, I just really want to understand what you mean. And I'm not thinking about the label or the identity. I just like want to understand the concepts you're pointing to so I can like pick out the concepts that I think are sensible and the things that aren't. And there was just something in that specific interaction that for me, like suddenly I saw a different way of being.
28:08I was like, oh my God, they're not playing a game that I suddenly now realize that I'm playing. And then that just completely transformed my relationship to thinking and to thoughts at all. And I loved it. But so it wasn't a point they made. It was that the way that they spoke and the way that they thought, it was like literally psychedelic for you. It was mind opening. And it made you realize that even though you'd stop believing the tenets of Calvinism, the style of thinking and the style of working out ideas and the style of arguing, you were just kind of brought with you. And in the way this person asked questions, you saw a different way to think.
28:43Yeah, basically. I mean, it's not even just Calvinism. It's like a lot of people do this with politics at all or any kind of identity. Yeah, I, it's funny. I'm not a rationalist. I read and like a lot of rationalist writers. The experience you're describing having, I've had that experience where you're talking to someone and they just start asking questions in a way where you feel like they're like slightly like moving some part of your brain that was on tracks somewhere else. And that it's not that you're trying to figure out what they believe, more like they have a mode of inquiry that seems more careful and you're trying to learn how to follow it.
29:20Yeah, basically. It's like you try and throw a grenade at somebody and they don't even notice that you threw a grenade. And you're like, oh, I don't have to be in a world where you are watching out for grenades. Yeah. Okay, so it's like you had this community that didn't work for you. You wandered in the world for a while. You found a process that worked for you and a community that was attached to it of people you liked. Back then when you're going to these meetups, is it a park? Is it at somebody's house? Is it a bar? At the time, it was at the Seattle University. One of the attendees was a student there and like had the gate pass thing.
29:53So we just went to one of the public buildings. But eventually we started making group houses and people started moving in together. And then the meetups turned into those houses. But it eventually ended up becoming a potluck where we'd all bring food and then have a group dinner afterwards. It was like very community vibe. And then we would read some of the sequences or adjacent blog posts. I think at one point we read one of my blog posts even. And discuss them and I don't know. See if we agreed or disagree. How would we have done it better? It's funny. It sounds like the parts of college people like.
30:23Yeah. Or like Bible study if the answers aren't already figured out in advance. Yeah, I remember I was walking around Berkeley like last year sometime, and I really had to poop. This is a recurring problem for me is the emergency pooping. But I was having one of those emergency pooping elements. And I was walking around with my friend, and my friend was like, oh, well, we should stop by somewhere to poop if you need. And then he started like pointing out all the rationalist group houses that were around. Like, well, down this block is this group house, and then we can go up two blocks in this group house.
30:49And, like, people in these group houses, like, I don't actually know them, really. But it's a rationalist group house, which means that, like, if you're part of the rationalist community, I could be like, hey, I'm a rationalist. Can I use your bathroom? And that was really cool. That actually did remind me of Christianity a bit because there was, like, a big communal atmosphere. Like, oh, if you're part of the church, we sort of know you and trust you. And we're part of the same social scene such that there's a reputation network that lets me trust you. And that was really nice. And so it's almost like it's weird.
31:16Like I've been trying to understand like who are these people and where did they show up from? And like I feel like one way you could think of it is, oh, it's a new school of thought or mode of thinking. One way it gets sort of poorly caricatured is like, oh, this is like some sort of Bay Area cult. Another way to think about it is it's a website that has a community attached to the website. Yeah, that sounds about right. Huh.
31:42I am not a rationalist. I don't think I'll ever be one. But as you can probably tell, I am curious about what they're trying to do. They are trying to solve a problem I often find myself tripping over in my own mind. Something I notice in myself when I try to figure out what's true or how to live is how many of my beliefs are just a product of the people I spend my time with. If what you believe is also part of your identity, a Christian, an atheist, a Democrat, a Republican, changing your mind is very expensive because on some level, you suspect you will suffer social consequences. All of us are social people, intensely so.
32:21But we also want to think of ourselves as independent thinkers, which I think means sometimes we tell ourselves that it's just a coincidence how much we happen to agree with the people we know, or tell ourselves that we agree with them because all of us just happen to have gotten to the right answers independently. Rationalists, or the people they influence, they really seem to be trying to find a way to get to their own individual ideas for real. You don't have to have the same answers to be in their club. You just have to have the same commitment to a process. That's the theory anyway. Although in practice, like any group, the rationalists tend to resemble each other.
32:57They usually worry a lot about AI. They tend to think hard about philanthropy. They're very into animal welfare. And there was another trait they seemed to share that, for Ayla's taste, was kind of annoying. In her opinion, rationalists throw lousy parties. This is my ongoing complaint with the rationalists, who I love dearly. The rationalists are fucking wonderful, but they drive me up the wall sometimes with not being very bodied and then not having very good parties. So I'm like, okay, I will design a party that will maximize how weird the environment is such that they must act differently somehow.
33:29Let's see if we can shock them out of it. And so I was like, what if we did a naked party where everybody has to be naked, and maybe that will somehow break the rationalists out of whatever fucking rationalist vibe they're bringing. And so I just picked like the most insane idea I could think of, and it did not work. So it's like, you were like, these people live completely in their minds. I'm going to try to create a party structure where they cannot help but be interesting in a non-in-their-minds way. and they were like, yes, you're thinking for why this party should exist or why you should attend it is sound.
34:02And yet they attend the party and they still just do the same thing that they would always do, but just naked. Yeah, it was so funny. I couldn't believe it. I was just so like, damn it, foiled again. And what was like the, like for me, every time I've started a party, the first fifth is kind of like difficult because I'm worried that people are not going to show up or if they show up, they're not going to have fun. or everyone's kind of in their corners, or they're like clustered around me. Like, what did conversation look like at the naked party? People felt awkward. It was stilted. And then I was trying to make jokes.
34:37And then at some point, it just became like a long debate about global politics. That's mostly all I remember. I think I tried to put on music and make them dance, but it didn't work. Okay. So I think I'm seeing it. It sounds like you're a person where you were enjoying the Bay Area's many countercultures. Rationalists were a part of that. Their sort of brainy insistence on living in their own minds was sometimes annoying. It sounds like part of your role in that community is to, like, push them towards, like, fun, embodiment, things like that. Yeah, as, like, the local sex weirdo. Right, in the Bay Area rationalist community, which is, like, a very funny local sex weirdo to be.
35:19Yeah, very much.
35:24Ayla said that at her naked rationalist party, the attendees wore masks. The idea being that the anonymity might make people more comfortable or the party more interesting. And so, some night in the Bay, there were nude philosophy fans wearing animal masks, paper bags, paper mache, discussing trade policy. Well, their host looked on in real disappointment. Things had not turned out differently.
35:52I spend a lot of time wondering what the world would have been like without social media, what we'd believe, who we'd follow. These days, I mostly notice what we've lost instead of what we've gained. But I wonder also about Ayla in the social media-less world. Is she still stuck at the factory making electrical relays? Is she still an uncomfortable Calvinist? Does she even know that somewhere out there, there's actually a tribe for her? A tribe too scattered and weird to find each other without a disruptive new communications technology. That'll also bring us rising authoritarianism and very convenient e-commerce.
36:27Probably not.
36:31After a short break, the local sex weirdo in the Bay Area rationalist community decides to do the most normal thing in the world. Find someone to have kids with.
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38:17Welcome back to the show. So the specific reason I'd wanted to talk to Ayla this week of all weeks was because I'd seen her posting about what I thought was, even by her standards, a very unusual project. Was project even the right word? She'd been trying to find a partner to have a kid with. But Ayla had been pursuing that goal with the same homebrewed deductive logic that she routinely pursued life's questions with. So I'm curious about the current mission that you are on. How do you, as a rationalist, apply the principles of rationalism to your goal, which is that you want to have a kid and you want to find a partner who you can have a kid with?
38:57I mean, rationality is not winning, is the common phrase. What does that mean, rationalism is not winning? I think it's like a lot of people have debates over what kind of beliefs are true, but generally the correct beliefs are winning. And I don't mean like fighting other people. I mean like if you build a car, does it run? You know, have you won at your goal of like trying to build the car? It's like demonstrable change in the world. Got it. Okay. Like sometimes how I think about it is it's people who are trying to figure out how to behave correctly without religion. But it sounds like a more accurate way to view it would be people who are trying to optimize.
39:32How do you achieve your goals? And so how do you apply that mode of thinking to this goal of like procreation? I mean, there's lots of things. I make prediction markets about dating to see what the market thinks about my love life. A prediction market is a place where strangers can bet on the outcomes of anything. You have opened up markets into what is going to happen to your love life? Yeah, because I broke up with my partner a while back. And I'm like, well, I get back together seriously with my partner. And then people get to bet on that. because often when you're inside of a thing, it's like hard to see straight.
40:04Well, what did you learn by doing it? Well, I think the market was higher than I thought it was. I was like, I am never going to find anyone. I'm not going to get back together with him. And the market was like 60%. Like, yes, you are. And I'm not back with him seriously, but I'm back together with him casually. And it seemed like a good chance that he might become serious. So maybe the markets were wiser than me. I've had that experience. There was somebody I had like broken up with. I was like, I'll never talk to them again. And a friend of mine was just like, I'll bet you 40 bucks. And then immediately I was like, oh, I'm lying to myself.
40:37Yeah. There's something about having money on the line that just really causes your brain to cut through the bullshit. Yeah. Okay. So one thing you're doing is you're inviting other people to make bets on what's going to happen with you as a way to better understand yourself, what you're doing, what you're looking for, et cetera. What else? I met my current partner through a survey. Well, I originally met him at that naked party, but I didn't talk to him. I didn't know who he was. And so I actually met up with him because I made a survey to date me where I had people fill out a form about a bunch of stuff that was important to me.
41:11And then I scored them secretly on the back end. And then I contacted the highest scorers. I saw you post this. You made a post that was just like, if you're interested in dating me, answer these questions. But I didn't read the survey. What type of questions were on the survey? Yeah, the survey split into three sections. One is like basic demographics, like, are you the right age range in the same location in the world? Are you poly? Do you want kids? And then another section is like sexual compatibility. And then the third section is like personality values kind of stuff. And so I sort of weighted those three equally.
41:44And then inside of those, I had a whole bunch of questions that I thought were important and a lot of decoy questions. And then I spit out a score at the end. And it found you a person you like. So presumably, in this case, your method was winning. Yeah, yeah. It was like, I ended up talking to him like briefly at a party to circle. And I knew about his existence, but I never like seriously considered him. I was just like, I was just a random dude. I don't particularly feel attracted to him. We don't have chemistry or whatever. But then he scored so high on the survey. I was like, well, I guess I have to give him another shot.
42:15And so our first date was three days in an Airbnb. And then it worked out. I think a lot of the world sort of shies away from optimizing things that are supposed to be magical. Like, oh, you're supposed to have this almost like mystical quality when you meet your boyfriend and then fall for him. And it's like not about anything really specific or cold, hard traits about him. There's just something about him. And sort of rationalists don't really ascribe to the mythology kind of thing. They're like, no, you can optimize anything. Is there just a better way to look for love? And often this runs up against people's sense of romanticism.
42:50But a traditionally rationalist approach to this sort of thing is to sort of disregard their romanticism in favor of actually succeeding. Okay, so. Ayla has been using open-to-all surveys to select people to date. She's been inviting internet strangers to bet on her future romantic choices, partly as a way to just test whether she could be kidding herself. But the really unusual choice she'd made is that she'd put up a cash prize to anyone who could help her in her quest. A large cash prize. A decision unusual enough that it had made me want to talk to her in the first place. To understand what kind of thinking had led to that decision, which I had never heard of anyone making before.
43:28So can you tell me about this post that you wrote? Yeah, I'm looking for something like a husband and offering a bounty, 100K if anybody recommends. Someone that I ended up marrying. and I am looking for someone who wants kids and is poly. And yeah, I don't know. This is sort of the thing. Yeah, this is the thing. This is the thing. The thing you're describing, you're describing it like in a very like, well, obviously way or something or like, but it's an interesting and unusual thing that you've chosen to do, in my opinion. Yeah, I guess so. Everything's kind of weird and unusual when I do it the first time or have the first thought, but then after a while, it feels like a normal thing and I forget what it's like to find it weird.
44:10So where were you? I assume you were somewhere where you had to poop, but where were you when you were like, oh, I should put a bounty on this? What was going on? Well, what happened is I signed up for a matchmaking thing. Yeah. And they had a system where if they match you, you pay them$100 ,000. And I was like, I mean, sure, if they fail, whatever, and if they succeed, I've made a husband, and I will have, in hindsight, said it's worth it. Then after a while, I was like, Hey, why am I just paying them$100K? If I'm actually willing to part with$100K for a husband, should I not crowdsource this?
44:42Should I not let anybody have this option? So I posted it publicly. I read it and was like,$100K, do I know anybody? Like it definitely worked on my brain. That's the goal. And how did you decide on$100 ,000? It's a lot of money. I mean, that's what the original matchmaker people were asking for. and this feels like high enough to be incentivizing, like pretty meaningfully incentivizing, especially since social circles are sort of stratified. Like I'm sort of interested in somebody who's roughly equivalent to me in maybe visibility or money or something, which means that like you're selecting for slightly higher income, higher wealth people.
45:19And those people tend to know each other and then those people are incentivized by lower amounts of money. So you really have to like raise the total money to like catch their attention. And then there was, if I remember, there's an additional part about pregnancy. If you can be impregnated. Yeah. So I would like someone to pay me$10 million to have and raise their child as a single mother, which, I mean, it seems kind of unlikely, but you know, why not? You should always like say the trades you're willing to make just in case. And then if you hook me up with this person, then I'll pay you$300K.
45:49And is this something like in my imagination, I'm like, okay, that seems like an advertisement for Elon Musk. Are there other people who are like, yes, I want to pay someone to raise my kid, but I don't want to meet or interact with my kid. Or are you just like, maybe that person exists, and if so, this money will summon them? Like, how did you decide this? Well, I had kind of slightly offhandedly tweeted a while ago that, like, if you pay me 10 mil, raise your baby, lol. And then somebody messaged me about it, and then we were in somewhat serious talks about it for a while. And it ended up not working out, but I went through the whole process of talking to lawyers.
46:20and you were talking to lawyers like to to draw up what this would look like as a formal agreement yeah like how would this work legally how would child custody work like how would it work with the fertility clinic and stuff like that I think what I so appreciate about this stranger plan is like I mean a lot of things like it's it's um you're making an unusual choice in a very deliberate way but also it's like the thing you want which is like find a mate and have a kid is so conventional, but you want it on your very specific terms in your very specific way. It's such a combination of a very old idea and a lot of new ideas.
47:01Yeah. I'm a super weird person, which I know that everybody sort of thinks that they're weird, but I suspect that I maybe actually am weird, even adjusted for that bias. And I've been having problems finding people that I'm attracted to in general. So I think it takes, if I'm that unusual, then I probably cannot go about mate fighting in the usual way. And how has it gone so far? Not great. Oh. Yeah. I've looked at the submissions to the form and nobody sort of has jumped out. There's been a couple direct recommendations that caught my interest, but none of them have quite worked out yet. And do you, it's weird.
47:39I can kind of make the argument that, I don't know, it's such a normal thing to be at the part of your life where you're like, like monogamous, polyamorous, whatever, where you're like, I'm trying to find my person, whatever that means, even if your person's persons. And I feel like a lot of people struggle with this at some point. And the thing I'll typically say to people, which is because it's true, not as a lie as I'll be like, you know, most people find somebody, you kind of only have to find one person who really suits you. But in the meantime, it's really, the uncertainty is really hard.
48:09Is your brain struggling with the uncertainty the way everybody else's does? Yeah, sometimes I'm set. I'm like, oh man, I think there's a reasonable chance that I might live my life without ever finding a guy that I want to have kids with. And that's like pretty narratively sad. I'm like, oh, does this mean I'm a failure in some way? But I mean, I think I'm like fundamentally okay. These questions Ayla's wrestling with are core human ones. Who should I partner with and how? Should I procreate? And if so, the conventional way or one of the myriad new ones? Time and time again in the past few years, I've met people with some new-to-me or weird-to-me answers to those questions, and then they've talked about how they got to those answers or I've seen their lives up close.
48:57And almost always, the unconventional paths to family have seemed just as workable as the conventional ones, which is really a way of saying that partnership is hard. Families are hard. And we're only here once, so we study our friends' choices, and then we guess. We guess about who to be with, whether or not to have a kid, and if so, how, and if so, when, and if so, how many. We guess, and we hope we're right. What makes Ayla different to me is not her answers, it's her process, and how public it is. To write in public that you are looking for a mate is to invite comments about why you will never find one.
49:35To say you think you've found an unconventional answer to the question of family is to invite people to tell you why you're dangerously wrong. but it's also a kind of gift. You're sharing data. You're letting other people try to learn from your experiment. And I'm just, I really have a lot of value in trying new things. Like even if it fails, now you have the value of like understanding what it was like to do it. And I think a lot of people will avoid trying the new thing because they're like, oh, it's going to have a downside or if it's going to fail. I'm like, yeah, but you don't know that. And how much money would you pay to know that?
50:05I think a lot of people don't like being wrong. And I think a lot of people don't like being seen to be wrong. I think some people would rather not be embarrassed than find out what is true or what they really believe. I think that's like a really, really normal thing. Oh, yeah. Everybody knowing you're wrong sucks. Yeah. But it doesn't seem to especially— Either it doesn't bother you or you choose not to let it bother you. No, it definitely bothers me. I, like, often my brain will, like, refuse to let me think clearly because I'm sort of subconsciously avoiding the fear of social penalties. And sometimes I notice it and sometimes I don't.
50:40I think a lot of the rationalist community tries, in theory, to make it such that we reward people who admit it being wrong to, like, sort of help our primate brains be less afraid. Like, if somebody, like, changes their mind, we're sort of like, yes, good job. Fantastic admitting you're wrong. This is a virtue.
50:57Okay, well, we're doing our part by airing this interview. Yeah, I appreciate it. Have you figured out, like, if a search engine listener recommends somebody, is there some kind of, like, revenue-sharing deal that the show would participate in? I mean, I could probably work something out. Okay. I mean, we're still trying to find a business model for podcasts.
51:18This is wonderful. I am so happy to get to talk to you. Enjoy the rest of your day. Okay. You too. Bye-bye. Bye.
51:31If you or someone you know think you might be a good match for Ayla, you can find her post about all this on her sub stack, which is called Knowing Less.
52:20Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinamineni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was fact-checked by Claire Hyman. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support from Emily Molter. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. If you'd like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus audio, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode.
53:01You can learn more at searchengine.show. You can sign up there or directly in Apple Podcasts. Follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. And thank you for listening. We'll see you in a couple weeks.
From the publisher
A member of an unusual Bay Area community decides to try to have a baby in an unusual way – by putting out a very large prize for anyone who can help her find a mate. How the internet shaped one person’s decision-thinking.
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