How does a rationalist make a baby?
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Can you introduce yourself and explain what you do?
Can you just introduce yourself?
Yeah, hi, I'm Ayla and I'm 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.
Well, I mean I think it depends a lot, right? 'Cause like usually you identify as whatever is sort of most distinct about you or like has the greatest social impact. And that is either sex worker or writer slash researcher, depending on what circles I'm in.
Ayla 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. People 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's 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. Rationalism 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.
In 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.
What is rationalism?
Well, it depends on what you mean. The community is like a scene. Um, but usually it's around some principles around like what does it look like to actually try and figure out what's true? Um, 'cause like 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 asked most people, do you care about finding out what's true? There'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 gonna 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, uh evangelical, homeschooled. Um, it was a professional evangelical family. My dad is a career Christian debater. Um, 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. Um, it the whole strategy is more how do you defend how right you are, um, which I think trained a lot of sort of poor rational.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Can you introduce yourself and explain what you do?
0:24–7:26
2
What was your religious upbringing and how did it shape your worldview?
7:26–12:34
3
What is the rationalist community and how does it influence decision‑making?
12:34–17:50
4
How did you transition from factory work to sex work and online camming?
17:50–24:15
5
What was the purpose and outcome of the naked rationalist party you organized?
24:15–30:14
6
How did you use prediction markets and surveys to find a partner?
30:14–35:35
7
Why did you offer a $100,000 bounty to find a husband and how did it work?
35:35–40:42
8
What have you learned from this unconventional approach to finding a partner and having a baby?
40:42–47:13