--- /dev/null
+Title: East Coast Trip
+Date: 2025-07-01 11:00
+Category: other
+Tags: anecdotal
+Status: draft
+
+In September 2021, I took a trip to the east coast to see my sister and new baby niece in Cambridge and some friends in New York, and otherwise to work on blog posts from my hotel room. (You've seen one American city, you've seen them all, I reasoned, _modulo_ a different ratio of Dunkin' Donuts to Starbucks.)
+
+The thought occured to me that while I was on vacation anyway, it might be nice to see an escort (which I had only done once before, in March 2016). I browsed around the "Boston" section on _eros.com_. Under the "ebony" subsection[^ebony], I found a profile that I liked on the basis of photographs and a professional-seeming website. I'll call her "Crystal" (which was not the name she used, and the name she used was also surely not her real name). The "consideration" page on the website listed three hours at $1500, and four hours for $2000. ("All rates are for my time and companionship only.") I filled out the booking form requesting a three-hour engagement.
+
+[^ebony]: I don't know why they say "ebony" instead of "black". Porn sites do this, too. Seems problematic to have an ethnic term that only gets used in sexualized contexts?
+
+"Crystal" didn't get back to me within several days, and I resigned myself to the implied rejection. (I already felt morally ambiguous about filling out the form; I certainly wasn't about to _shop around_.) But then on 4:37 _p.m._ on the day before my flight left, she got back to me asking if I was still interested in connecting, explaining that there had been a problem with her spam filter (Subject: "Hello! My apologies For The Late Reply"). I rushed to the bank just before it closed to withdraw $2000 cash that would have been harder to get at on my trip, between ATM withdrawal limits and the lack of Wells Fargo branches in Massachusetts.
+
+She suggested switching to texts to get around the spam issue, and I texted her a photo of my ID and a link to my LinkedIn profile to confirm my identity (or gentlemanliness). She asked, "Would you like to go on a dinner date, four hours, 2,000."[^no-dollar-sign] (Already feeling morally ambiguous, I certainly wasn't going to complain about getting _upsold_.)[^upsold] I eagerly agreed, and suggested an Indian restaurant a half-mile walk from my hotel.
+
+[^no-dollar-sign]: I appreciated the absence of a dollar sign in front of the figure. Feels less crass.
+
+[^upsold]: But I had mentioned the $2000 bank withdrawal in my email, so it made sense that that figure was more salient to her than the fact that my form submission from weeks earlier had said three hours.
+
+I didn't get any writing done the day of our date, although I had at least [gotten in a couple hundred words the previous day](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=470bbc84ba) on my draft review of Charles Murray's _Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America_. I texted my sister and my mother (who was also in town to see my sister) that I had other plans that night, requested housekeeping service for my hotel room (which had been suspended by default due to COVID), and mostly just walked around Cambridge for the late morning and afternoon. I bought a shirt with a collar at Target.
+
+My mother called to inquire more about my plans, which I preferred to be at least somewhat vague about. I said that the safety concerns about meeting someone from the internet were mostly for women. She asked that I at least tell my sister where I was going, to which I agreed. I texted my sister: "Mom thinks there's a safety rationale for telling someone my plans, which I think is retarded, but specifically, it's a casual dinner date at"—I gave the name and address of the restaurant—"with a woman I met online (no reply expected; there's nothing useful for you to do with this information and this message is just to appease Mom)".
+
+"Crystal" was late (date was originally scheduled for 4 _p.m._, then she texted in the early afternoon to move it to 4:30, then finally texted "I'm here"/"Just valeting my car" at 5:04), and then it turned out that she was expecting to meet me at the hotel while I was waiting at the restaurant, but we met in the middle and walked back to the restaurant.
+
+It was nice—an opportunity to talk to someone who I otherwise wouldn't get to meet. Messaging someone like her on OKCupid would have felt fake, and cold-approaching someone like her in public was unthinkable. It felt more honest to just pay for her time.
+
+What do I mean by "someone like her"? Definitely not race _per se_. Rather ... non-nerds?—normies. I know how to talk to _the kinds of women I meet in "rationalist"/EA circles_, and even (very rarely) ask them on a date.[^romantic-poem] That doesn't feel fake, because they're just peers who happen to be female. (I may have renounced [the ideological psychological sex difference denialism of my youth](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), but I'm not _sexist_.)
+
+What I don't know how to do without the moral [indulgence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence) of money changing hands is to ask out a beautiful woman _because she's a beautiful woman_. I won't say it's morally wrong, exactly; it's just not how I was raised. (I mean, I wasn't raised to hire escorts, either, but somehow the transactionality of it puts it outside some of the ethical constraints of ordinary courtship.)
+
+[^romantic-poem]: Though the meter is occasionally a little bit bizarre, I'm very proud of [the poem I wrote in 2016 depicting a woman I was interested in eradicating malaria by wiping out all the mosquitos using CRISPR gene drive](/ancillary/megan-and-the-anopheles-gambiae/), although our one date didn't amount to anything. She later married Scott Alexander.
+
+Dinner was nice. We talked. She had a dayjob in real estate. There were some conversational topics I wanted to steer away from until after dinner. When we got to my hotel room, I felt freer to speak. I explained autogynephilia to her, and (briefly) the Category War with my robot cult.
+
+I didn't tell her about the book review I was writing.
+
+We got undressed. I put on a condom, but I didn't let (have?) her touch my penis. That would have seemed unethical to me. I just wanted to admire her naked body, to touch, to cuddle. My own pleasure I could—handle myself. I kept telling her how beautiful she was—and that I was jealous. That I wanted to know what it would be like, if [by some miracle of technology or magic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories), I could look like her, be shaped like her. To have that face and that voice and those breasts (my gynecomastia from [that HRT experiment four years before](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) simply didn't compare) and that—waist-to-hip ratio. (She said I could have her breasts; they were heavy.)
+
+I'm not actually ultra-confident that what I call "ethics" didn't make things weirder for her. She had said that she had been treating her night job was an alternative to conventional dating, that she wasn't seeing anyone nonprofessionally. It's possible that to a woman in that position, a normal man who wants to use a woman in the normal way is actually preferable to the kind of creep I am?—in contrast to my hopes that satisfying the kind of creep I am would be gratifyingly easy job for the money.
+
+(At any rate, I think it would have been _more_ creepy if I tried to convince her that I was "actually" a woman in some unspecified metaphysical sense.)
+
+I wasn't coming. She said that for $2000, I definitely deserved to get off. That didn't matter to me. I ended up finishing that after she left.
+
+Before she left, as she was using the bathroom and washing up, I tried to say something about how I wished I could have a photo to remember her by, but I knew that it would be impolite to ask. (I had done my reading. "Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.") No photos, she said.
+
+I wanted to clarify that I wasn't _asking_, I was making a meta-comment about how I _wasn't_ asking—and then I realized that normie culture must not support that level of indirection. To her, there was no semantic difference between apophasis and actually saying the thing, even if my "rationalist" friends would have understood what I meant. Considering my frustration at Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying games, I wondered if the normie way wasn't superior.
+
+------
+
+The New York leg of my trip went fine. I visited Sarah. I met another _Less Wrong_-er whose comments I had liked. I made $60 babysitting Zvi Mowshowitz's kids.
+
+I visited Ben and met his new girlfiend. Jessica wasn't around. We hadn't talked much since the "Lenore" disaster nine months before. He said that my behavior then _had_ been a betrayal, but a finite one. It happens. (Not "it happens" meaning that it's _okay_, but that it _happens_; moral agents keep accounts; [you forgive, but don't forget](/2020/Dec/liability/).)
+
+I got to meet my neoreactionary Twitter mutual, who held the distinction of having been banned from the _Slate Star Codex_ comment section ["for reasons of total personal caprice"](https://archive.md/sRfBj#selection-1633.27-1633.64). I wore my _Quillette_ T-shirt. He offered to buy me a drink. I said I didn't drink, but he insisted that getting drunk was the ritual by which men established trust. I couldn't argue with that, and ended up having a glass and a half of wine while we talked for a couple hours.
+
+So much of my intellectual life for the past five years had been shaped by the fight to keep mere heresies on the shared map, that it was a nice change to talk to an out-and-out _apostate_, with whom none of none of my ingrained defensive motions were necessary. (I just want to restore the moral spirit of 2008 liberalism but with better epistemology; he wants to bring back [_coverture_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture) on the grounds that women of the Eurasian subspecies of humanity haven't exercised mate choice in 10,000 years and aren't being helped by starting now.) There was one moment when I referred to the rationalists as my guys, and instinctively disclaimed, "and of course, we're mostly guys." He pointed out that I didn't need to tell _him_ that.
------
-In September 2021, I took a trip to the east coast to see my sister and new baby niece in Cambridge and some friends in New York, and otherwise to work on blog posts from my hotel room. (You've seen one American city, you've seen them all, I reasoned, _modulo_ a different ratio of Dunkin' Donuts to Starbucks.)
-
-The thought occured to me that while I was on vacation anyway, it might be nice to see an escort (which I had only done once before, in March 2016). I browsed around the "Boston" section on _eros.com_. Under the "ebony" subsection[^ebony], I found a profile that I liked on the basis of photographs and a professional-seeming website. I'll call her "Crystal" (which was not the name she used, and the name she used was also surely not her real name). The "consideration" page on the website listed three hours at $1500, and four hours for $2000. ("All rates are for my time and companionship only.") I filled out the booking form requesting a three-hour engagement.
-
-[^ebony]: I don't know why they say "ebony" instead of "black". Porn sites do this, too. Seems problematic to have an ethnic term that only gets used in sexualized contexts?
-
-"Crystal" didn't get back to me within several days, and I resigned myself to the implied rejection. (I already felt morally ambiguous about filling out the form; I certainly wasn't about to _shop around_.) But then on 4:37 _p.m._ on the day before my flight left, she got back to me asking if I was still interested in connecting, explaining that there had been a problem with her spam filter (Subject: "Hello! My apologies For The Late Reply"). I rushed to the bank just before it closed to withdraw $2000 cash that would have been harder to get at on my trip, between ATM withdrawal limits and the lack of Wells Fargo branches in Massachusetts.
-
-She suggested switching to texts to get around the spam issue, and I texted her a photo of my ID and a link to my LinkedIn profile to confirm my identity (or gentlemanliness). She asked, "Would you like to go on a dinner date, four hours, 2,000."[^no-dollar-sign] (Already feeling morally ambiguous, I certainly wasn't going to complain about getting _upsold_.)[^upsold] I eagerly agreed, and suggested an Indian restaurant a half-mile walk from my hotel.
-
-[^no-dollar-sign]: I appreciated the absence of a dollar sign in front of the figure. Feels less crass.
-
-[^upsold]: But I had mentioned the $2000 bank withdrawal in my email, so it made sense that that figure was more salient to her than the fact that my form submission from weeks earlier had said three hours.
-
-I didn't get any writing done the day of our date, although I had at least [gotten in a couple hundred words the previous day](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=470bbc84ba) on my draft review of Charles Murray's _Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America_. I texted my sister and my mother (who was also in town to see my sister) that I had other plans that night, requested housekeeping service for my hotel room (which had been suspended by default due to COVID), and mostly just walked around Cambridge for the late morning and afternoon. I bought a shirt with a collar at Target.
-
-My mother called to inquire more about my plans, which I preferred to be at least somewhat vague about. I said that the safety concerns about meeting someone from the internet were mostly for women. She asked that I at least tell my sister where I was going, to which I agreed. I texted my sister: "Mom thinks there's a safety rationale for telling someone my plans, which I think is retarded, but specifically, it's a casual dinner date at"—I gave the name and address of the restaurant—"with a woman I met online (no reply expected; there's nothing useful for you to do with this information and this message is just to appease Mom)".
-
-"Crystal" was late (date was originally scheduled for 4 _p.m._, then she texted in the early afternoon to move it to 4:30, then finally texted "I'm here"/"Just valeting my car" at 5:04), and then it turned out that she was expecting to meet me at the hotel while I was waiting at the restaurant, but we met in the middle and walked back to the restaurant.
-
-It was nice—an opportunity to talk to someone who I otherwise wouldn't get to meet. Messaging someone like her on OKCupid would have felt fake, and cold-approaching someone like her in public was unthinkable. It felt more honest to just pay for her time.
-
-What do I mean by "someone like her"? Definitely not race _per se_. Rather ... non-nerds?—normies. I know how to talk to _the kinds of women I meet in "rationalist"/EA circles_, and even (very rarely) ask them on a date.[^romantic-poem] That doesn't feel fake, because they're just peers who happen to be female. (I may have renounced [the ideological psychological sex difference denialism of my youth](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), but I'm not _sexist_.)
-
-What I don't know how to do without the moral [indulgence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence) of money changing hands is to ask out a beautiful woman _because she's a beautiful woman_. I won't say it's morally wrong, exactly; it's just not how I was raised. (I mean, I wasn't raised to hire escorts, either, but somehow the transactionality of it puts it outside some of the ethical constraints of ordinary courtship.)
-
-[^romantic-poem]: Though the meter is occasionally a little bit bizarre, I'm very proud of [the poem I wrote in 2016 depicting a woman I was interested in eradicating malaria by wiping out all the mosquitos using CRISPR gene drive](/ancillary/megan-and-the-anopheles-gambiae/), although our one date didn't amount to anything. She later married Scott Alexander.
-
-Dinner was nice. We talked. She had a dayjob in real estate. There were some conversational topics I wanted to steer away from until after dinner. When we got to my hotel room, I felt freer to speak. I explained autogynephilia to her, and (briefly) the Category War with my robot cult.
-
-I didn't tell her about the book review I was writing.
-
-We got undressed. I put on a condom, but I didn't let (have?) her touch my penis. That would have seemed unethical to me. I just wanted to admire her naked body, to touch, to cuddle. My own pleasure I could—handle myself. I kept telling her how beautiful she was—and that I was jealous. That I wanted to know what it would be like, if [by some miracle of technology or magic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories), I could look like her, be shaped like her. To have that face and that voice and those breasts (my gynecomastia from [that HRT experiment four years before](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) simply didn't compare) and that—waist-to-hip ratio. (She said I could have her breasts; they were heavy.)
-
-I'm not actually ultra-confident that what I call "ethics" didn't make things weirder for her. She had said that she had been treating her night job was an alternative to conventional dating, that she wasn't seeing anyone nonprofessionally. It's possible that to a woman in that position, a normal man who wants to use a woman in the normal way is actually preferable to the kind of creep I am?—in contrast to my hopes that satisfying the kind of creep I am would be gratifyingly easy job for the money.
-
-(At any rate, I think it would have been _more_ creepy if I tried to convince her that I was "actually" a woman in some unspecified metaphysical sense.)
-
-I wasn't coming. She said that for $2000, I definitely deserved to get off. That didn't matter to me. I ended up finishing that after she left.
-
-Before she left, as she was using the bathroom and washing up, I tried to say something about how I wished I could have a photo to remember her by, but I knew that it would be impolite to ask. (I had done my reading. "Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.") No photos, she said.
-
-I wanted to clarify that I wasn't _asking_, I was making a meta-comment about how I _wasn't_ asking—and then I realized that normie culture must not support that level of indirection. To her, there was no semantic difference between apophasis and actually saying the thing, even if my "rationalist" friends would have understood what I meant. Considering my frustration at Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying games, I wondered if the normie way wasn't superior.
-
-------
-
-The New York leg of my trip went fine. I visited Sarah. I met another _Less Wrong_-er whose comments I had liked. I made $60 babysitting Zvi Mowshowitz's kids.
-
-I visited Ben and met his new girlfiend. Jessica wasn't around. We hadn't talked much since the "Lenore" disaster nine months before. He said that my behavior then _had_ been a betrayal, but a finite one. It happens. (Not "it happens" meaning that it's _okay_, but that it _happens_; moral agents keep accounts; [you forgive, but don't forget](/2020/Dec/liability/).)
-
-I got to meet my neoreactionary Twitter mutual, who held the distinction of having been banned from the _Slate Star Codex_ comment section ["for reasons of total personal caprice"](https://archive.md/sRfBj#selection-1633.27-1633.64). I wore my _Quillette_ T-shirt. He offered to buy me a drink. I said I didn't drink, but he insisted that getting drunk was the ritual by which men established trust. I couldn't argue with that, and ended up having a glass and a half of wine while we talked for a couple hours.
-
-So much of my intellectual life for the past five years had been shaped by the fight to keep mere heresies on the shared map, that it was a nice change to talk to an out-and-out _apostate_, with whom none of none of my ingrained defensive motions were necessary. (I just want to restore the moral spirit of 2008 liberalism but with better epistemology; he wants to bring back [_coverture_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture) on the grounds that women of the Eurasian subspecies of humanity haven't exercised mate choice in 10,000 years and aren't being helped by starting now.) There was one moment when I referred to the rationalists as my guys, and instinctively disclaimed, "and of course, we're mostly guys." He pointed out that I didn't need to tell _him_ that.
-
-------
-
In October 2021, Jessica Taylor [published a post about her experiences at MIRI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe), making analogies between sketchy social pressures she had experienced in the core rationalist community (around short AI timelines, secrecy, deference to community leaders, _&c._) and those reported in [Zoe Cramer's recent account of her time at Leverage Research](https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b).
Scott Alexander posted [a comment claiming to add important context](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=4j2GS4yWu6stGvZWs), essentially blaming Jessica's problems on her association with Michael Vassar, to the point of describing her psychotic episode as a "Vassar-related phenomenon" (!). Alexander accused Vassar of trying "'jailbreak'" people from normal social reality, which "involve[d] making them paranoid about MIRI/CFAR and convincing them to take lots of drugs". Yudkowsky posted [a comment that uncritically validated Scott's reliability as a narrator](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=x5ajGhggHky9Moyr8).
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff