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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34914 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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The fact that anybody pays any mind to these absolutely ridiculous “polls” is embarrassing. It is absolutely no surprise to me, and I don’t think should be a surprise to anyone, that unhappy men are the ones following this person around online and parroting her nonsense.

Setting aside the negative tone and adjectives about this character in the first paragraph, I have to agree on this. Don't understand what's the deal with this Aella person, first time I heard about her was here and then watched a recent podcast. My impression is, this is just a regular girl that escorts and do polls on twitter. Why people care so much. I can't find any other reason than 'simping'.

A lot of women in highly visible positions seem to be very much aligned with the progressive Zeitgeist in regarding rationalist adjacent spaces as *-ists. Aella seems to be an oddity in this regard. I am pretty sure if any other woman even makes a superficial attempt [1] at hearing out rationalist positions, she will build up a similar following of simps.

[1] By superficial attempt I do not mean to say anything about Aella. I don't follow her and don't know anything about her.

She's simply a semi-famous figure in the rationalist community. Even here she's revered a bit, with a moderator describing her as "friend-of-the-motte", despite her never having commented on /r/TheMotte or even registered on here as far as I'm aware. I don't even know of any evidence that she even knows of the existence of this place. Then there are people like Scott Alexander, who describes her as a "national treasure", and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who brags that he can satisfy her because he's immortal.

If I had to wager a guess, she got her notoriety from doing a ton of provocative Twitter polls, because the easiest way to get engagement is to get negative engagement. It's why PETA is infamous and behaves the way they do.

I'm pretty sure she got her notoriety from certain photos with lawn gnomes.

The polling--and the SSC comments, and the pingbacks from other rationalist figures--came later.

Correct. She was the gnome-fucker on reddit before she was anything else.

I'm still not sure why she would be called friend of the motte. That just seems like consensus building. "This is a person we all know and love." Not exactly.

You're right, she was on the podcast. The Bailey Podcast E012: Polyamory (Feat. Aella).

I'll take it. That's close enough for my book.

I honestly took calling her a "friend of the motte" as a joke. At least half a joke. She's brought up a lot, but she's a polarizing figure.

It's an applause light. "Oh cool, I've been told that she's a friend of The Motte! That means she should be trustworthy!" It'd make sense to place her in as much a positive light as possible, because the very next thing in the post is the author attacking the arguments of Aella's debate opponent.

Some of us were raised in a time when a regular girl would never escort, and never ever do polls on twitter.

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