Dear @Aella_Girl, I’ve heard a lot of people seeming to think that I reject you wholesale, or that I don’t approve of you for being a sex worker. I want to set the record straight about why I do not want to work with you and have made certain comments, and offer the chance for a dialogue if you want. I also want to apologize. I don’t like you because of how my ex-husband, Ronny Fernandez, your plzdontkillus cofounder, would make sexual and romantic bids at you in front of me (presumably also in private) while we were in a monogamous relationship. This was his fault, and it contributed to our divorce, but because it caused me to resent you as well, I came to you about it, hoping to give you a chance to show you weren’t down with it. You were cold to me, dismissing my concerns with “he’s not my type.” At that point I realized we were not friends. It wasn’t your responsibility to stop him, but your priority was him and my feelings weren’t part of the equation. When you’re in an abusive relationship, it’s easy to feel more angry and betrayed at the people around you than at the abuser. I felt angry at you and many others from the rationalist community, as well as general rationalist culture, for supporting him. It’s not your fault that I was in an abusive relationship. It was his fault. Even though I think my feelings are valid, especially when you opted not to help me when I reached out, I recognize that I’m transferring anger onto you that really belongs to him. I saw you once say that I judged you for being a sex worker. I think you were remembering a time when I argued that, because Ronny had your nudes, you didn’t just have a platonic relationship. I have also critiqued the blurred line between your sex work and your intellectual content, where engaging with you without sex is still a form of flirtation and erotic connection, for a similar reason. My issue has never been with the sexuality. It had to do with how you and our mutual friends were insisting that I had no recourse against my partner cheating on me— that I was in the wrong for feeling jealous. Perhaps you regret this, or would regret this now that you know how I felt. It would make a big difference to me if you did. There are also subject matter disagreements I have with you on AI Safety work, and I wrote a lot of them up, but upon introspection I think that discussion would be pretty collegial if I saw you have empathy for a wound in me that’s still healing. The breach of trust was really a personal thing. I’m also writing to share my concern about your current relationship with Ronny. Ronny lovebombs you epically on main, and I think that could lead to epic devaluation and exploitation if you’re not careful. I have wondered if he’s pushed you to do and share more and more extreme things when I see him seeming to get dividends. I saw him negging you and undercutting you even when he and I were together, and he’s good at portraying that destruction of self-esteem as rationalist introspective virtue and fucky intimacy. No matter how annoyed I may feel at you, I would never want you to go through what he did to me. I’m going to unblock you, and you can DM or reply if you wish. Holly