Knowingless
knowingless.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2018
An anonymous rationalist-adjacent writer who analyzes sex work, dating, power dynamics, and online community behavior in a data-minded way.
What HN saysHN links it in threads on sex work, parasocial relationships, and rationalist communities; commenters mostly use it as a reference point, with little direct judgment of the writing.
36HN people shared it
19linked it in comments
21stories submitted
1.2Kstory points
8 months agolast shared
2018people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1[NSFW] Maximizing Your Slut Impact: An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling8 people · 37 points · first shared 2018 · 5 comments on HN
- 2Overly analytical guide to escorting4 people · 829 points · first shared 2021 · 440 comments on HN
- 3Internet Communities: Otters vs. Possums (2017)4 people · 65 points · first shared 2020 · 36 comments on HN
- 4Power imbalances and sex2 people · 171 points · first shared 2018 · 292 comments on HN
- 5Frame Control2 people · 38 points · first shared 2021 · 21 comments on HN
- 6What I Learned from My Date-Me Experiment2 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 7Homepage2 people · first shared 2022
- 8Get my eggs2 people · first shared 2022
- 9Choosing Insecurity (2017)1 people · 20 points · first shared 2022 · 31 comments on HN
- 10How common is sex trafficking?1 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 11Political Compass Fetishes1 people · 3 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Blame-Game Theory1 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 13Cold and Warm Cultures1 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 14The Iron Price1 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 15The Enlightenment Interviews1 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
vwoolf · 2022-12-30
It's also possible that the woman you know is, for predominantly genetic or personality reasons, highly sexed and sociosexually unrestricted, and her parents' efforts at best delayed some matters. There's a line of thinking, articulated in Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and elsewhere, that a large component of personality is innate and parents spend way too much time trying to micro-shape their kids.
There is an interesting writer and tweeter named Aella: https://knowingless.com/ who has described at length how she was born into a fundamentalist Christian family, found herself doing work she hated in a factory at 19, and escaped it via nude camming and then sex work (both of which she likes a lot, relative to alternatives). She's tweeted about how her mom appears to LOVE the trad Christian life, and how Aella and some of her siblings hate it. Who is "right?" Maybe no one: people's personal propensities and desires vary in many ways that appear to be genetic in origin, even if their expressions may change across cultures, and this may also include in matters of sex.
There are lots of pseudo-Freudian theories about how the way one is raised affects one's adolescent and adult sex life but I'm not sure any of those theories are true.
TheOtherHobbes · 2026-01-13
There's a strong parasocial element to traditional prostitution, although it's used more by high-end "escorts" who deliberately cultivate conversational skills. So none of this is new.
"My default strategy was this: I would invite the man in, we’d sit down and talk for a while. I’d establish physical contact in the conversation by touching his hand when laughing at a joke, or crossing my leg so it bumped into his. I would become increasingly charmed, utterly fascinated by his life, and I asked him to explain to me concepts I already knew (remember, they like you smart in order to validate their identity as a man who likes smart women, and they still love teaching you things)."
https://knowingless.com/2021/10/19/becoming-a-whorelord-the-overly-ana…
Animats · 2025-10-06
Aella [1] studies that. She's an escort who is into statistical analysis. She did very well on OnlyFans, after analyzing what men wanted with questionnaires and Python programs. Now she spends more time on figuring out what men and woman really do what, which is not what most people think.
[1] https://knowingless.com/
JamesBarney · 2021-06-02
Here is an interesting and insightful blog post by someone who was abused as a child, but due to being homeschooled didn't realize she was abused until a year after leaving home. And once she realized she had been abused she started suddenly experiencing an enormous amount of anxiety and depression.
https://knowingless.com/2018/09/21/trauma-narrative/
roenxi · 2025-02-01
My favourite part about the rationalists is that they are a completely normal community apart from the rationalism. You'd think a group of people devoted to being rational would be a group of monk-like beings, cerebral, disconnected from the concerns of the flesh.
Instead we get this weird hotbed of fanfiction, cults, wild sex crime allegations, financial schemes so brazen they almost wouldn't qualify as fraud and a vague sense of some sort of group that are capable of any evil. Plus I can't stop laughing at the idea of Aella as "that rationalist hooker" [0] - a combination of words which never fails to make me chuckle.
The whole scene really deserves some sort of film, book, video game or something. I can't get a vision out of my head where some straitlaced person realises rationalists are involved and their face twists in horror. Keeping an eye on them over the years the communities that grew up around LessWrong really are as good as any work of fiction. Plus they're doing their best to make the world better and maybe people will learn something about Bayesianism, who knows.
[0] https://knowingless.com/about/
TheAceOfHearts · 2023-04-20
Twitter [0] explicitly allows sexual content:
> You can share graphic content and consensually produced adult nudity and sexual behavior content within your Tweets, provided that you mark this media as sensitive.
But since we're on the topic, one social media service that you didn't mention is TikTok. I haven't seen anyone write about this and find it a bit fascinating. Although TikTok claim that sexual content isn't allowed, a lot of adult sex workers continuously skirt or outright ignore the rules. Some sex worker's strategy seems to be to continuously create multiple new accounts, as new accounts have a time period and size limit where growth and reach is really easy in order to get creators initially hooked. Two trends I've encountered are women flashing their vaginal lips through a see-through dress with a backlight and women flashing their breasts on reflective background items while seeming to engage in some mundane activity. But even the sex workers that don't engage in blatant TOS violations clearly create content to lead you towards their OnlyFans page. A breakdown of the evolution of the sex worker advertisement meta on TikTok is a YouTube video waiting to be made, especially as TikTok dies off and the strategies no longer remain viable as a vehicle for growth. A modern-day version of Aella's classic "Maximizing Your Slut Impact: An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling" [1].
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/media-policy
[1]…
verdverm · 2026-03-10
She does have a couple of free questionnaires after this section to get entered into the free pass pool
https://knowingless.com/get-my-eggs/
PaulHoule · 2025-05-28
See this disaster: https://knowingless.com/2021/11/15/what-i-learned-from-my-date-me-expe… my understanding is that four years later she is still single and offering $100,000 of her OnlyFans earnings to someone who can help her find a partner.
nestorD · 2022-07-31
She also has a very good blog with further data analysis on the subject: https://knowingless.com/old-posts-full-archive/
bowsamic · 2022-05-27
Hmm
https://knowingless.com/get-my-eggs/
> Get My Eggs
> I think my genes are wonderful, I’d like to see more of them in the world, and I don’t have any immediate plans for reproducing myself.
> If you’re interested in using my eggs to reproduce, I’m down to discuss this in exchange for payment for my time and fear of needles. I have ancestry, health testing, and family history I can share.
> Contact me at [email protected]; sometimes my responses go to spam, so be sure to check spam!
wiseowise · 2022-05-13
Otters and possums.
https://knowingless.com/2017/05/02/internet-communities-otters-vs-poss…
bschne · 2021-12-02
Reminded me of this I read recently and found quite fascinating — http://knowingless.com/2021/11/27/frame-control/
selfhoster11 · 2021-11-06
I invite you to read this article: https://knowingless.com/2017/05/02/internet-communities-otters-vs-poss… I suspect that the ban-happy communities you're seeing is the result of the otters being dominant on those particular servers, and trying to keep the server focused.
slyall · 2021-10-20
I posted a similar article by the same author a couple of years ago called "An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling" but it got flagged to death
https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impact-an-over…
cabalamat · 2021-07-20
> Sites like OnlyFans could have mandatory training about not revealing sensitive details
That's a practical proposal that would help.
Onlyfans creator Aella did a guide on camgirling a few years back: https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impact-an-over…
orangecat · 2020-09-02
Here's a detailed writeup from a successful camgirl. It's way more than lighting.
https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impact-an-over…
Pamar · 2020-09-02
I suggest reading this essay for some insight on the topic: https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impact-an-over…
tulunsutao · 2019-11-01
A sci-fi tale in which a man is resurrected using technology:
https://knowingless.com/2016/08/20/you-wake-up-on-a-table/
reducesuffering · 2022-01-19
Nonsense. Aella grew up in an extremely fundamentalist Christian household. We're talking 'non-Christians lead to the devil, don't be friends with them"-type. It is absolutely seriously uncomfortable breaking up your entire programmed worldview from that.
"I grew up in an isolated, homeschooled environment. I’d moved up to northern Idaho in an attempt to go to college, but my parents were very “use your bootstraps” people and wouldn’t help me financially or cosign on any loans. They also made too much money for me to qualify for financial aid, so I was screwed; a few months into college I got an ominous letter and had to drop out shortly afterwards.
I’d been brought up with the expectation of being a submissive housewife – but here I was, 19 years old, no support system, education, or future, and with an unsettling cultural disconnect from everyone around me. Everyone used words I didn’t know, references to movies I hadn’t seen, attitudes drawn from music I hadn’t heard.
So I worked whatever I could. I occasionally went hungry, unable to afford food. I slept on a mattress on the floor in a large group house. I ended up working very long hours at a factory with no windows where I wore a uniform and stood on my feet all day and saw the sun only on weekends."
https://knowingless.com/2020/05/25/readjusting-to-porn/
Luckily, her intellect allowed her to figure a way out of what would usually be a tough upbringing to bounce back from. But "absurdly comfortable"??