The post is focused on (banter -> sex) mainly because that's the place where I most strongly feel I'm missing something, i.e. I am unable to picture how it would plausibly work. Banter as a general social skill, e.g. for making friends or just having fun conversations or breaking the ice with new people, is something I'm already quite comfortable with.

Indeed, much of the reason I was originally confused about the (banter -> sex) pipeline was because I have had so much of that kind of conversation for so many years, and over all that time it did not particularly seem to lead to sex.

I guess I should have directly asked: is the appeal of conversation before sex, for you, that it is a sexual turn on in its own right? Like, does good conversation with someone make you sexually aroused? Or is it something less direct than that, like e.g. you find it hard to be aroused by someone without first respecting them, or feeling curious about them, or something like that?

Not sure how much this applies to you specifically, but my go-to hypothesis when someone says "I am not very interested in sex with someone who I can't have a good conversation with" is "yeah sure you're not, I wonder what you'd say if you were already turned on by the person in question?". Like, using Aella's toy model of "ladybrain" and "hornybrain", "I am not very interested in sex with someone who I can't have a good conversation with" is a very central example of something ladybrain says. And like most of the things ladybrain says, one could jump through the hoop... or one could just get hornybrain amped up enough that ladybrain gives up and calls it a night.

On my models, when someone is actually turned on, a lot of their supposed barriers have a tendency to suddenly become quite flexible.

this feels like a subtweet of our recent paper on circuit sparsity

It isn't. This post has been in my drafts for ages and I just got around to slapping a passable coat of paint on it and shipping it.

One bit review: yes.

Low-bit-count info which I think would be most high-value for those who've already seen Sleep No More:

And there is no one less suited than a corpse for time-sensitive emergency situations. 

This is very false.

I have personally experienced people who outright panic in emergency situations, and a corpse would be far more helpful than a panicking person.

Some supplementary armchair psychologizing + navel gazing...

A core part of the recipe for a prototypical LWer seems to be: take a kid with a fairly high IQ (like, at least +2 sd, probably more). At some point, the kid notices that the authority figures in their life - teachers, bosses, parents, what have you - are just not that smart or competent. Indeed, relative to the capabilities of our prototypical LWer, it is basically true that the authority figures in their life are largely morons. (This was certainly my experience!)

… and a natural response to this is to reject the core dominance-hierarchies of society.

That, in turn, lifts the wool from the prototypical LWer’s eyes in many ways. They become able to apply an appropriate level of skepticism to authoritative sources of information, like e.g. academic papers. On the flip side, part of the cost is often losing the standard anti-akrasia mechanism.

Brief responses:

• I think the points about subagents within one human mind are largely factually correct.
• "I think [John is] pointing at the yum/yuck we feel now when thinking of something, not the projected yum we expect we'd feel later" is very importantly wrong as a description of what I'm pointing at (see Values Are Real Like Harry Potter), but again not cruxy to the point at hand. (Heroin is a go-to motivating example in that linked post.)
• Actual cruxy claim: the process which actually produces claims about Goodness, memetically, in our world, is mostly not a bargaining process which "just" aggregates values. It biases heavily towards memeticity, even when memetic fitness is anticorrelated with the values of all the agents involved. (Think e.g. Toxoplasma of Rage.)
• It would indeed be useful to have some term for the values which would pop out of some unbiased process of bargaining and value aggregation at a societal scale. That process does not currently exist, and consequently there is no standard mainstream word which is actually-in-practice used to refer to such values. Conflating that concept with "good" brings in unearned baggage/connotations/associations.

Indeed, good catch. Fixed.

Separate from the cringe, I do also see little object-level reason to go, at least for me. The signal to noise ratio at noob-dominated events is pretty bad, EA branding specifically tends to make it worse, and if I'm just going to restrict to people I already know anyway then I can just talk to them outside of such events.