Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Every "Every Bay Area House Party" Bay Area House Party, published by Richard Ngo on February 16, 2024 on LessWrong.

Inspired by a house party inspired by

Scott Alexander.

By the time you arrive in Berkeley, the party is already in full swing. You've come late because your reading of the polycule graph indicated that the first half would be inauspicious. But now you've finally made it to the social event of the season: the Every Bay Area House Party-themed house party.

The first order of the evening is to get a color-coded flirting wristband, so that you don't incur any accidental

micromarriages. You scan the menu of options near the door. There's the wristband for people who aren't interested in flirting; the wristband for those want to be flirted with, but will never flirt back; the wristband for those who only want to flirt with people who have different-colored wristbands; and of course the one for people who want to

glomarize disclosure of their flirting preferences. Finally you reach down and grab the last one: the wristband for those who only flirt with those who don't flirt with themselves. As you slip it over your wrist, you notice it's fastened in a Mobius strip.

You scan around the living room, trying to figure out who to talk to first. The host is sitting on the sofa, with two boxes attached to the front of her shirt. One is filled with money, the other empty. A guy next to her is surreptitiously one-boxing, but she presciently slaps his hand away without even looking. You decide to leave them to it. On the other side of a room, there's a lone postrationalist, surrounded by a flock of alignment researchers.

You hear a snatch of their conversation: "-but what part of your model rules out FOOM? Surely-". As they keep talking, the postrationalist looks increasingly uncomfortable, until eventually her interlocutor takes a breath and she seizes the opportunity to escape. You watch her flee down the street through the window labeled Outside View.

With the living room looking unpromising, you head into the kitchen to grab a drink. As you walk through the door, you hear a crunching sound from under your feet; glancing down, you see hundreds of paperclips scattered across the floor. On the table there are two big pitchers, carefully labeled. One says "For

contextualizers"; the other says "For decouplers and homophobes". You go straight for the former; it's impossible to do any good countersignalling by decoupling these days.

Three guys next to you out themselves as decouplers and/or homophobes, though, which gives you a perfect opportunity. You scoop up a few paperclips off the floor. "Hey, anyone want to

sell their soul for some paperclips?" The question makes them shuffle awkwardly - or maybe they were already doing that, you can't tell. "Come on, last person to sell their soul is a self-confessed bigot!" One of them opens his mouth, but before he can speak you're interrupted from the side.

"No no no, you don't want to buy those. Here, look." The newcomer, a guy with shaggy hair and a charizard t-shirt, brandishes a folder at you, opened up to a page full of graphs. "Buy my paperclip futures instead. As you can see, the expected number of paperclips in a few decades' time is astronomical. Far better to invest in these and -"

"Great," you interrupt. "Can't argue with your logic. I'll take three trillion."

"Got payment for that?"

"Yeah, this guy's soul," you say, jerking your thumb at your original victim. "It's also incredibly valuable in expectation, but

he's willing to hand it over to signal how much of a decoupler he is. Any objections?" There are none, so you're suddenly three trillion paperclips richer (in expectation).

Quest complete; time to explore further. You wander back to the living room and cast your eye over the crowd. Someone is wearing a real FTX ...