I read all 122 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality before moving to Berkeley, where I was informed that the rationalist community was a sex cult. This was encouraging. I had spent most of my twenties being told that reading Harry Potter fanfiction was the reason I wasn’t having sex, and it was satisfying to discover that I had merely been doing the prerequisites.

I am thirty-four and have never had sex. I chose AI safety after comparing its apparent sexual outcomes with those of software quality assurance, which had supplied no pussy across eleven years of full-time employment. Several men in the Bay Area appeared to have both research positions and multiple girlfriends. I was prepared to acquire the research position if that was how the benefits were administered. My mother asked whether I actually believed an artificial intelligence would kill everyone. I told her I could not afford to resolve every uncertainty before acting.

HPMOR had already supplied the relevant framework. Harry encounters a civilization that regards death as inevitable and refuses to confuse an established outcome with a necessary one. My friends had made a similar error about my virginity. They recommended accepting myself, cultivating interests, and finding meaning outside sex. I already had interests. One of them was a six-hundred-thousand-word demonstration that exceptionally intelligent people should disregard advice from people who have made peace with failure. When my friend Chris said there was more to life than getting laid, I asked whether his wife knew he was willing to remove that feature from their relationship. He said he wasn’t discussing this again, which left his position insufficiently specified.

My first invitation was to dinner at a group house. I brought a bottle of wine and prepared to discuss the failure of conventional society to accommodate people like us. A woman named Mara said she liked my shirt. I explained that compliments often function as low-cost signals and asked how much evidence she intended me to extract from hers. She said she had meant that she liked the shirt. We then had a fairly productive discussion about whether people have introspective access to their own motives, although she spent much of it trying to pass me the rice.

Later, Mara mentioned having two partners. I asked whether she had an explicit admission procedure or whether the relationships had accumulated before she developed one. She said she loved them both. I accepted love as an important variable and asked how she had measured it before committing. Apparently they had spent time together and she had noticed how she felt. This struck me as a dangerously informal process for allocating years of access to pussy. I offered to help her construct a more reliable procedure. She said neither man had ever described their relationship that way. I recorded this as a difference in vocabulary, since both were having sex with her and I could not identify another interpretation under which their behavior made sense.

In HPMOR, Harry uses a Time-Turner to acquire six additional hours a day for study. I cannot reproduce the mechanism, but I have reproduced the allocation by eliminating exercise, recreational reading, and most telephone contact with my parents. The additional hours go toward alignment research and preparing for conversations with women. Before the next dinner, I wrote answers to forty-three questions a woman might ask about me. Mara asked how my week had been, which was not among them. I explained that a week contains too many events to summarize without knowing what decision the summary was intended to inform. She said she was just making conversation. I asked whether this was a prerequisite to another activity or the activity itself, because I needed to know how long to budget.

Aella’s work has helped me refine the geographic component. Her recent survey analysis accounts for proximity to her and the Bay Area when examining rationalists’ sexual preferences. I had already moved to the Bay Area and subsequently subscribed to her newsletter, although I recognize that a paid subscription may constitute a weaker social connection than friendship. I am tracking it separately. Daniel, an alignment researcher with two girlfriends, suggested that I attend events without expecting anything from the women there. I explained that I could behave identically to someone with no expectations while retaining an internal objective function that strongly preferred getting pussy. He said people could tell. This was a surprisingly strong claim about their ability to inspect a system whose source code I had not provided.

The deeper lesson of HPMOR is that intelligence needs something to protect. My future first sexual encounter is such a thing. It depends on civilization continuing to exist, on my remaining alive, and on at least one woman eventually recognizing that the relevant constraints can be jointly satisfied. This makes preventing human extinction directly relevant to my interests. At a forecasting workshop, I asked whether “humanity survives, but I die a virgin” was being counted as a successful outcome. The facilitator said the exercise concerned species-level survival. I agreed that this was a useful intermediate benchmark. I also asked whether anyone had estimated how many years I would need to become sufficiently important in the field for women to approach me, since that interval should inform our demands for a pause.

Daniel has now offered to introduce me to a reading group. He says I should begin by listening, get to know people, and contribute where I can. I have agreed to set out the chairs and wash up afterward, although neither activity requires the intellectual capabilities I came to Berkeley to deploy. Last week he left early because one of his girlfriends wanted him to come over. I asked what she wanted him to do there. He said she missed him. I have added being missed to the list of capabilities I need to develop and asked him how long he had been absent before the effect became detectable. He has not yet answered, so I am continuing to wash the dishes while keeping my phone where I can hear it.