I've never seen Aella as a groomer. What I see her as is a useful idiot that is helping usher the normalization of child abuse with her dumb ""research"". She assures actual creeps/pedos that their fetishes are totally normal and fine, and that they don't need help, it's society that needs to stop being so prudish! She downplays abuse ("I was sexually abused and I turned out fine!" "Native tribes are naked in front of kids and they are fine!"etc) not because she's a groomer that wants to abuse kids, but because she's incredibly dumb and too far up her own ass to realize that she has a bunch of creepy simps gassing her up and telling her how uber smart her disgusting opinions are.
yes, this is definitely accurate and tracks with what I know.
for me, the big giveaway was how much she downplayed the risk of talking about drugs in public.
college kids understand how to speak around this topic, they're used to talking about drinking before they're 21 and know ways to sidestep discussion. LessWrongs are on average 25-40 years old, many of these people are late bloomers and don't have the intuition you learn when e.g. hiding vodka from your dorm inspector, you can't replicate this environment in your late 20s because the consequences are too high. (also, a bunch of these people flew in from the bay area; Texas police are to say the least nothing like Berkeley police, and your intuition of what is 'fine' in Berkeley may be way off here.)
I believe I quite literally said "the rate of autism in this scene is too high to risk some of the community talking about LSD and other schedule I drugs in public, if there was indeed a cop trying to sting anyone they would be a lamb to a slaughter."
the counter to this is, of course: "what cop is going to be in a park behind HEB Central Market asking weird adults about drugs?" idk, a guy with a quota? I get the logic — but why risk it? you can talk about it literally any other time.
and note that I am pro-decriminalization, pro-experimentation and have both done and studied more drugs than aella has, so I was saying this
as someone who has been there. the more conservative members of the group also agreed with my reasoning and I think that alignment speaks for itself. they also would not have said anything if I didn't, because they knew they were in the minority otherwise.
aella's response was just a callous "well, I'm still going to talk about it." which of course means everyone else is going to follow her lead, since they know if she's doing it, it's an unavoidable topic. her olive branch, which I believe I mentioned before, was that she'd pay $10,000 if someone was jailed. this is like that meme — "tell me you've never known anyone charged with a felony without telling me you've never known anyone charged with a felony." it was unbelievable.
this is why we had groupchats that talked about her, or why I'm using websites like this: on paper she'll say she wants to be directly told what's up, but if you do that it's a question of when not if you're going to get banned/mobbed/canceled/whatever — and she strategically picks her environments so that this is the case. would I have posted all of this on lesswrong if that
were possible? yes, absolutely, but good fucking luck with that.
aella is one of the most stubborn people I have ever met, and I'm quite extroverted and have met a lot of people. she is able to feign autistic mannerisms because she refuses to understand certain social norms, not because she can't. she gets away with acting like she's modest because she lets people flame her on twitter if it's not in a way that compromises her image. but, make no mistake, this is a front; IRL when you talk to her you're talking to a wall.
