How does a rationalist make a baby?

The Calculated Search for a Life Partner

There are people who live by intuition and others who try to write rules for everything. Ayla belongs to the second camp: a former Calvinist, factory worker, and cam performer who gradually taught herself to make big personal decisions like experiments. Her life has the shape of a social science project—each relationship, job change, and viral stunt an observation to be measured. The through-line is not shock value but method: she treats love, sex, and family like problems to be probed, scored, and iterated upon.

From religious scripts to first principles

Ayla grew up in a professional evangelical household where theological certainty was a form of social training. The family dinner table was a classroom for arguing, defending, and reciting positions—religion as intellectual combat. Leaving that environment left a double vacancy: she no longer accepted the answers she’d been given, and she also lacked a replacement moral map. That vacuum invited experimentation. Instead of a new creed, she found a process—one that prized transparent reasoning and constant updating over allegiance to identity.

Economic escape routes and the internet as laboratory

After a stint on a factory assembly line, Ayla discovered camming and then the broader economy of the internet. What began as a pragmatic choice to pay rent became a space for creative iteration. She learned to test variables—tone of voice, pacing, costume and performance—and to read feedback in real time when viewers tipped or ignored her. The internet, for her, was a feedback loop: behavior in, measurable outcomes out.

Rationalist community as process, not dogma

Rationalism, as Ayla encountered it, was less an ideology than an ethos: a shared commitment to finding truth by refining methods of thinking. Meetups in the Bay Area evolved into group houses and potlucks where residents treated ideas like lab equipment. Where religion historically offered set answers, this network offered a ritual of questioning—structured curiosity rather than catechism. The result for Ayla was rehabilitating thought itself: identity loosened its hold, and she discovered social environments that rewarded changing your mind.

Embodiment experiments and the limits of intellectual communities

Not all experiments were abstract. Ayla staged parties designed to force people out of their heads—one memorable attempt involved a masked, nude gathering meant to jolt rationalists into a different register of feeling. The stunt failed to produce the boisterous re-embodiment she imagined; attendees debated geopolitics in animal masks. The moment illustrated a recurring theme: experiments can fail in illuminating ways, exposing the gap between intention and human social habits.

Dating as an optimization problem

What is radical about Ayla’s approach is not that she wants love or children—those are universal aims—but that she treats the search as an engineering challenge. She built a multi-part survey to rank prospective partners by demographics, sexual compatibility, and values, adding decoy questions and weighting each axis. She used the output to decide whom to contact, and a seemingly unpromising candidate rose to the top of her algorithm and became the subject of a three-day first date. The experiment nudged a myth: connection does not require mysticism; it can be constructed, or at least found, through disciplined selection.

Prediction markets, crowdsourced matchmaking, and a $100K bounty

Ayla pushed the logic further by opening prediction markets about her own love life—letting strangers bet on whether she would reunite with an ex, for example—to get an honest second opinion against her own biases. Her most provocative move was to place a publicly announced bounty: $100,000 for anyone who recommended someone she would marry. She even sketched an extreme contingency—$10 million for someone willing to pay her to have and raise a child as a single mother—both to signal what trades she might accept and to draw unusual options into view.

Public experiments, privacy costs, and social data

Making private struggles public alters incentives and invites critique. Ayla’s willingness to post dating surveys and advertise a bounty makes her search legible and scalable, but also exposes her to ridicule and unsolicited advice. Yet she argues that public trials accelerate learning: failed attempts produce data and reduce the fog of individual guesswork. Her stance reframes embarrassment as the price of discovery rather than the end of a story.

Workable lives beyond conventional scripts

What emerges from this story is not an instruction manual but a permission slip. Conventional timelines for family and partnership assume a narrow pathway; Ayla’s path shows alternatives can be functional if treated with the same seriousness and transparency one brings to a job or a study. Whether by surveys, bets, or bounties, she seeks demonstrable outcomes instead of narratives: did the tactic move her closer to a stable partnership or a child?

Concluding reflection

There is an old question about whether method can replace mystery. In Ayla’s case method does not extinguish mystery; it relocates it. The gamble she makes is to trade the romantic myth of serendipity for a disciplined curiosity about cause and effect in human relationships. That trade is not purely instrumental—what it buys is clarity about what she values, and what she is willing to risk to have it. In the end, the work of living deliberately can look unromantic and brave at once, because to design your life is to accept both possible failure and a clearer testimony to what you tried.