I am currently holding a rough hypothesis of “when someone is interested in exploring psychosis and psychedelics, they become more interested in Michael Vassar’s ideas”, in that the former causes the latter, rather than the other way around.
I can attest to something kind of like this; in mid-late 2020, I
already knew Michael (but had been out of touch with him for a while) and was interested in his ideas (but hadn’t seriously thought about them in a while)
started doing some weird intense introspection (no drugs involved) that led to noticing some deeply surprising things & entering novel sometimes-disruptive mental states
noticed that Michael/Ben/Jessica were talking about some of the same things I was picking up on, and started reading & thinking a lot more about their online writing
(IIRC, this noticing was not entirely conscious — to some extent it was just having a much stronger intuition that what they were saying was interesting)
didn’t directly interact with any of them during this period, except for one early phone conversation with Ben which helped me get out of a very unpleasant state (that I’d gotten into by, more or less, decompartmentalizing some things about myself that I was unprepared to deal with)
From my conversations with Vassar, I think there’s a sense of “There’s a lot that’s possible to do in the world, if you just ignore social conventions” that’s downstream from being accepting what Vassar says. A person who previously didn’t take any psychedelics because of social conventions, might become more open to taking psychedelics and thinking about whether it makes sense to take them.
Ah, again a situation where ethical concerns are an obstacle to science! We obviously need to ban Michael from a randomly selected half of LW meetups, and invite him to the other half.
Thanks again.
I am currently holding a rough hypothesis of “when someone is interested in exploring psychosis and psychedelics, they become more interested in Michael Vassar’s ideas”, in that the former causes the latter, rather than the other way around.
I can attest to something kind of like this; in mid-late 2020, I
already knew Michael (but had been out of touch with him for a while) and was interested in his ideas (but hadn’t seriously thought about them in a while)
started doing some weird intense introspection (no drugs involved) that led to noticing some deeply surprising things & entering novel sometimes-disruptive mental states
noticed that Michael/Ben/Jessica were talking about some of the same things I was picking up on, and started reading & thinking a lot more about their online writing
(IIRC, this noticing was not entirely conscious — to some extent it was just having a much stronger intuition that what they were saying was interesting)
didn’t directly interact with any of them during this period, except for one early phone conversation with Ben which helped me get out of a very unpleasant state (that I’d gotten into by, more or less, decompartmentalizing some things about myself that I was unprepared to deal with)
From my conversations with Vassar, I think there’s a sense of “There’s a lot that’s possible to do in the world, if you just ignore social conventions” that’s downstream from being accepting what Vassar says. A person who previously didn’t take any psychedelics because of social conventions, might become more open to taking psychedelics and thinking about whether it makes sense to take them.
Ah, again a situation where ethical concerns are an obstacle to science! We obviously need to ban Michael from a randomly selected half of LW meetups, and invite him to the other half.