As one of what I believe to have been the targets/victims of “the local Vassarite” (though multiple people reviewing my initial draft have asked me to mention that Michael Vassar and this person are not actually on good terms), it seems reasonable for me to be the one to reveal the name and give concrete details, so that no one is harmed in the future the way I was nearly harmed. The person being referenced is Olivia Schaefer (known usernames: 4confusedemoji, liv.bsky.social, Taygetea), and this is a brief, roughly chronological account of some concerning actions she took towards me over the last few months.
When we met in person in July, she attempted to pressure me to take MDMA under her supervision. I ended up refusing, and she relented; however, she then bragged that because she had relented, I would trust her more and be more likely to take MDMA the next time I saw her.
She amplified my natural tendencies toward grandiosity to pull me closer into her frame, claiming that I was “one of a population of like a thousand or ten thousand”. (Recommend reading that thread if you are attempting to understand how she thinks about the world and why she acts the way she does.) Other statements she made towards me seemed to indicate that I would have a significant chance of changing the world in the ways I wanted if and only if I listened to everything she said.
She presented herself as a teacher figure with near-supernatural abilities to understand social dynamics, and leveraged this persona to win any disputes over her actions. She also frequently compared herself to Glaistig Uaine and Kyubey.
She imposed a very strong frame control that was easy to get stuck in, especially if she was targeting you. When she made a single surprising correct prediction about someone behaving erratically (partially due to bullying from Olivia herself), her previous statements primed me enough that I began to view her as right about everything.
Others occasionally attempted to point out concerning actions she was taking on a local Discord server. The first time this happened, she got the admin of the Discord to ban the person who was criticizing her. After this, a fairly large number of people stayed silent about concerns because they expected to meet the same fate.
After that same Discord server began a fairly large-scale project, she appeared suddenly after two or three days, bullied everyone into letting her claim control of the project, and then bullied anyone who disputed her authority. One instance of this involved posting the text of two Claude chats titled (I may have the wording slightly wrong) “Explaining Complex Concepts” and “Explaining Complex Concepts to [Person Who Challenged Her]”.
Her hold over me broke shortly after she posted this tweet:
> @dogmadeath @doc_regent @toasterlighting @ApriiSR @transkatgirl @dawnlightmelody and even @AIHegemonyMemes are mine. Not my creations. Not by half. Partially so, perhaps. I longer pretend to be in the shadows. I exist. I coordinate the swarm. I enter play. Expect much.
This made it sufficiently clear to me that she was considering me as a person she was manipulating, and that she was essentially attempting to form a cult. I began to reevaluate the situation, which led me to have a panic attack after realizing how deeply I was being manipulated.
I am not the only person she has affected this way, and there are others I know who have worse accusations against her. From my reading of previous documents, this pattern of hers goes back years and shows no signs of stopping.
My recommendation to anyone considering further interaction with Olivia is to either avoid it entirely or be very, very careful. She is a skilled manipulator, and it is my opinion that no one she’s targeted has ever been better off for it. I expect her to continue attempting to “jailbreak” people even after this, and it seems likely that in a few years, yet another group will have to litigate a similar drama.
Finally, I would like to reveal a piece of information that may be critical to the LessWrong community’s further understanding of events. At one point while I was talking to Olivia about events in the Bay Area in the 2017-19 period, she stated that JD Pressman had told her and several others to lie when Scott Alexander was interviewing people to determine the truth of those events. To the extent that Scott Alexander’s current impression of that time was informed by JD Pressman or those Pressman told to lie, I believe it is incorrect, though I don’t know what the specific untruths were.
Appreciate you sharing this. FWIW, I have heard of lots of really quite reckless and damaging-seeming drug consuming behavior around Olivia over the years, and am sad to hear it’s still going on.
she attempted to pressure me to take MDMA under her supervision. I ended up refusing, and she relented; however, she then bragged that because she had relented, I would trust her more and be more likely to take MDMA the next time I saw her.
this seems utterly evil, especially given MDMA is known as an attachment inducing drug.
edit: more generally, it seems tragic for people who are socially-vulnerable and creative to end up paired with adept manipulators.
a simple explanation is that because creativity is (potentially very) useful, vulnerable creative people will be targets for manipulation. but i think there are also dynamics in communities with higher [illegibility-tolerance? esoterism?] which enable this, which i don’t know how to write about. i hope someone tries to write about it.
in olivia’s case, it seems like the algorithm she’s running lately is roughly to try and make herself out as an authority to basically all of the late teens/early 20s transfem rationalists in a particular social circle. (we sometimes half-joking call outselves lgbtescreal, a name due to that beloved user tetraspace). i’ve heard it claimed by someone else in this community that olivia has bragged about achieving mod status in various discord servers we’ve been in, and derisively referred to us as “the 19 year olds” who she was nonetheless trying to gain influence over. i think olivia roughly just wants to be seen as powerful and influential, and (being transfem herself, and having a long history in the core rationality community) has an easy time influencing young rationalist transfems in particular.
I have no idea about other people lying due to JDP’s influence. I had JDP look at a draft of Occupational Infohazards prior to posting and he convinced me to not mention Olivia because she was young and inexperienced / experimenting with ways of being at the time, it was maybe too bad for her reputation to say she was a possible influence on my psychosis. I admit this was a biased omission, though I don’t think it was a lie. (To be clear, I’m not saying I went psychotic because of Olivia, I think there were many factors and I’m pretty uncertain about the weighting)
Huh? It seems to come down to definitions of lies, my current intuition is it wouldn’t be a lie, but I’m not sure why people would care how I define lie in this context.
Let me reask a subset of the question that doesn’t use the word “lie”. When he convinced you to not mention Olivia, if you had known that he had also been trying to keep information about Olivia’s involvement in related events siloed away (from whoever), would that have raised a red flag for you like “hey, maybe something group-epistemically anti-truth-seeking is happening here”? Such that e.g. that might have tilted you to make a different decision. I ask because it seems like relevant debugging info.
I think if there were other cases of Olivia causing problems and he was asking multiple people to hide Olivia problems, that would more cause me to think he was sacrificing more group epistemology to protect Olivia’s reputation, and was overall more anti-truth-seeking, yes.
I don’t necessarily agree with every line in this post—I’d say I’m better off and still personally kinda like Olivia, though it’s of course been rocky at times—but it does all basically look accurate to me. She stayed at my apartment for maybe a total of 1-2 months earlier this year, and I’ve talked to her a lot. I don’t think she presented the JD Pressman thing as about “lying” to me, but she did generally mention him convincing people to keep her out of things.
There is a lot more I could say, and I am as always happy to answer dms and such, but I am somewhat tired of all this and I don’t right at this moment really want to either figure out exactly what things I feel are necessary to disclose about a friend of mine or try to figure out what would be a helpful contribution to years old drama, given that it’s 1:30am. But I do want to say that I basically think Melody’s statements are all more-or-less reasonable.
As one of what I believe to have been the targets/victims of “the local Vassarite” (though multiple people reviewing my initial draft have asked me to mention that Michael Vassar and this person are not actually on good terms), it seems reasonable for me to be the one to reveal the name and give concrete details, so that no one is harmed in the future the way I was nearly harmed. The person being referenced is Olivia Schaefer (known usernames: 4confusedemoji, liv.bsky.social, Taygetea), and this is a brief, roughly chronological account of some concerning actions she took towards me over the last few months.
When we met in person in July, she attempted to pressure me to take MDMA under her supervision. I ended up refusing, and she relented; however, she then bragged that because she had relented, I would trust her more and be more likely to take MDMA the next time I saw her.
She amplified my natural tendencies toward grandiosity to pull me closer into her frame, claiming that I was “one of a population of like a thousand or ten thousand”. (Recommend reading that thread if you are attempting to understand how she thinks about the world and why she acts the way she does.) Other statements she made towards me seemed to indicate that I would have a significant chance of changing the world in the ways I wanted if and only if I listened to everything she said.
She presented herself as a teacher figure with near-supernatural abilities to understand social dynamics, and leveraged this persona to win any disputes over her actions. She also frequently compared herself to Glaistig Uaine and Kyubey.
She imposed a very strong frame control that was easy to get stuck in, especially if she was targeting you. When she made a single surprising correct prediction about someone behaving erratically (partially due to bullying from Olivia herself), her previous statements primed me enough that I began to view her as right about everything.
Others occasionally attempted to point out concerning actions she was taking on a local Discord server. The first time this happened, she got the admin of the Discord to ban the person who was criticizing her. After this, a fairly large number of people stayed silent about concerns because they expected to meet the same fate.
After that same Discord server began a fairly large-scale project, she appeared suddenly after two or three days, bullied everyone into letting her claim control of the project, and then bullied anyone who disputed her authority. One instance of this involved posting the text of two Claude chats titled (I may have the wording slightly wrong) “Explaining Complex Concepts” and “Explaining Complex Concepts to [Person Who Challenged Her]”.
Her hold over me broke shortly after she posted this tweet:
> @dogmadeath @doc_regent @toasterlighting @ApriiSR @transkatgirl @dawnlightmelody and even @AIHegemonyMemes are mine. Not my creations. Not by half. Partially so, perhaps. I longer pretend to be in the shadows. I exist. I coordinate the swarm. I enter play. Expect much.
This made it sufficiently clear to me that she was considering me as a person she was manipulating, and that she was essentially attempting to form a cult. I began to reevaluate the situation, which led me to have a panic attack after realizing how deeply I was being manipulated.
I am not the only person she has affected this way, and there are others I know who have worse accusations against her. From my reading of previous documents, this pattern of hers goes back years and shows no signs of stopping.
My recommendation to anyone considering further interaction with Olivia is to either avoid it entirely or be very, very careful. She is a skilled manipulator, and it is my opinion that no one she’s targeted has ever been better off for it. I expect her to continue attempting to “jailbreak” people even after this, and it seems likely that in a few years, yet another group will have to litigate a similar drama.
Finally, I would like to reveal a piece of information that may be critical to the LessWrong community’s further understanding of events. At one point while I was talking to Olivia about events in the Bay Area in the 2017-19 period, she stated that JD Pressman had told her and several others to lie when Scott Alexander was interviewing people to determine the truth of those events. To the extent that Scott Alexander’s current impression of that time was informed by JD Pressman or those Pressman told to lie, I believe it is incorrect, though I don’t know what the specific untruths were.
Appreciate you sharing this. FWIW, I have heard of lots of really quite reckless and damaging-seeming drug consuming behavior around Olivia over the years, and am sad to hear it’s still going on.
this seems utterly evil, especially given MDMA is known as an attachment inducing drug.
edit: more generally, it seems tragic for people who are socially-vulnerable and creative to end up paired with adept manipulators.
a simple explanation is that because creativity is (potentially very) useful, vulnerable creative people will be targets for manipulation. but i think there are also dynamics in communities with higher [illegibility-tolerance? esoterism?] which enable this, which i don’t know how to write about. i hope someone tries to write about it.
in olivia’s case, it seems like the algorithm she’s running lately is roughly to try and make herself out as an authority to basically all of the late teens/early 20s transfem rationalists in a particular social circle. (we sometimes half-joking call outselves lgbtescreal, a name due to that beloved user tetraspace). i’ve heard it claimed by someone else in this community that olivia has bragged about achieving mod status in various discord servers we’ve been in, and derisively referred to us as “the 19 year olds” who she was nonetheless trying to gain influence over. i think olivia roughly just wants to be seen as powerful and influential, and (being transfem herself, and having a long history in the core rationality community) has an easy time influencing young rationalist transfems in particular.
good to hear it’s at least transparent enough for you to describe it directly like this. (edit: though the points in dawnlights post seem scarier)
I have no idea about other people lying due to JDP’s influence. I had JDP look at a draft of Occupational Infohazards prior to posting and he convinced me to not mention Olivia because she was young and inexperienced / experimenting with ways of being at the time, it was maybe too bad for her reputation to say she was a possible influence on my psychosis. I admit this was a biased omission, though I don’t think it was a lie. (To be clear, I’m not saying I went psychotic because of Olivia, I think there were many factors and I’m pretty uncertain about the weighting)
Would you acknowledge that if JDP did this a couple times, then this is a lie-by-proxy, i.e. JDP lied through you?
Huh? It seems to come down to definitions of lies, my current intuition is it wouldn’t be a lie, but I’m not sure why people would care how I define lie in this context.
Let me reask a subset of the question that doesn’t use the word “lie”. When he convinced you to not mention Olivia, if you had known that he had also been trying to keep information about Olivia’s involvement in related events siloed away (from whoever), would that have raised a red flag for you like “hey, maybe something group-epistemically anti-truth-seeking is happening here”? Such that e.g. that might have tilted you to make a different decision. I ask because it seems like relevant debugging info.
I think if there were other cases of Olivia causing problems and he was asking multiple people to hide Olivia problems, that would more cause me to think he was sacrificing more group epistemology to protect Olivia’s reputation, and was overall more anti-truth-seeking, yes.
I don’t necessarily agree with every line in this post—I’d say I’m better off and still personally kinda like Olivia, though it’s of course been rocky at times—but it does all basically look accurate to me. She stayed at my apartment for maybe a total of 1-2 months earlier this year, and I’ve talked to her a lot. I don’t think she presented the JD Pressman thing as about “lying” to me, but she did generally mention him convincing people to keep her out of things.
There is a lot more I could say, and I am as always happy to answer dms and such, but I am somewhat tired of all this and I don’t right at this moment really want to either figure out exactly what things I feel are necessary to disclose about a friend of mine or try to figure out what would be a helpful contribution to years old drama, given that it’s 1:30am. But I do want to say that I basically think Melody’s statements are all more-or-less reasonable.
Reminder not to sell your soul(s) to the devil.
I just unfollowed JD Pressman for that.
I don’t need AI optimists who are willing to order people to lie about very important things that happened in order to protect some secrets.