Ben’s articles were easier to read for me; the general idea seems to be that people are sometimes hypocritical. Which I something I agree with, but it also doesn’t sound very surprising.
So I assume that this is the motte. Now is there a place where I could find the bailey, spelled out? I am tired of trying to decipher vague hints.
(My guess would be that the bailey is something like “everyone is 100% hypocritical about everything 100% of the time, all people are actually 100% stupid and evil; except maybe for the small group of people around Michael Vassar” or something like that. Which of course sounds silly when you put it this way, so it works better if you only make hints and let people connect the dots for themselves, preferably in an altered mind state; it helps if they were already mentally unstable so they only need a nudge.)
… those posts are saying much more specific things than ‘people are sometimes hypocritical’?
“Can crimes be discussed literally?”:
some kinds of hypocrisy (the law and medicine examples) are normalized
these hypocrisies are / the fact of their normalization is antimemetic (OK, I’m to some extent interpolating this one based on familiarity with Ben’s ideas, but I do think it’s both implied by the post, and relevant to why someone might think the post is interesting/important)
the usage of words like ‘crime’ and ‘lie’ departs from their denotation, to exclude normalized things
people will push back in certain predictable ways on calling normalized things ‘crimes’/‘lies’, related to the function of those words as both description and (call for) attack
“There is a clear conflict between the use of language to punish offenders, and the use of language to describe problems, and there is great need for a language that can describe problems. For instance, if I wanted to understand how to interpret statistics generated by the medical system, I would need a short, simple way to refer to any significant tendency to generate false reports. If the available simple terms were also attack words, the process would become much more complicated.”
This seems ‘unsurprising’ to me in, and only in, an antimemetic Everybody Knows sense.
“Guilt, Shame, and Depravity”:
hypocrisy is often implemented through internal dissociation (shame)
ashamed people form coalitions around a shared interest in hiding information
[some modeling of/claims about how these coalitions work]
[some modeling of the incentives/conditions that motivate guilt vs. shame]
This is a bit more detailed than ‘people are sometimes hypocritical’; and I don’t think of the existence of ashamed coalitions to cover up norm violations in general (as opposed to relatively-more-explicitly-coordinated coalitions to cover up more-specific kinds of violations) as a broadly unsurprising claim. The degree to which shame can involve forgetting one’s own actions & motives, which Ben describes, certainly felt like a big important surprise when I (independently, two years before that post) consciously noticed it in myself.
My guess would be that the bailey is something like “everyone is 100% hypocritical about everything 100% of the time, all people are actually 100% stupid and evil; except maybe for the small group of people around Michael Vassar” or something like that.
I haven’t picked up this vibe from them at all (in writing or in person); I have sometimes picked up a vibe of ‘we have uniquely/indispensably important insights’. YMMV, of course.
Thank you for the summary. I guess my bubble is more cynical than the average population, so I may underestimate how shocking similar thoughts would be for them. I might also add the replication crisis in science, etc.
Yes. The world is bad. Almost everything is broken. People don’t want to admit it. Those who understand how things work are often ashamed for their role in the system. Some respond by attacking those who point it out, or even those who merely refuse to participate in the same way.
...it still feels like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.
All these things, they make me feel sad. I feel bad about all the wasted opportunity to live better. I don’t model most people as evil, just… overwhelmed by all the things that are wrong, and their inability to do something against it. Well, many are too stupid to care. Some people are genuinely evil. Many are going along with the flow, wherever it takes them. Most of human behavior is probably determined by habit; if you grow up in a dysfunctional environment, it will become your normal, but if your twin grew up in a better environment, they would recognize it as better. Even now, there are people who name the unpleasant truths. People who spend a large part of their life fighting against some specific dysfunction. But the world is complicated, and problems too numerous.
So, what is that extra insight that I could gain by contemplating these things while taking drugs and listening to Vassar whispering dark thoughts into my ears?
I have sometimes picked up a vibe of ‘we have uniquely/indispensably important insights’.
Me too, but nothing specific. Maybe it’s like when you are high and you believe that you have amazing insights, but when you write them down and read them again when you are sober, there is nothing.
some kinds of hypocrisy (the law and medicine examples) are normalized
these hypocrisies are / the fact of their normalization is antimemetic (OK, I’m to some extent interpolating this one based on familiarity with Ben’s ideas, but I do think it’s both implied by the post, and relevant to why someone might think the post is interesting/important)
the usage of words like ‘crime’ and ‘lie’ departs from their denotation, to exclude normalized things
people will push back in certain predictable ways on calling normalized things ‘crimes’/‘lies’, related to the function of those words as both description and (call for) attack
“There is a clear conflict between the use of language to punish offenders, and the use of language to describe problems, and there is great need for a language that can describe problems. For instance, if I wanted to understand how to interpret statistics generated by the medical system, I would need a short, simple way to refer to any significant tendency to generate false reports. If the available simple terms were also attack words, the process would become much more complicated.”
Does it bother you that this is not what’s happening in many of the examples in the post? e.g., With “the American hospital system is built on lies.”
After sleeping on it, it seems to me that the topic were are talking about is “staring into the abyss”: whether, when, and how to do it properly, and for what outcome.
The easiest way is to not do it at all. Just pretend that everything is flowers and rainbows, and refuse to talk about the darker aspects of reality.
This is what we typically do with little children. A part of that is parental laziness: by avoiding difficult topics we avoid difficult conversations. But another part is that children are not cognitively ready to process nontrivial topics, so we try to postpone the debates about darker things until later, when they get the capability. Some lazy parents overdo it; some kids grow up living in a fairy tale world. Occasional glimpses of darkness can be dismissed as temporary exceptions to the general okay-ness of the world. “Grandma died, but now she is happy in Heaven.” At this level, people who try to disrupt the peace are dismissed relatively gently, accused of spoiling the mood and frightening the kids.
When this becomes impossible because the darkness pushes its way beyond our filters, the next lazy strategy is to downplay the darkness. Either it is not so bad, or there is some silver lining to everything. “Death gives meaning to life.” “The animals don’t mind dying so that we can have meat to eat; they understand it is their role in the system.” “Slavery actually benefits the blacks; they do not have the mental capacity to survive without a master.” “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” At this point the pushback against those trying to disrupt the peace is stronger; people are aware that their rationalizations are fragile. Luckily, we can reframe the rationalizations as a sign of maturity, and dismiss those who disagree with us as immature. “When you grow up, you will realize that...”
Another possible reaction is trying to join the abyss. Yes, bad things happen, but since they are inevitable, there is no point worrying about that. Heck, if there is a cosmic rule saying that things will always be as bad as possible, there is no point feeling guilty about contributing to the badness; if you won’t do it, someone else will! Resigning on your values is the true wisdom, and cynicism is how you signal being wise; trying to follow your values is immature. The reaction to people trying to follow their values is hostile, because (a) they make us seem bad in contrast, showing that following your values is actually possible… but if we succeed at destroying them, it proves that they were wrong, and (b) hey, there is nothing intrinsically bad at hurting people; life is suffering, sooner or later someone is going to teach you the lesson, it might as well be me, at least I will take some enjoyment from it.
Another reaction is throwing a tantrum. Yes, the abyss is there, and no, I am not going to make peace with it. I have no idea what should I do about that, but I know that I need to do something. So I am going to do some random thing; the more extreme the better, because it clearly signals that I am opposed to things being bad. Fight! Fight! And if all that happens as a result of my random fighting is that some innocent people get hurt and no problem actually gets solved… hey, my intentions were pure, and at least I did something! Don’t you dare accusing me of being a part of the problem.
And… the last option that comes to my mind is accepting the situation for what it is. Looking at the abyss, unflinching. Realizing that there is not much you can do about it. Trying to figure out the best way anyway, and following it, quite aware that it is too little compared to the size of the problems. Perhaps if more people joined you… but they won’t, because that’s how thing are, and that’s how we got here in the first place. At the end, you may successfully contribute to some small improvement that probably doesn’t change the overall situation much. But it made some things better for some people. It was probably all you could do, given your options and capabilities. It was not enough. It was something.
.
From this perspective, I see Vassar in the “throwing a tantrum” category. Yes, he is doing something, but he is optimizing for signal rather than the true thing. Becoming a drug addict, developing schizophrenia, killing yourself—those are all costly signals of engaging with the abyss. But sending the strongest signal was not the point. It doesn’t make you stronger. It doesn’t make humanity stronger. It doesn’t really address the problem that you so strongly signal caring about.
I assumed we can do better than this. This is some teenage-level shit, and maybe it’s downstream of living in the Bay Area, where saying “don’t do drugs” makes you uncool, and saying “it’s better to be sane” makes you ableist. I still think you should stop taking drugs (or never start taking them) and protect your sanity. Look for the ways to become stronger, and don’t let people like Vassar hurt your friends. I didn’t think that this needs to be said explicitly, but apparently it is, so here I said it.
Everyone, please, don’t be stupid. You probably came here because you wanted to do better. Remember that.
Okay, you made me realize I’ve been wrong about Michael. Your comment is the single most credible instance I’ve seen of him causing acute psychosis in an individual. Well, I guess it’s more the idea of Michael (and Ben), because no one who reads the linked blog posts or listens to the linked podcasts could mistakenly think your comments had anything to do with their content. I mean, it’s possible a casual observer might mistake your earlier characterization of their content as, “isn’t this just saying people can sometimes be hypocrites?” as merely garden variety functional illiteracy, but if they knew anything about this website and the high verbal IQ it selects for, they’d know to rule that possibility out immediately.
I’d also forgive someone for mistaking your comments for garden variety tribalism and treating arguments as your soldiers, but again, one needs to take into account the context of the website we’re on. There’s no way Viliam could expect to stay in good standing with this community if he pretended he couldn’t read while also making up a totally fabricated version of what others are saying. Like, maybe if the texts/audio in question were hidden and he had privileged access to them he could leverage his reputation and get people to take his word for it, but they’re all on the open internet and people can just read them! He would obviously have zero reason to expect anyone would cover for such flagrant nonsense.
So as unlikely as it seemed on priors, it really does look like Viliam has gone temporarily psychotic, with Michael Vassar as the proximal cause. Honestly this kinda scares me. I previously thought this was just dumb made up drama, but if people really can make people temporarily psychotic like this, it’s a huge worldview shift for me and I’m gonna have to take some time to integrate it. I hope at the very least that you’re in a safe environment and have loved ones that can help you out.
Yes, he is doing something, but he is optimizing for signal rather than the true thing. Becoming a drug addict, developing schizophrenia, killing yourself—those are all costly signals of engaging with the abyss.
What? Michael Vassar has (AFAIK from Zack M. Davis’ descriptions) not taken drugs or promoted becoming a drug addict or “killing yourself”. If you hear his Spencer interview, you’ll notice that he seems very sane and erudite, and clearly does not give off the unhinged ‘Nick Land’ vibe that you seem to be claiming that he has or he promotes.
You are directly contributing to the increase of misinformation and FUD here, by making such claims without enough confidence or knowledge of the situation.
I’ve talked to Michael Vassar many times in person. I’m somewhat confident he has taken LSD based on him saying so (although if this turned out wrong I wouldn’t be too surprised, my memory is hazy)
I definitely have the experiencing of him saying lots of things that sound very confusing and crazy, making pretty outlandish brainstormy-style claims that are maybe interesting, which he claims to take as literally true, that seem either false, or, at least require a lot of inferential gap. I have also heard him make a lot of morally charged, intense statements that didn’t seem clearly supported.
(I do think I have valued talking to Michael, despite this, he is one of the people who helped unstick me in certain ways, but, the mechanism by which he helped me was definitely via being kinda unhinged sounding.)
I’ve talked to Michael Vassar many times in person. I’m somewhat confident he has taken LSD based on him saying so (although if this turned out wrong I wouldn’t be too surprised, my memory is hazy)
I would take bets at 9:1 odds that Michael has taken large amounts of psychedelics. I would also take bets at similar odds that he promotes the use of psychedelics.
Ben’s articles were easier to read for me; the general idea seems to be that people are sometimes hypocritical. Which I something I agree with, but it also doesn’t sound very surprising.
So I assume that this is the motte. Now is there a place where I could find the bailey, spelled out? I am tired of trying to decipher vague hints.
(My guess would be that the bailey is something like “everyone is 100% hypocritical about everything 100% of the time, all people are actually 100% stupid and evil; except maybe for the small group of people around Michael Vassar” or something like that. Which of course sounds silly when you put it this way, so it works better if you only make hints and let people connect the dots for themselves, preferably in an altered mind state; it helps if they were already mentally unstable so they only need a nudge.)
… those posts are saying much more specific things than ‘people are sometimes hypocritical’?
“Can crimes be discussed literally?”:
some kinds of hypocrisy (the law and medicine examples) are normalized
these hypocrisies are / the fact of their normalization is antimemetic (OK, I’m to some extent interpolating this one based on familiarity with Ben’s ideas, but I do think it’s both implied by the post, and relevant to why someone might think the post is interesting/important)
the usage of words like ‘crime’ and ‘lie’ departs from their denotation, to exclude normalized things
people will push back in certain predictable ways on calling normalized things ‘crimes’/‘lies’, related to the function of those words as both description and (call for) attack
“There is a clear conflict between the use of language to punish offenders, and the use of language to describe problems, and there is great need for a language that can describe problems. For instance, if I wanted to understand how to interpret statistics generated by the medical system, I would need a short, simple way to refer to any significant tendency to generate false reports. If the available simple terms were also attack words, the process would become much more complicated.”
This seems ‘unsurprising’ to me in, and only in, an antimemetic Everybody Knows sense.
“Guilt, Shame, and Depravity”:
hypocrisy is often implemented through internal dissociation (shame)
ashamed people form coalitions around a shared interest in hiding information
[some modeling of/claims about how these coalitions work]
[some modeling of the incentives/conditions that motivate guilt vs. shame]
This is a bit more detailed than ‘people are sometimes hypocritical’; and I don’t think of the existence of ashamed coalitions to cover up norm violations in general (as opposed to relatively-more-explicitly-coordinated coalitions to cover up more-specific kinds of violations) as a broadly unsurprising claim. The degree to which shame can involve forgetting one’s own actions & motives, which Ben describes, certainly felt like a big important surprise when I (independently, two years before that post) consciously noticed it in myself.
I haven’t picked up this vibe from them at all (in writing or in person); I have sometimes picked up a vibe of ‘we have uniquely/indispensably important insights’. YMMV, of course.
Thank you for the summary. I guess my bubble is more cynical than the average population, so I may underestimate how shocking similar thoughts would be for them. I might also add the replication crisis in science, etc.
Yes. The world is bad. Almost everything is broken. People don’t want to admit it. Those who understand how things work are often ashamed for their role in the system. Some respond by attacking those who point it out, or even those who merely refuse to participate in the same way.
...it still feels like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.
All these things, they make me feel sad. I feel bad about all the wasted opportunity to live better. I don’t model most people as evil, just… overwhelmed by all the things that are wrong, and their inability to do something against it. Well, many are too stupid to care. Some people are genuinely evil. Many are going along with the flow, wherever it takes them. Most of human behavior is probably determined by habit; if you grow up in a dysfunctional environment, it will become your normal, but if your twin grew up in a better environment, they would recognize it as better. Even now, there are people who name the unpleasant truths. People who spend a large part of their life fighting against some specific dysfunction. But the world is complicated, and problems too numerous.
So, what is that extra insight that I could gain by contemplating these things while taking drugs and listening to Vassar whispering dark thoughts into my ears?
Me too, but nothing specific. Maybe it’s like when you are high and you believe that you have amazing insights, but when you write them down and read them again when you are sober, there is nothing.
Does it bother you that this is not what’s happening in many of the examples in the post? e.g., With “the American hospital system is built on lies.”
After sleeping on it, it seems to me that the topic were are talking about is “staring into the abyss”: whether, when, and how to do it properly, and for what outcome.
The easiest way is to not do it at all. Just pretend that everything is flowers and rainbows, and refuse to talk about the darker aspects of reality.
This is what we typically do with little children. A part of that is parental laziness: by avoiding difficult topics we avoid difficult conversations. But another part is that children are not cognitively ready to process nontrivial topics, so we try to postpone the debates about darker things until later, when they get the capability. Some lazy parents overdo it; some kids grow up living in a fairy tale world. Occasional glimpses of darkness can be dismissed as temporary exceptions to the general okay-ness of the world. “Grandma died, but now she is happy in Heaven.” At this level, people who try to disrupt the peace are dismissed relatively gently, accused of spoiling the mood and frightening the kids.
When this becomes impossible because the darkness pushes its way beyond our filters, the next lazy strategy is to downplay the darkness. Either it is not so bad, or there is some silver lining to everything. “Death gives meaning to life.” “The animals don’t mind dying so that we can have meat to eat; they understand it is their role in the system.” “Slavery actually benefits the blacks; they do not have the mental capacity to survive without a master.” “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” At this point the pushback against those trying to disrupt the peace is stronger; people are aware that their rationalizations are fragile. Luckily, we can reframe the rationalizations as a sign of maturity, and dismiss those who disagree with us as immature. “When you grow up, you will realize that...”
Another possible reaction is trying to join the abyss. Yes, bad things happen, but since they are inevitable, there is no point worrying about that. Heck, if there is a cosmic rule saying that things will always be as bad as possible, there is no point feeling guilty about contributing to the badness; if you won’t do it, someone else will! Resigning on your values is the true wisdom, and cynicism is how you signal being wise; trying to follow your values is immature. The reaction to people trying to follow their values is hostile, because (a) they make us seem bad in contrast, showing that following your values is actually possible… but if we succeed at destroying them, it proves that they were wrong, and (b) hey, there is nothing intrinsically bad at hurting people; life is suffering, sooner or later someone is going to teach you the lesson, it might as well be me, at least I will take some enjoyment from it.
Another reaction is throwing a tantrum. Yes, the abyss is there, and no, I am not going to make peace with it. I have no idea what should I do about that, but I know that I need to do something. So I am going to do some random thing; the more extreme the better, because it clearly signals that I am opposed to things being bad. Fight! Fight! And if all that happens as a result of my random fighting is that some innocent people get hurt and no problem actually gets solved… hey, my intentions were pure, and at least I did something! Don’t you dare accusing me of being a part of the problem.
And… the last option that comes to my mind is accepting the situation for what it is. Looking at the abyss, unflinching. Realizing that there is not much you can do about it. Trying to figure out the best way anyway, and following it, quite aware that it is too little compared to the size of the problems. Perhaps if more people joined you… but they won’t, because that’s how thing are, and that’s how we got here in the first place. At the end, you may successfully contribute to some small improvement that probably doesn’t change the overall situation much. But it made some things better for some people. It was probably all you could do, given your options and capabilities. It was not enough. It was something.
.
From this perspective, I see Vassar in the “throwing a tantrum” category. Yes, he is doing something, but he is optimizing for signal rather than the true thing. Becoming a drug addict, developing schizophrenia, killing yourself—those are all costly signals of engaging with the abyss. But sending the strongest signal was not the point. It doesn’t make you stronger. It doesn’t make humanity stronger. It doesn’t really address the problem that you so strongly signal caring about.
I assumed we can do better than this. This is some teenage-level shit, and maybe it’s downstream of living in the Bay Area, where saying “don’t do drugs” makes you uncool, and saying “it’s better to be sane” makes you ableist. I still think you should stop taking drugs (or never start taking them) and protect your sanity. Look for the ways to become stronger, and don’t let people like Vassar hurt your friends. I didn’t think that this needs to be said explicitly, but apparently it is, so here I said it.
Everyone, please, don’t be stupid. You probably came here because you wanted to do better. Remember that.
Okay, you made me realize I’ve been wrong about Michael. Your comment is the single most credible instance I’ve seen of him causing acute psychosis in an individual. Well, I guess it’s more the idea of Michael (and Ben), because no one who reads the linked blog posts or listens to the linked podcasts could mistakenly think your comments had anything to do with their content. I mean, it’s possible a casual observer might mistake your earlier characterization of their content as, “isn’t this just saying people can sometimes be hypocrites?” as merely garden variety functional illiteracy, but if they knew anything about this website and the high verbal IQ it selects for, they’d know to rule that possibility out immediately.
I’d also forgive someone for mistaking your comments for garden variety tribalism and treating arguments as your soldiers, but again, one needs to take into account the context of the website we’re on. There’s no way Viliam could expect to stay in good standing with this community if he pretended he couldn’t read while also making up a totally fabricated version of what others are saying. Like, maybe if the texts/audio in question were hidden and he had privileged access to them he could leverage his reputation and get people to take his word for it, but they’re all on the open internet and people can just read them! He would obviously have zero reason to expect anyone would cover for such flagrant nonsense.
So as unlikely as it seemed on priors, it really does look like Viliam has gone temporarily psychotic, with Michael Vassar as the proximal cause. Honestly this kinda scares me. I previously thought this was just dumb made up drama, but if people really can make people temporarily psychotic like this, it’s a huge worldview shift for me and I’m gonna have to take some time to integrate it. I hope at the very least that you’re in a safe environment and have loved ones that can help you out.
What? Michael Vassar has (AFAIK from Zack M. Davis’ descriptions) not taken drugs or promoted becoming a drug addict or “killing yourself”. If you hear his Spencer interview, you’ll notice that he seems very sane and erudite, and clearly does not give off the unhinged ‘Nick Land’ vibe that you seem to be claiming that he has or he promotes.
You are directly contributing to the increase of misinformation and FUD here, by making such claims without enough confidence or knowledge of the situation.
(I have not engaged with this thread deeply)
I’ve talked to Michael Vassar many times in person. I’m somewhat confident he has taken LSD based on him saying so (although if this turned out wrong I wouldn’t be too surprised, my memory is hazy)
I definitely have the experiencing of him saying lots of things that sound very confusing and crazy, making pretty outlandish brainstormy-style claims that are maybe interesting, which he claims to take as literally true, that seem either false, or, at least require a lot of inferential gap. I have also heard him make a lot of morally charged, intense statements that didn’t seem clearly supported.
(I do think I have valued talking to Michael, despite this, he is one of the people who helped unstick me in certain ways, but, the mechanism by which he helped me was definitely via being kinda unhinged sounding.)
I would take bets at 9:1 odds that Michael has taken large amounts of psychedelics. I would also take bets at similar odds that he promotes the use of psychedelics.