I met Vassar once. He came across as extremely charismatic (with a sort of charisma that probably only works on a particular type of people, which includes me), creating the impression of saying wise and insightful things (especially if you lack relevant domain knowledge), while in truth he was saying a lot of stuff which was patently absurd. Something about his delivery was so captivating, that it took me a while to “shake off the fairy dust” and realize just how silly some of his claims were, even when it should have been obvious from the start. Moreover, his worldview seemed heavily based on paranoidal / conspiracy-theory type of thinking. So, yes, I’m not too surprised by Scott’s revelations about him.
He came across as extremely charismatic (with a sort of charisma that probably only works on a particular type of people, which includes me), creating the impression of saying wise and insightful things (especially if you lack relevant domain knowledge), while in truth he was saying a lot of stuff which was patently absurd.
Yeah, it definitely didn’t work on me. I believe I wrote this thread shortly after my one-and-only interaction with him, in which he said a lot of things that made me very skeptical but that I couldn’t easily refute, or had much time to think about before he would move on to some other topic. (Interestingly, he actually replied in that thread even though I didn’t mention him by name.)
It saddens me to learn that his style of conversation/persuasion “works” on many people who otherwise seem very smart and capable (and even self-selected for caring about being rational). It seems like pretty bad news as far as what kind of epistemic situation humanity is in (e.g., how easily we will be manipulated by even slightly-smarter-than-human AIs / human-AI systems).
One of the things that makes Michael Vassar an interesting person to be around is that he has an opinion about everything. If you locked him up in an empty room with grey walls, it would probably take the man about thirty seconds before he’d start analyzing the historical influence of the Enlightenment on the tradition of locking people up in empty rooms with grey walls.
I met Vassar once. He came across as extremely charismatic (with a sort of charisma that probably only works on a particular type of people, which includes me), creating the impression of saying wise and insightful things (especially if you lack relevant domain knowledge), while in truth he was saying a lot of stuff which was patently absurd. Something about his delivery was so captivating, that it took me a while to “shake off the fairy dust” and realize just how silly some of his claims were, even when it should have been obvious from the start. Moreover, his worldview seemed heavily based on paranoidal / conspiracy-theory type of thinking. So, yes, I’m not too surprised by Scott’s revelations about him.
Yeah, it definitely didn’t work on me. I believe I wrote this thread shortly after my one-and-only interaction with him, in which he said a lot of things that made me very skeptical but that I couldn’t easily refute, or had much time to think about before he would move on to some other topic. (Interestingly, he actually replied in that thread even though I didn’t mention him by name.)
It saddens me to learn that his style of conversation/persuasion “works” on many people who otherwise seem very smart and capable (and even self-selected for caring about being rational). It seems like pretty bad news as far as what kind of epistemic situation humanity is in (e.g., how easily we will be manipulated by even slightly-smarter-than-human AIs / human-AI systems).
Oh, this is because the OP that I was replying to did mention him by name: