It seems to me that, at least in your worldview, this question of whether and what sort of subtle mental influence between people is possible is extremely important, to the point where different answers to the question could lead to pretty different political philosophies.
Let’s consider a disjunction: 1: There isn’t a big effect here, 2: There is a big effect here.
In case 1:
It might make sense to discourage people from talking too much about “charisma”, “auras”, “mental objects”, etc, since they’re pretty fake, really not the primary factors to think about when modeling society.
The main problem with the relevant discussions at Leverage is that they’re making grandiose claims of mind powers and justifying e.g. isolating people on the basis of these, not actual mental influence.
The case made against Michael, that he can “cause psychotic breaks” by talking with people sometimes (or, in the case of Eric B, by talking sometimes with someone who is talking sometimes with the person in question), has no merit. People are making up grandiose claims about Michael to justify scapegoating him, it’s basically a witch hunt. We should have a much more moderated, holistic picture where there are multiple people in a social environment affecting a person, and the people closer to them generally have more influence, such that causing psychotic breaks 2 hops out is implausible, and causing psychotic breaks with only occasional conversation (and very little conversation close to the actual psychotic episode) is also quite unlikely.
There isn’t a significant falsification of liberal individualism.
In case 2:
Since there’s a big effect, it makes sense to spend a lot of energy speculating on “charisma”, “auras”, “mental objects”, and similar hypotheses. “Charisma” has fewer details than “auras” which has fewer details than “mental objects”; all of them are hypotheses someone could come up with in the course of doing pre-paradigmatic study of the phenomenon, knowing that while these initial hypotheses will make mis-predictions sometimes, they’re (in expectation) moving in the direction of clarifying the phenomenon. We shouldn’t just say “charisma” and leave it at that, it’s so important that we need more details/gears.
Leverage’s claims about weird mind powers are to some degree plausible, there’s a big phenomenon here even if their models are wrong/silly in some places. The weird social dynamics are a result of an actual attempt to learn about and manage this extremely important phenomenon.
The claim that Michael can cause psychotic breaks by talking with people is plausible. The claim that he can cause psychotic breaks 2 hops out might be plausible depending on the details (this is pretty similar to a “mental objects” claim).
There is a significant falsification of liberal individualism. Upon learning about the details of how mental influence works, you could easily conclude that some specific form of collectivism is much more compatible with human nature than liberal individualism.
(You could make a spectrum or expand the number of dimensions here, I’m starting with a binary here to make the poles obvious)
It seems like you haven’t expressed a strong belief whether we’re in case 1 or case 2. Some things you’ve said are more compatible with case 1 (e.g. Leverage worrying about mental objects being silly, talking about demons being a psychiatric emergency, it being appropriate for MIRI to stop me from talking about demons and auras, liberalism being basically correct even if there are exceptions). Some are more compatible with case 2 (e.g. Michael causing psychotic breaks, “cults” being real and actually somewhat bad for liberalism to admit the existence of, “charisma” being a big important thing).
I’m left with the impression that your position is to some degree inconsistent (which is pretty normal, propagating beliefs fully is hard) and that you’re assigning low value to investigating the details of this very important variable.
(I myself still have a lot of uncertainty here; I’ve had the impression of subtle mental influence happening from time to time but it’s hard to disambiguate what’s actually happening, and how strong the effect is. I think a lot of what’s going on is people partly-unconsciously trying to synchronize with each other in terms of world-model and behavioral plans, and there existing mental operations one can do that cause others’ synchronization behavior to have weird/unexpected effects.)
I agree I’m being somewhat inconsistent, I’d rather do that than prematurely force consistency and end up being wrong or missing some subtlety. I’m trying to figure out what went on in these cases in more details and will probably want to ask you a lot of questions by email if you’re open to that.
This misses the fact that people’s ability to negatively influence others might vary very widely, making it so that it is silly to worry about, say, 99.99% of people strongly negatively influencing you, but reasonable to worry about the other 0.01%. If Michael is one of those 0.01%, then Scott’s worldview is not inconsistent.
If it’s reasonable to worry about the .01%, it’s reasonable to ask how the ability varies. There’s some reason, some mechanism. This is worth discussing even if it’s hard to give more than partial, metaphorical hypotheses. And if there are these .01% of very strong influencers, that is still an exception to strong liberal individualism.
That would still admit some people at Leverage having significant mental influence, especially if they got into weird mental tech that almost no one gets into. A lot of the weirdness is downstream of them encountering “body workers” who are extremely good at e.g. causing mental effects by touching people’s back a little; these people could easily be extremal, and Leverage people learned from them. I’ve had sessions with some post-Leverage people where it seemed like really weird mental effects are happening in some implicit channel (like, I feel a thing poking at the left side of my consciousness and the person says, “oh, I just did an implicit channel thing, maybe you felt that”), I’ve never experienced effects like that (without drugs, and not obviously on drugs either though the comparison is harder) with others including with Michael, Anna, or normal therapists. This could be “placebo” in a way that makes it ultimately not that important but still, if we’re admitting that 0.01% of people have these mental effects then it seems somewhat likely that this includes some Leverage people.
Also, if the 0.01% is disproportionately influential (which, duh), then getting more detailed models than “charisma” is still quite important.
It seems to me that, at least in your worldview, this question of whether and what sort of subtle mental influence between people is possible is extremely important, to the point where different answers to the question could lead to pretty different political philosophies.
Let’s consider a disjunction: 1: There isn’t a big effect here, 2: There is a big effect here.
In case 1:
It might make sense to discourage people from talking too much about “charisma”, “auras”, “mental objects”, etc, since they’re pretty fake, really not the primary factors to think about when modeling society.
The main problem with the relevant discussions at Leverage is that they’re making grandiose claims of mind powers and justifying e.g. isolating people on the basis of these, not actual mental influence.
The case made against Michael, that he can “cause psychotic breaks” by talking with people sometimes (or, in the case of Eric B, by talking sometimes with someone who is talking sometimes with the person in question), has no merit. People are making up grandiose claims about Michael to justify scapegoating him, it’s basically a witch hunt. We should have a much more moderated, holistic picture where there are multiple people in a social environment affecting a person, and the people closer to them generally have more influence, such that causing psychotic breaks 2 hops out is implausible, and causing psychotic breaks with only occasional conversation (and very little conversation close to the actual psychotic episode) is also quite unlikely.
There isn’t a significant falsification of liberal individualism.
In case 2:
Since there’s a big effect, it makes sense to spend a lot of energy speculating on “charisma”, “auras”, “mental objects”, and similar hypotheses. “Charisma” has fewer details than “auras” which has fewer details than “mental objects”; all of them are hypotheses someone could come up with in the course of doing pre-paradigmatic study of the phenomenon, knowing that while these initial hypotheses will make mis-predictions sometimes, they’re (in expectation) moving in the direction of clarifying the phenomenon. We shouldn’t just say “charisma” and leave it at that, it’s so important that we need more details/gears.
Leverage’s claims about weird mind powers are to some degree plausible, there’s a big phenomenon here even if their models are wrong/silly in some places. The weird social dynamics are a result of an actual attempt to learn about and manage this extremely important phenomenon.
The claim that Michael can cause psychotic breaks by talking with people is plausible. The claim that he can cause psychotic breaks 2 hops out might be plausible depending on the details (this is pretty similar to a “mental objects” claim).
There is a significant falsification of liberal individualism. Upon learning about the details of how mental influence works, you could easily conclude that some specific form of collectivism is much more compatible with human nature than liberal individualism.
(You could make a spectrum or expand the number of dimensions here, I’m starting with a binary here to make the poles obvious)
It seems like you haven’t expressed a strong belief whether we’re in case 1 or case 2. Some things you’ve said are more compatible with case 1 (e.g. Leverage worrying about mental objects being silly, talking about demons being a psychiatric emergency, it being appropriate for MIRI to stop me from talking about demons and auras, liberalism being basically correct even if there are exceptions). Some are more compatible with case 2 (e.g. Michael causing psychotic breaks, “cults” being real and actually somewhat bad for liberalism to admit the existence of, “charisma” being a big important thing).
I’m left with the impression that your position is to some degree inconsistent (which is pretty normal, propagating beliefs fully is hard) and that you’re assigning low value to investigating the details of this very important variable.
(I myself still have a lot of uncertainty here; I’ve had the impression of subtle mental influence happening from time to time but it’s hard to disambiguate what’s actually happening, and how strong the effect is. I think a lot of what’s going on is people partly-unconsciously trying to synchronize with each other in terms of world-model and behavioral plans, and there existing mental operations one can do that cause others’ synchronization behavior to have weird/unexpected effects.)
I agree I’m being somewhat inconsistent, I’d rather do that than prematurely force consistency and end up being wrong or missing some subtlety. I’m trying to figure out what went on in these cases in more details and will probably want to ask you a lot of questions by email if you’re open to that.
Yes, I’d be open to answering email questions.
This misses the fact that people’s ability to negatively influence others might vary very widely, making it so that it is silly to worry about, say, 99.99% of people strongly negatively influencing you, but reasonable to worry about the other 0.01%. If Michael is one of those 0.01%, then Scott’s worldview is not inconsistent.
If it’s reasonable to worry about the .01%, it’s reasonable to ask how the ability varies. There’s some reason, some mechanism. This is worth discussing even if it’s hard to give more than partial, metaphorical hypotheses. And if there are these .01% of very strong influencers, that is still an exception to strong liberal individualism.
That would still admit some people at Leverage having significant mental influence, especially if they got into weird mental tech that almost no one gets into. A lot of the weirdness is downstream of them encountering “body workers” who are extremely good at e.g. causing mental effects by touching people’s back a little; these people could easily be extremal, and Leverage people learned from them. I’ve had sessions with some post-Leverage people where it seemed like really weird mental effects are happening in some implicit channel (like, I feel a thing poking at the left side of my consciousness and the person says, “oh, I just did an implicit channel thing, maybe you felt that”), I’ve never experienced effects like that (without drugs, and not obviously on drugs either though the comparison is harder) with others including with Michael, Anna, or normal therapists. This could be “placebo” in a way that makes it ultimately not that important but still, if we’re admitting that 0.01% of people have these mental effects then it seems somewhat likely that this includes some Leverage people.
Also, if the 0.01% is disproportionately influential (which, duh), then getting more detailed models than “charisma” is still quite important.