Olivia, Devi and I all talked to people other than Michael Vassar, such as Anna Salamon. We gravitated towards the Berkeley community, which was started around Eliezer’s writing. None of us are calling for blame, ostracism, or cancelling of Michael. Michael helped all of us in ways no one else did. None of us have a motive to pursue a legal case against him. Ziz’s sentence you quoted doesn’t implicate Michael in any crimes.
The sentence is also misleading given Devi didn’t detransition afaik.
Jessicata, I will be blunt here. This article you wrote was [EDIT: expletive deleted] misleading. Perhaps you didn’t do it on purpose; perhaps this is what you actually believe. But from my perspective, you are an unreliable narrator.
Your story, original version:
I worked for MIRI/CFAR
I had a psychotic breakdown, and I believed I was super evil
the same thing also happened to a few other people
conclusion: MIRI/CFAR is responsible for all this
Your story, updated version:
I worked for MIRI/CFAR
then Michael Vassar taught me that everyone is super evil, including CFAR/MIRI, and told me to use drugs in order to get a psychotic breakdown and liberate myself from evil
I actually used the drugs
I had a psychotic breakdown, and I believed I was super evil
the same thing also happened to a few other people
conclusion: I still blame MIRI/CFAR, and I am trying to downplay Vassar’s role in this
If you can’t see how these two stories differ, then… I don’t have sufficiently polite words to describe it, so let’s just say that to me these two stories seem very different.
Lest you accuse me of gaslighting, let me remind you that I am not doubting any of the factual statements you made. (I actually tried to collect them here, to separate them from the long stream of dark insinuations.) What I am saying is that you omitted a few “details”, which perhaps seem irrelevant to you, but in my opinion fundamentally change the meaning of the story.
At this moment, we just have to agree to disagree, I guess.
In my opinion, the greatest mistake MIRI/CFAR made in this story, was being associated with Michael Vassar in the first place (and that’s putting it mildly; at some moment it seemed like Eliezer was in love with him, he so couldn’t stop praising his high intelligence… well, I guess he learned that “alignment is more important than intelligence” applies not just to artificial intelligences but also to humans), providing him social approval and easy access to people who then suffered as a consequence. They are no longer making this mistake. Ironically, now it’s you, after having positioned yourself as a victim, who is blinded by his intelligence, and doesn’t see the harm he causes. But the proper way to stop other people from getting hurt is to make it known that listening too much to Vassar does this, predictably. So that he can no longer use the rationalist community as a “social proof” to get people’s trust.
EDIT: To explain my unkind words “after having positioned yourself as a victim”, the thing I am angry about is that you publicly describe your suffering as a way to show people that MIRI/CFAR is evil. But when it turns of that Michael Vassar is more directly responsible for it, suddenly the angle changes and he actually “helped you”.
So could you please make up your mind? Is having a psychotic breakdown and spending a few weeks catatonic in hospital a good thing or a bad thing? Is it trauma, or is it jailbreaking? Because it seems like you call it bad when you attribute it to MIRI/CFAR, but when other people suggest that Vassar was responsible, then it seems a bit like no big deal, definitely not anything to blame him for.
I could be very wrong, but the story I currently have about this myself is that Vassar himself was a different and saner person before he used too much psychedelics. :( :( :(
Do you have a timeline of when you think that shift happened? That might make it easier for other people who knew Vassar at the time to say whether their observation matched yours.
I saw some him make some questionable drug use decisions at Burning Man in 2011 and 2012, including larger than normal doses, and I don’t think I saw all of it.
A lot of people take a lot of drugs on big events like Burning Man with little issue. In my observation, it’s typically the overly frequent and/or targeted psychedelic use that causes such big changes at least in those that start of fairly stable.
you publicly describe your suffering as a way to show people that MIRI/CFAR is evil.
Could you expand more on this? E.g. what are a couple sentences in the post that seem most trying to show this.
Because it seems like you call it bad when you attribute it to MIRI/CFAR, but when other people suggest that Vassar was responsible, then it seems a bit like no big deal, definitely not anything to blame him for.
I appreciate the thrust of your comment, including this sentence, but also this sentence seems uncharitable, like it’s collapsing down stuff that shouldn’t be collapsed. For example, it could be that the MIRI/CFAR/etc. social field could set up (maybe by accident, or even due to no fault of any of the “central” people) the conditions where “psychosis” is the best of the bad available options; in which case it makes sense to attribute causal fault to the social field, not to a person who e.g. makes that clear to you, and therefore more proximal causes your breakdown. (Of course there’s disagreement about whether that’s the state of the world, but it’s not necessarily incoherent.)
I do get the sense that jessicata is relating in a funny way to Michael Vassar, e.g. by warping the narrative around him while selectively posing as “just trying to state facts” in relation to other narrative fields; but this is hard to tell, since it’s also what it might look like if Michael Vassar was systematically scapegoated, and jessicata is reporting more direct/accurate (hence less bad-seeming) observations.
Where did jessicata corroborate this sentence “then Michael Vassar taught me that everyone is super evil, including CFAR/MIRI, and told me to use drugs in order to get a psychotic breakdown and liberate myself from evil” ?
I should note that, as an outsider, the main point I recall Eliezer making in that vein is that he used Michael Vassar as a model for the character who was called Professor Quirrell. As an outsider, I didn’t see that as an unqualified endorsement—though I think your general message should be signal-boosted.
The claim that Michael Vassar is substantially like Quirrell seems to me strange. Where did you get the claim that Eliezer modelled Vassar after Quirrell?
To make the claim a bit more based on public data, take Vassar’s TedX talk. I think it gives a good impression of how Vassar thinks. There are some official statistics that claim for Jordan that life expectancy, so I think there’s a good chance that Vassar here actually believes what he says.
If you however look deeper then Jordan’s life expectancy is not as high as is asserted by Vassar. Given that the video is in the public record that’s an error that everybody can find who tries to check what Vassar is saying. I don’t think it’s in Vassar’s interest to give a public talk like that with claims that are easily found to be wrong by factchecking. Quirrell wouldn’t have made an error like this but is a lot more controlled.
Eliezer made Vassar president of the precursor of MIRI. That’s a strong signal of trust and endorsement.
But from my perspective, you are an unreliable narrator.
I appreciate you’re telling me this given that you believe it. I definitely am in some ways, and try to improve over time.
then Michael Vassar taught me that everyone is super evil, including CFAR/MIRI, and told me to use drugs in order to get a psychotic breakdown and liberate myself from evil
I said in the text that (a) there were conversations about corruption in EA institutions, including about the content of Ben Hoffman’s posts, (b) I was collaborating with Michael Vassar at the time, (c) Michael Vassar was commenting about social epistemology. I admit that connecting points (a) and (c) would have made the connection clearer, but it wouldn’t have changed the text much.
In cases where someone was previously part of a “cult” and later says it was a “cult” and abusive in some important ways, there has to be a stage where they’re thinking about how bad the social context was, and practically always, that involves conversations with other people who are encouraging them to look at the ways their social context is bad. So my having conversations where people try to convince me CFAR/MIRI are evil is expected given what else I have written.
Besides this, “in order to get a psychotic breakdown” is incredibly false about his intentions, as Zack Davis points out.
I actually used the drugs
This was not in the literally initial version of the post but was included within a few hours, I think, when someone pointed out to me that it was relevant.
But the proper way to stop other people from getting hurt is to make it known that listening too much to Vassar does this, predictably.
As I pointed out, this doesn’t obviously attribute less “spooky mind powers” to Michael Vassar compared with what Leverage was attributing to people, where Leverage attributing this (and isolating people from each other on the basis of it) was considered crazy and abusive. Maybe he really was this influential, but logical consistency is important here.
But when it turns of that Michael Vassar is more directly responsible for it, suddenly the angle changes and he actually “helped you”.
In this comment I’m saying he has an unclear and probably low amount of responsibility, so this is a misread.
So could you please make up your mind?
I was pretty clear in the text that there were trauma symptoms resulting from these events and they also had advantages such as gaining a new perspective, and that overall I don’t regret working at MIRI. I was also clear that there are relatively better and worse social contexts in which to experience psychosis symptoms, and hospitalization indicates a relatively worse social context.
None of us are calling for blame, ostracism, or cancelling of Michael.
What I’m saying is that the Berkeley community should be.
Ziz’s sentence you quoted doesn’t implicate Michael in any crimes.
Supplying illicit drugs is a crime (but perhaps the drugs were BYO?). IDK if doing so and negligently causing permanent psychological injury is a worse crime, but it should be.
I’m not going to comment on drug usage in detail for legal reasons, except to note that there are psychedelics legal in some places, such as marijuana in CA.
It doesn’t make sense to attribute unique causal responsibility for psychotic breaks to anyone, except maybe to the person it’s happening to. There are lots of people all of us were talking to in that time period who influenced us, and multiple people were advocating psychedelic use. Not all cases happened to people who were talking significantly with Michael around the time. As I mentioned in the OP, as I was becoming more psychotic, people tried things they thought might help, which generally didn’t, and they could have done better things instead. Even causal responsibility doesn’t imply blame, e.g. Eliezer had some causal responsibility due to writing things that attracted people to the Berkeley scene where there were higher-variance psychological outcomes. Michael was often talking with people who were already “not ok” in important ways, which probably affects the statistics.
Olivia, Devi and I all talked to people other than Michael Vassar, such as Anna Salamon. We gravitated towards the Berkeley community, which was started around Eliezer’s writing. None of us are calling for blame, ostracism, or cancelling of Michael. Michael helped all of us in ways no one else did. None of us have a motive to pursue a legal case against him. Ziz’s sentence you quoted doesn’t implicate Michael in any crimes.
The sentence is also misleading given Devi didn’t detransition afaik.
Jessicata, I will be blunt here. This article you wrote was [EDIT: expletive deleted] misleading. Perhaps you didn’t do it on purpose; perhaps this is what you actually believe. But from my perspective, you are an unreliable narrator.
Your story, original version:
I worked for MIRI/CFAR
I had a psychotic breakdown, and I believed I was super evil
the same thing also happened to a few other people
conclusion: MIRI/CFAR is responsible for all this
Your story, updated version:
I worked for MIRI/CFAR
then Michael Vassar taught me that everyone is super evil, including CFAR/MIRI, and told me to use drugs in order to get a psychotic breakdown and liberate myself from evil
I actually used the drugs
I had a psychotic breakdown, and I believed I was super evil
the same thing also happened to a few other people
conclusion: I still blame MIRI/CFAR, and I am trying to downplay Vassar’s role in this
If you can’t see how these two stories differ, then… I don’t have sufficiently polite words to describe it, so let’s just say that to me these two stories seem very different.
Lest you accuse me of gaslighting, let me remind you that I am not doubting any of the factual statements you made. (I actually tried to collect them here, to separate them from the long stream of dark insinuations.) What I am saying is that you omitted a few “details”, which perhaps seem irrelevant to you, but in my opinion fundamentally change the meaning of the story.
At this moment, we just have to agree to disagree, I guess.
In my opinion, the greatest mistake MIRI/CFAR made in this story, was being associated with Michael Vassar in the first place (and that’s putting it mildly; at some moment it seemed like Eliezer was in love with him, he so couldn’t stop praising his high intelligence… well, I guess he learned that “alignment is more important than intelligence” applies not just to artificial intelligences but also to humans), providing him social approval and easy access to people who then suffered as a consequence. They are no longer making this mistake. Ironically, now it’s you, after having positioned yourself as a victim, who is blinded by his intelligence, and doesn’t see the harm he causes. But the proper way to stop other people from getting hurt is to make it known that listening too much to Vassar does this, predictably. So that he can no longer use the rationalist community as a “social proof” to get people’s trust.
EDIT: To explain my unkind words “after having positioned yourself as a victim”, the thing I am angry about is that you publicly describe your suffering as a way to show people that MIRI/CFAR is evil. But when it turns of that Michael Vassar is more directly responsible for it, suddenly the angle changes and he actually “helped you”.
So could you please make up your mind? Is having a psychotic breakdown and spending a few weeks catatonic in hospital a good thing or a bad thing? Is it trauma, or is it jailbreaking? Because it seems like you call it bad when you attribute it to MIRI/CFAR, but when other people suggest that Vassar was responsible, then it seems a bit like no big deal, definitely not anything to blame him for.
I could be very wrong, but the story I currently have about this myself is that Vassar himself was a different and saner person before he used too much psychedelics. :( :( :(
Non-agenda’d question: about when did you notice changes in him?
My autobiographical episodic memory is nowhere near good enough to answer this question, alas.
Do you have a timeline of when you think that shift happened? That might make it easier for other people who knew Vassar at the time to say whether their observation matched yours.
That… must have hurt a lot.
(I hope your story is right.)
I saw some him make some questionable drug use decisions at Burning Man in 2011 and 2012, including larger than normal doses, and I don’t think I saw all of it.
A lot of people take a lot of drugs on big events like Burning Man with little issue. In my observation, it’s typically the overly frequent and/or targeted psychedelic use that causes such big changes at least in those that start of fairly stable.
Could you expand more on this? E.g. what are a couple sentences in the post that seem most trying to show this.
I appreciate the thrust of your comment, including this sentence, but also this sentence seems uncharitable, like it’s collapsing down stuff that shouldn’t be collapsed. For example, it could be that the MIRI/CFAR/etc. social field could set up (maybe by accident, or even due to no fault of any of the “central” people) the conditions where “psychosis” is the best of the bad available options; in which case it makes sense to attribute causal fault to the social field, not to a person who e.g. makes that clear to you, and therefore more proximal causes your breakdown. (Of course there’s disagreement about whether that’s the state of the world, but it’s not necessarily incoherent.)
I do get the sense that jessicata is relating in a funny way to Michael Vassar, e.g. by warping the narrative around him while selectively posing as “just trying to state facts” in relation to other narrative fields; but this is hard to tell, since it’s also what it might look like if Michael Vassar was systematically scapegoated, and jessicata is reporting more direct/accurate (hence less bad-seeming) observations.
Where did jessicata corroborate this sentence “then Michael Vassar taught me that everyone is super evil, including CFAR/MIRI, and told me to use drugs in order to get a psychotic breakdown and liberate myself from evil” ?
I should note that, as an outsider, the main point I recall Eliezer making in that vein is that he used Michael Vassar as a model for the character who was called Professor Quirrell. As an outsider, I didn’t see that as an unqualified endorsement—though I think your general message should be signal-boosted.
The claim that Michael Vassar is substantially like Quirrell seems to me strange. Where did you get the claim that Eliezer modelled Vassar after Quirrell?
To make the claim a bit more based on public data, take Vassar’s TedX talk. I think it gives a good impression of how Vassar thinks. There are some official statistics that claim for Jordan that life expectancy, so I think there’s a good chance that Vassar here actually believes what he says.
If you however look deeper then Jordan’s life expectancy is not as high as is asserted by Vassar. Given that the video is in the public record that’s an error that everybody can find who tries to check what Vassar is saying. I don’t think it’s in Vassar’s interest to give a public talk like that with claims that are easily found to be wrong by factchecking. Quirrell wouldn’t have made an error like this but is a lot more controlled.
Eliezer made Vassar president of the precursor of MIRI. That’s a strong signal of trust and endorsement.
https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing/empathyrespect
Eliezer has openly said Quirrell’s cynicism is modeled after a mix of Michael Vassar and Robin Hanson.
I appreciate you’re telling me this given that you believe it. I definitely am in some ways, and try to improve over time.
I said in the text that (a) there were conversations about corruption in EA institutions, including about the content of Ben Hoffman’s posts, (b) I was collaborating with Michael Vassar at the time, (c) Michael Vassar was commenting about social epistemology. I admit that connecting points (a) and (c) would have made the connection clearer, but it wouldn’t have changed the text much.
In cases where someone was previously part of a “cult” and later says it was a “cult” and abusive in some important ways, there has to be a stage where they’re thinking about how bad the social context was, and practically always, that involves conversations with other people who are encouraging them to look at the ways their social context is bad. So my having conversations where people try to convince me CFAR/MIRI are evil is expected given what else I have written.
Besides this, “in order to get a psychotic breakdown” is incredibly false about his intentions, as Zack Davis points out.
This was not in the literally initial version of the post but was included within a few hours, I think, when someone pointed out to me that it was relevant.
As I pointed out, this doesn’t obviously attribute less “spooky mind powers” to Michael Vassar compared with what Leverage was attributing to people, where Leverage attributing this (and isolating people from each other on the basis of it) was considered crazy and abusive. Maybe he really was this influential, but logical consistency is important here.
In this comment I’m saying he has an unclear and probably low amount of responsibility, so this is a misread.
I was pretty clear in the text that there were trauma symptoms resulting from these events and they also had advantages such as gaining a new perspective, and that overall I don’t regret working at MIRI. I was also clear that there are relatively better and worse social contexts in which to experience psychosis symptoms, and hospitalization indicates a relatively worse social context.
What I’m saying is that the Berkeley community should be.
Supplying illicit drugs is a crime (but perhaps the drugs were BYO?). IDK if doing so and negligently causing permanent psychological injury is a worse crime, but it should be.
I’m not going to comment on drug usage in detail for legal reasons, except to note that there are psychedelics legal in some places, such as marijuana in CA.
It doesn’t make sense to attribute unique causal responsibility for psychotic breaks to anyone, except maybe to the person it’s happening to. There are lots of people all of us were talking to in that time period who influenced us, and multiple people were advocating psychedelic use. Not all cases happened to people who were talking significantly with Michael around the time. As I mentioned in the OP, as I was becoming more psychotic, people tried things they thought might help, which generally didn’t, and they could have done better things instead. Even causal responsibility doesn’t imply blame, e.g. Eliezer had some causal responsibility due to writing things that attracted people to the Berkeley scene where there were higher-variance psychological outcomes. Michael was often talking with people who were already “not ok” in important ways, which probably affects the statistics.