Thanks for sharing the details of your experience. Fyi I had a trip earlier in 2017 where I had the thought “Michael Vassar is God” and told a couple people about this, it was overall a good trip, not causing paranoia afterwards etc.
If I’m trying to put my finger on a real effect here, it’s related to how Michael Vassar was one of the initial people who set up the social scene (e.g. running singularity summits and being executive director of SIAI), being on the more “social/business development/management” end relative to someone like Eliezer; so if you live in the scene, which can be seen as a simulacrum, the people most involved in setting up the scene/simulacrum have the most aptitude at affecting memes related to it, like a world-simulator programmer has more aptitude at affecting the simulation than people within the simulation (though to a much lesser degree of course).
As a related example, Von Neumann was involved in setting up post-WWII US Modernism, and is also attributed extreme mental powers by modernism (e.g. extreme creativity in inventing a wide variety of fields); in creating the social system, he also has more memetic influence within that system, and could more effectively change its boundaries e.g. in creating new fields of study.
Fyi I had a trip earlier in 2017 where I had the thought “Michael Vassar is God” and told a couple people about this, it was overall a good trip, not causing paranoia afterwards etc.
2017 would be the year Eric’s episode happened as well. Did this result in multiple conversation about “Michael Vassar is God” that Eric might then picked up when he hang around the group?
I don’t know, some of the people were in common between these discussions so maybe, but my guess would be that it wasn’t causal, only correlational. Multiple people at the time were considering Michael Vassar to be especially insightful and worth learning from.
I haven’t used the word god myself nor have heard it used by other people to refer to someone who’s insightful and worth learning from. Traditionally, people learn from prophets and not from gods.
Thanks for sharing the details of your experience. Fyi I had a trip earlier in 2017 where I had the thought “Michael Vassar is God” and told a couple people about this, it was overall a good trip, not causing paranoia afterwards etc.
If I’m trying to put my finger on a real effect here, it’s related to how Michael Vassar was one of the initial people who set up the social scene (e.g. running singularity summits and being executive director of SIAI), being on the more “social/business development/management” end relative to someone like Eliezer; so if you live in the scene, which can be seen as a simulacrum, the people most involved in setting up the scene/simulacrum have the most aptitude at affecting memes related to it, like a world-simulator programmer has more aptitude at affecting the simulation than people within the simulation (though to a much lesser degree of course).
As a related example, Von Neumann was involved in setting up post-WWII US Modernism, and is also attributed extreme mental powers by modernism (e.g. extreme creativity in inventing a wide variety of fields); in creating the social system, he also has more memetic influence within that system, and could more effectively change its boundaries e.g. in creating new fields of study.
2017 would be the year Eric’s episode happened as well. Did this result in multiple conversation about “Michael Vassar is God” that Eric might then picked up when he hang around the group?
I don’t know, some of the people were in common between these discussions so maybe, but my guess would be that it wasn’t causal, only correlational. Multiple people at the time were considering Michael Vassar to be especially insightful and worth learning from.
I haven’t used the word god myself nor have heard it used by other people to refer to someone who’s insightful and worth learning from. Traditionally, people learn from prophets and not from gods.