I now got some better sourced information from a friend who’s actually in good contact with Eric. Given that I’m also quite certain that there were no drugs involved and that isn’t a case of any one person being mainly responsible for it happening but multiple people making bad decisions. I’m currently hoping that Eric will tell his side himself so that there’s less indirection about the information sourcing so I’m not saying more about the detail at this point in time.
Edit: The following account is a component of a broader and more complex narrative. While it played a significant role, it must be noted that there were numerous additional challenges concurrently affecting my life. Absent these complicating factors, the issues delineated in this post alone may not have precipitated such severe consequences. Additionally, I have made minor revisions to the third-to-last bullet point for clarity.
It is pertinent to provide some context to parts of my story that are relevant to the ongoing discussions.
My psychotic episode was triggered by a confluence of factors, including acute physical and mental stress, as well as exposure to a range of potent memes. I have composed a detailed document on this subject, which I have shared privately with select individuals. I am willing to share this document with others who were directly involved or have a legitimate interest. However, a comprehensive discussion of these details is beyond the ambit of this post, which primarily focuses on the aspects related to my experiences at Vassar.
During my psychotic break, I believed that someone associated with Vassar had administered LSD to me. Although I no longer hold this belief, I cannot entirely dismiss it. Nonetheless, given my deteriorated physical and mental health at the time, the vividness of my experiences could be attributed to a placebo effect or the onset of psychosis.
My delusions prominently featured Vassar. At the time of my arrest, I had a notebook with multiple entries stating “Vassar is God” and “Vassar is the Devil.” This fixation partly stemmed from a conversation with Vassar, where he suggested that my “pattern must be erased from the world” in response to my defense of EA. However, it was primarily fueled by the indirect influence of someone from his group with whom I had more substantial contact.
This individual was deeply involved in a psychological engagement with me in the months leading to my psychotic episode. In my weakened state, I was encouraged to develop and interact with a mental model of her. She once described our interaction as “roleplaying an unfriendly AI,” which I perceived as markedly hostile. Despite the negative turn, I continued the engagement, hoping to influence her positively.
After joining Vassar’s group, I urged her to critically assess his intense psychological methods. She relayed a conversation with Vassar about “fixing” another individual, Anna (Salamon), to “see material reality” and “purge her green.” This exchange profoundly disturbed me, leading to a series of delusions and ultimately exacerbating my psychological instability, culminating in a psychotic state. This descent into madness continued for approximately 36 hours, ending with an attempted suicide and an assault on a mental health worker.
Additionally, it is worth mentioning that I visited Leverage on the same day. Despite exhibiting clear signs of delusion, I was advised to exercise caution with psychological endeavors. Ideally, further intervention, such as suggesting professional help or returning me to my friends, might have been beneficial. I was later informed that I was advised to return home, though my recollection of this is unclear due to my mental state at the time.
In the hotel that night, my mental state deteriorated significantly after I performed a mental action which I interpreted as granting my mental model of Vassar substantial influence over my thoughts, in an attempt to regain stability.
While there are many more intricate details to this story, I believe the above summary encapsulates the most critical elements relevant to our discussion.
I do not attribute direct blame to Vassar, as it is unlikely he either intended or could have reasonably anticipated these specific outcomes. However, his approach, characterized by high-impact psychological interventions, can inadvertently affect the mental health of those around him. I hope that he has recognized this potential for harm and exercises greater caution in the future.
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.
Can someone please clarify what is meant in this conext by ‘Vassar’s group’, or the term ‘Vassarites’ used by others?
My intution previously was that Michael Vassar had no formal ‘group’ or insitution of any kind, and it was just more like ‘a cluster of friends who hung out together a lot’, but this comment makes it seem like something more official.
While “Vassar’s group” is informal, it’s more than just a cluster of friends; it’s a social scene with lots of shared concepts, terminology, and outlook (although of course not every member holds every view and members sometimes disagree about the concepts, etc etc). In this way, the structure is similar to social scenes like “the AI safety community” or “wokeness” or “the startup scene” that coordinate in part on the basis of shared ideology even in the absence of institutional coordination, albeit much smaller. There is no formal institution governing the scene, and as far as I’ve ever heard Vassar himself has no particular authority within it beyond individual persuasion and his reputation.
Median Group is the closest thing to a “Vassarite” institution, in that its listed members are 2⁄3 people who I’ve heard/read describing the strong influence Vassar has had on their thinking and 1⁄3 people I don’t know, but AFAIK Median Group is just a project put together by a bunch of friends with similar outlook and doesn’t claim to speak for the whole scene or anything.
Michael and I are sometimes-housemates and I’ve never seen or heard of any formal “Vassarite” group or institution, though he’s an important connector in the local social graph, such that I met several good friends through him.
It sounds like you’re saying that based on extremely sparse data you made up a Michael Vassar in your head to drive you crazy. More generally, it seems like a bunch of people on this thread, most notably Scott Alexander, are attributing spooky magical powers to him. That is crazy cult behavior and I wish they would stop it.
ETA: In case it wasn’t clear, “that” = multiple people elsewhere in the comments attributing spooky mind control powers to Vassar. I was trying to summarize Eric’s account concisely, because insofar as it assigns agency at all I think it does a good job assigning it where it makes sense to, with the person making the decisions.
Reading through the comments here, I perceive a pattern of short-but-strongly-worded comments from you, many of which seem to me to contain highly inflammatory insinuations while giving little impression of any investment of interpretive labor. It’s not [entirely] clear to me what your goals are, but barring said goals being very strange and inexplicable indeed, it seems to me extremely unlikely that they are best fulfilled by the discourse style you have consistently been employing.
To be clear: I am annoyed by this. I perceive your comments as substantially lower-quality than the mean, and moreover I am annoyed that they seem to be receiving engagement far in excess of what I believe they deserve, resulting in a loss of attentional resources that could be used engaging more productively (either with other commenters, or with a hypothetical-version-of-you who does not do this). My comment here is written for the purpose of registering my impressions, and making it common-knowledge among those who share said impressions (who, for the record, I predict are not few) that said impressions are, in fact, shared.
(If I am mistaken in the above prediction, I am sure the voters will let me know in short order.)
I say all of the above while being reasonably confident that you do, in fact, have good intentions. However, good intentions do not ipso facto result in good comments, and to the extent that they have resulted in bad comments, I think one should point this fact out as bluntly as possible, which is why I worded the first two paragraphs of this comment the way I did. Nonetheless, I felt it important to clarify that I do not stand against [what I believe to be] your causes here, only the way you have been going about pursuing those causes.
(For the record: I am unaffiliated with MIRI, CFAR, Leverage, MAPLE, the “Vassarites”, or the broader rationalist community as it exists in physical space. As such, I have no direct stake in this conversation; but I very much do have an interest in making sure discussion around any topics this sensitive are carried out in a mature, nuanced way.)
If you want to clarify whether I mean to insinuate something in a particular comment, you could ask, like I asked Eliezer. I’m not going to make my comments longer without a specific idea of what’s unclear, that seems pointless.
It is accurate to state that I constructed a model of him based on limited information, which subsequently contributed to my dramatic psychological collapse. Nevertheless, the reason for developing this particular model can be attributed to his interactions with me and others. This was not due to any extraordinary or mystical abilities, but rather his profound commitment to challenging individuals’ perceptions of conventional reality and mastering the most effective methods to do so.
This approach is not inherently negative. However, it must be acknowledged that for certain individuals, such an intense disruption of their perceived reality can precipitate a descent into a detrimental psychological state.
Thanks for verifying. In hindsight my comment reads as though it was condemning you in a way I didn’t mean to; sorry about that.
The thing I meant to characterize as “crazy cult behavior” was people in the comments here attributing things like what you did in your mind to Michael Vassar’s spooky mind powers. You seem to be trying to be helpful and informative here. Sorry if my comment read like a personal attack.
This can be unpacked into an alternative to the charisma theory.
Many people are looking for a reference person to tell them what to do. (This is generally consistent with the Jaynesian family of hypotheses.) High-agency people are unusually easy to refer to, because they reveal the kind of information that allows others to locate them. There’s sufficient excess demand that even if someone doesn’t issue any actual orders, if they seem to have agency, people will generalize from sparse data to try to construct a version of that person that tells them what to do.
I have sent you the document in question. As the contents are somewhat personal, I would prefer that it not be disseminated publicly. However, I am amenable to it being shared with individuals who have a valid interest in gaining a deeper understanding of the matter.
I now got some better sourced information from a friend who’s actually in good contact with Eric. Given that I’m also quite certain that there were no drugs involved and that isn’t a case of any one person being mainly responsible for it happening but multiple people making bad decisions. I’m currently hoping that Eric will tell his side himself so that there’s less indirection about the information sourcing so I’m not saying more about the detail at this point in time.
Edit: The following account is a component of a broader and more complex narrative. While it played a significant role, it must be noted that there were numerous additional challenges concurrently affecting my life. Absent these complicating factors, the issues delineated in this post alone may not have precipitated such severe consequences. Additionally, I have made minor revisions to the third-to-last bullet point for clarity.
It is pertinent to provide some context to parts of my story that are relevant to the ongoing discussions.
My psychotic episode was triggered by a confluence of factors, including acute physical and mental stress, as well as exposure to a range of potent memes. I have composed a detailed document on this subject, which I have shared privately with select individuals. I am willing to share this document with others who were directly involved or have a legitimate interest. However, a comprehensive discussion of these details is beyond the ambit of this post, which primarily focuses on the aspects related to my experiences at Vassar.
During my psychotic break, I believed that someone associated with Vassar had administered LSD to me. Although I no longer hold this belief, I cannot entirely dismiss it. Nonetheless, given my deteriorated physical and mental health at the time, the vividness of my experiences could be attributed to a placebo effect or the onset of psychosis.
My delusions prominently featured Vassar. At the time of my arrest, I had a notebook with multiple entries stating “Vassar is God” and “Vassar is the Devil.” This fixation partly stemmed from a conversation with Vassar, where he suggested that my “pattern must be erased from the world” in response to my defense of EA. However, it was primarily fueled by the indirect influence of someone from his group with whom I had more substantial contact.
This individual was deeply involved in a psychological engagement with me in the months leading to my psychotic episode. In my weakened state, I was encouraged to develop and interact with a mental model of her. She once described our interaction as “roleplaying an unfriendly AI,” which I perceived as markedly hostile. Despite the negative turn, I continued the engagement, hoping to influence her positively.
After joining Vassar’s group, I urged her to critically assess his intense psychological methods. She relayed a conversation with Vassar about “fixing” another individual, Anna (Salamon), to “see material reality” and “purge her green.” This exchange profoundly disturbed me, leading to a series of delusions and ultimately exacerbating my psychological instability, culminating in a psychotic state. This descent into madness continued for approximately 36 hours, ending with an attempted suicide and an assault on a mental health worker.
Additionally, it is worth mentioning that I visited Leverage on the same day. Despite exhibiting clear signs of delusion, I was advised to exercise caution with psychological endeavors. Ideally, further intervention, such as suggesting professional help or returning me to my friends, might have been beneficial. I was later informed that I was advised to return home, though my recollection of this is unclear due to my mental state at the time.
In the hotel that night, my mental state deteriorated significantly after I performed a mental action which I interpreted as granting my mental model of Vassar substantial influence over my thoughts, in an attempt to regain stability.
While there are many more intricate details to this story, I believe the above summary encapsulates the most critical elements relevant to our discussion.
I do not attribute direct blame to Vassar, as it is unlikely he either intended or could have reasonably anticipated these specific outcomes. However, his approach, characterized by high-impact psychological interventions, can inadvertently affect the mental health of those around him. I hope that he has recognized this potential for harm and exercises greater caution in the future.
Thank you for sharing such personal details for the sake of the conversation.
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.
Can someone please clarify what is meant in this conext by ‘Vassar’s group’, or the term ‘Vassarites’ used by others?
My intution previously was that Michael Vassar had no formal ‘group’ or insitution of any kind, and it was just more like ‘a cluster of friends who hung out together a lot’, but this comment makes it seem like something more official.
While “Vassar’s group” is informal, it’s more than just a cluster of friends; it’s a social scene with lots of shared concepts, terminology, and outlook (although of course not every member holds every view and members sometimes disagree about the concepts, etc etc). In this way, the structure is similar to social scenes like “the AI safety community” or “wokeness” or “the startup scene” that coordinate in part on the basis of shared ideology even in the absence of institutional coordination, albeit much smaller. There is no formal institution governing the scene, and as far as I’ve ever heard Vassar himself has no particular authority within it beyond individual persuasion and his reputation.
Median Group is the closest thing to a “Vassarite” institution, in that its listed members are 2⁄3 people who I’ve heard/read describing the strong influence Vassar has had on their thinking and 1⁄3 people I don’t know, but AFAIK Median Group is just a project put together by a bunch of friends with similar outlook and doesn’t claim to speak for the whole scene or anything.
As a member of that cluster I endorse this description.
Michael and I are sometimes-housemates and I’ve never seen or heard of any formal “Vassarite” group or institution, though he’s an important connector in the local social graph, such that I met several good friends through him.
Thank you very much for sharing. I wasn’t aware of any of these details.
It sounds like you’re saying that based on extremely sparse data you made up a Michael Vassar in your head to drive you crazy. More generally, it seems like a bunch of people on this thread, most notably Scott Alexander, are attributing spooky magical powers to him. That is crazy cult behavior and I wish they would stop it.
ETA: In case it wasn’t clear, “that” = multiple people elsewhere in the comments attributing spooky mind control powers to Vassar. I was trying to summarize Eric’s account concisely, because insofar as it assigns agency at all I think it does a good job assigning it where it makes sense to, with the person making the decisions.
Reading through the comments here, I perceive a pattern of short-but-strongly-worded comments from you, many of which seem to me to contain highly inflammatory insinuations while giving little impression of any investment of interpretive labor. It’s not [entirely] clear to me what your goals are, but barring said goals being very strange and inexplicable indeed, it seems to me extremely unlikely that they are best fulfilled by the discourse style you have consistently been employing.
To be clear: I am annoyed by this. I perceive your comments as substantially lower-quality than the mean, and moreover I am annoyed that they seem to be receiving engagement far in excess of what I believe they deserve, resulting in a loss of attentional resources that could be used engaging more productively (either with other commenters, or with a hypothetical-version-of-you who does not do this). My comment here is written for the purpose of registering my impressions, and making it common-knowledge among those who share said impressions (who, for the record, I predict are not few) that said impressions are, in fact, shared.
(If I am mistaken in the above prediction, I am sure the voters will let me know in short order.)
I say all of the above while being reasonably confident that you do, in fact, have good intentions. However, good intentions do not ipso facto result in good comments, and to the extent that they have resulted in bad comments, I think one should point this fact out as bluntly as possible, which is why I worded the first two paragraphs of this comment the way I did. Nonetheless, I felt it important to clarify that I do not stand against [what I believe to be] your causes here, only the way you have been going about pursuing those causes.
(For the record: I am unaffiliated with MIRI, CFAR, Leverage, MAPLE, the “Vassarites”, or the broader rationalist community as it exists in physical space. As such, I have no direct stake in this conversation; but I very much do have an interest in making sure discussion around any topics this sensitive are carried out in a mature, nuanced way.)
If you want to clarify whether I mean to insinuate something in a particular comment, you could ask, like I asked Eliezer. I’m not going to make my comments longer without a specific idea of what’s unclear, that seems pointless.
It is accurate to state that I constructed a model of him based on limited information, which subsequently contributed to my dramatic psychological collapse. Nevertheless, the reason for developing this particular model can be attributed to his interactions with me and others. This was not due to any extraordinary or mystical abilities, but rather his profound commitment to challenging individuals’ perceptions of conventional reality and mastering the most effective methods to do so.
This approach is not inherently negative. However, it must be acknowledged that for certain individuals, such an intense disruption of their perceived reality can precipitate a descent into a detrimental psychological state.
Thanks for verifying. In hindsight my comment reads as though it was condemning you in a way I didn’t mean to; sorry about that.
The thing I meant to characterize as “crazy cult behavior” was people in the comments here attributing things like what you did in your mind to Michael Vassar’s spooky mind powers. You seem to be trying to be helpful and informative here. Sorry if my comment read like a personal attack.
This can be unpacked into an alternative to the charisma theory.
Many people are looking for a reference person to tell them what to do. (This is generally consistent with the Jaynesian family of hypotheses.) High-agency people are unusually easy to refer to, because they reveal the kind of information that allows others to locate them. There’s sufficient excess demand that even if someone doesn’t issue any actual orders, if they seem to have agency, people will generalize from sparse data to try to construct a version of that person that tells them what to do.
A more culturally central example than Vassar is Dr Fauci, who seems to have mostly reasonable opinions about COVID, but is worshipped by a lot of fanatics with crazy beliefs about COVID.
The charisma hypothesis describes this as a fundamental attribute of the person being worshipped, rather than a behavior of their worshippers.
If this information isn’t too private, can you send it to me? scott@slatestarcodex.com
I have sent you the document in question. As the contents are somewhat personal, I would prefer that it not be disseminated publicly. However, I am amenable to it being shared with individuals who have a valid interest in gaining a deeper understanding of the matter.