The large majority of folks described in the OP as experiencing psychosis are transgender.
That would be, arguably, 3 of the 4 cases of psychosis I knew about (if Zack Davis is included as transgender) and not the case of jail time I knew about. So 60% total. [EDIT: See PhoneixFriend’s comment, there were 4 cases who weren’t talking with Michael and who probably also weren’t trans (although that’s unknown); obviously my own knowledge is limited to my own social circle and people including me weren’t accounting for this in statistical inference]
My impression from reading Zoe’s writeup is that she thinks her poor mental health resulted from memes/policies/conversations that were at best accidentally mindfucky, and often intentionally abusive and manipulative.
In contrast, my impression of what happened in these rationalist social circles is more like “friends or colleagues earnestly introduced people (who happened to be drawn from a population with unusually high rates of mental illness) to upsetting plausible ideas.”
These don’t seem like mutually exclusive categories? Like, “upsetting plausible ideas” would be “memes” and “conversations” that could include things like AI probably coming soon, high amounts of secrecy being necessary, and the possibility of “mental objects” being transferred between people, right?
Even people not at the organizations themselves were an important cause, everyone was in a similar social context and responding to it, e.g. a lot of what Michael Vassar said was in response to and critical of lots of ideas institutional people had.
It seems like something strange is happening with some ideas that were different from the mainstream being labeled as “memes” and others, some of which are counter to the first set of ideas and some of which are counter to mainstream understanding, being labeled as “upsetting plausible ideas” with more causal attribution to the second class.
If a certain scene is a “cult” and people who “exit the cult” have higher rates of psychosis than people who don’t even attempt to “exit the cult” then this is consistent with the observations so far. Which could happen in part due to the ontological shift necessary to “exit the cult” and also because exiting would increase social isolation (increasing social dependence on a small number of people), which is a known risk factor.
Both Zoe and I were at one time “in a cult” and at a later time “out of the cult” with some in-between stage of “believing what we were in was a cult”, where both being “in the cult” and “coming to believe what we were in was a cult” involved “memes” and “upsetting plausible ideas”, which doesn’t seem like enough to differentiate.
Overall this doesn’t immediately match my subjective experience and seems like it’s confusing a lot of things.
[EDIT: The case I’m making here is even stronger given PhoenixFriend’s comment.]
exiting would increase social isolation (increasing social dependence on a small number of people), which is a known risk factor
If exiting makes you socially isolated, it means that (before exiting) all/most of your contacts were within the group.
That suggests that the safest way to exit is to gradually start meeting new people outside the group, start spending more time with them and less time with other group member, until the majority of your social life happens outside the group, which is when you should quit.
Cults typically try to prevent you from doing this, to keep the exit costly and dangerous. One method is to monitor you and your communications all the time. (For example, Jehovah Witnesses are always out there in pairs, because they have a sacred duty to snitch on each other. Another way is to keep you at the group compound where you simply can’t meet non-members. Yet another way is to establish a duty to regularly confess what you did and who you talked to, and to chastise you for spending time with unbelievers.) Another method is simply to keep you so busy all day long that you have no time left to interact with strangers.
To revert this—a healthy group will provide you enough private free time. (With the emphasis on all the three words: “free”, “private”, and “enough”.)
Both Zoe and I were at one time “in a cult”
We know that Zoe had little free time, she had to spend a lot of time reporting her thoughts to her supervisors, and she was pressured to abandon her hobbies and not socialize.
2–6hr long group debugging sessions in which we as a sub-faction (Alignment Group) would attempt to articulate a “demon” which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our systems using debugging tools.
it was suggested I cancel my intended trip to Europe to show my commitment, which I did.
There was no vacation policy, which seemed good, but in reality panned out in my having no definitively free, personal time that couldn’t be infringed upon by expectations of project prioritization.
One day, I was debugging with a supervisor and we got to the topic of my desire to perform as an actor. [...] he thought that wanting to do acting [...] was “honestly sociopathic.”
We were kept extremely busy. [...] Here are four screenshots of my calendar, showing an average month in my last 6 months at Leverage.
I was regularly left with the feeling that I was low status, uncommitted, and kind of useless for wanting to socialize on the weekends or in the evenings.
Also, the group belief that if you meet outsiders they may “mentally invade you”, the rival groups (does this refer to rationalists and EAs? not sure) will “infiltrate” you with “demons”, and ordinary people will intentionally or subconsciously “leave objects” in you… does not sound like it would exactly encourage you to make friends outside the group, to put it mildly.
Now, do you insist that your experience in MIRI/CFAR was of the same kind? -- Like, what was your schedule, approximately? Did you have free weekends? Were you criticized for socializing with people outside MIRI/CFAR, especially with “rival groups”? Did you have to debug your thoughts and exorcise the mental invasions left by your interaction with nonmembers? If possible, please be specific.
Were you criticized for socializing with people outside MIRI/CFAR, especially with “rival groups”?
As a datapoint, while working at MIRI I started dating someone working at OpenAI, and never felt any pressure from MIRI people to drop the relationship (and he was welcomed at the MIRI events that we did, and so on), despite Eliezer’s tweets discussed here representing a pretty widespread belief at MIRI. (He wasn’t one of the founders, and I think people at MIRI saw a clear difference between “founding OpenAI” and “working at OpenAI given that it was founded”, so idk if they would agree with the frame that OpenAI was a ‘rival group’.)
That suggests that the safest way to exit is to gradually start meeting new people outside the group, start spending more time with them and less time with other group member, until the majority of your social life happens outside the group, which is when you should quit.
This is what I did, it was just still a pretty small social group, and getting it and “quitting” were part of the same process.
(does this refer to rationalists and EAs? not sure)
I think it was other subgroups at Leverage, at least primarily. So “mental objects” would be a consideration in favor of making friends outside of the group. Unless one is worried about spreading mental objects to outsiders.
Now, do you insist that your experience in MIRI/CFAR was of the same kind?
Most of this is answered in the post, e.g. I made it clear that the over-scheduling issue was not a problem for me at MIRI, which is an important difference. I was certainly spending a lot of time outside of work doing psychological work, and I noted friendships including one with a housemate formed around a shared interest in such work (Zoe notes that a lot of things on her schedule were internal psychological work). There wasn’t active prevention of talking to people outside the community but it’s common for it to happen anyway which is influenced by soft social pressure (e.g. looking down on people as “normies”). Zoe also is saying a lot of the pressure at Leverage was soft/nonexplicit, e.g. “being looked down on” for taking normal weekends.
I do remember Nate Soares who was executive director at the time telling me that “work-life balance is overrated/not really necessary” and if I’d been more sensitive to this I might have spent a lot more time on work. (I’m not even sure he’s “wrong” in that the way “normal people” do this has a lot of problems and integrating different domains of life can help sometimes, it still could have been taken as encouragement in the direction of working on weekends etc.)
Just want to register that this comment seemed overly aggressive to me on a first read, even though I probably have many sympathies in your direction (that Leverage is importantly disanalogous to MIRI/CFAR)
That would be, arguably, 3 of the 4 cases of psychosis I knew about (if Zack Davis is included as transgender) and not the case of jail time I knew about. So 60% total. [EDIT: See PhoneixFriend’s comment, there were 4 cases who weren’t talking with Michael and who probably also weren’t trans (although that’s unknown); obviously my own knowledge is limited to my own social circle and people including me weren’t accounting for this in statistical inference]
These don’t seem like mutually exclusive categories? Like, “upsetting plausible ideas” would be “memes” and “conversations” that could include things like AI probably coming soon, high amounts of secrecy being necessary, and the possibility of “mental objects” being transferred between people, right?
Even people not at the organizations themselves were an important cause, everyone was in a similar social context and responding to it, e.g. a lot of what Michael Vassar said was in response to and critical of lots of ideas institutional people had.
It seems like something strange is happening with some ideas that were different from the mainstream being labeled as “memes” and others, some of which are counter to the first set of ideas and some of which are counter to mainstream understanding, being labeled as “upsetting plausible ideas” with more causal attribution to the second class.
If a certain scene is a “cult” and people who “exit the cult” have higher rates of psychosis than people who don’t even attempt to “exit the cult” then this is consistent with the observations so far. Which could happen in part due to the ontological shift necessary to “exit the cult” and also because exiting would increase social isolation (increasing social dependence on a small number of people), which is a known risk factor.
Both Zoe and I were at one time “in a cult” and at a later time “out of the cult” with some in-between stage of “believing what we were in was a cult”, where both being “in the cult” and “coming to believe what we were in was a cult” involved “memes” and “upsetting plausible ideas”, which doesn’t seem like enough to differentiate.
Overall this doesn’t immediately match my subjective experience and seems like it’s confusing a lot of things.
[EDIT: The case I’m making here is even stronger given PhoenixFriend’s comment.]
If exiting makes you socially isolated, it means that (before exiting) all/most of your contacts were within the group.
That suggests that the safest way to exit is to gradually start meeting new people outside the group, start spending more time with them and less time with other group member, until the majority of your social life happens outside the group, which is when you should quit.
Cults typically try to prevent you from doing this, to keep the exit costly and dangerous. One method is to monitor you and your communications all the time. (For example, Jehovah Witnesses are always out there in pairs, because they have a sacred duty to snitch on each other. Another way is to keep you at the group compound where you simply can’t meet non-members. Yet another way is to establish a duty to regularly confess what you did and who you talked to, and to chastise you for spending time with unbelievers.) Another method is simply to keep you so busy all day long that you have no time left to interact with strangers.
To revert this—a healthy group will provide you enough private free time. (With the emphasis on all the three words: “free”, “private”, and “enough”.)
We know that Zoe had little free time, she had to spend a lot of time reporting her thoughts to her supervisors, and she was pressured to abandon her hobbies and not socialize.
Also, the group belief that if you meet outsiders they may “mentally invade you”, the rival groups (does this refer to rationalists and EAs? not sure) will “infiltrate” you with “demons”, and ordinary people will intentionally or subconsciously “leave objects” in you… does not sound like it would exactly encourage you to make friends outside the group, to put it mildly.
Now, do you insist that your experience in MIRI/CFAR was of the same kind? -- Like, what was your schedule, approximately? Did you have free weekends? Were you criticized for socializing with people outside MIRI/CFAR, especially with “rival groups”? Did you have to debug your thoughts and exorcise the mental invasions left by your interaction with nonmembers? If possible, please be specific.
As a datapoint, while working at MIRI I started dating someone working at OpenAI, and never felt any pressure from MIRI people to drop the relationship (and he was welcomed at the MIRI events that we did, and so on), despite Eliezer’s tweets discussed here representing a pretty widespread belief at MIRI. (He wasn’t one of the founders, and I think people at MIRI saw a clear difference between “founding OpenAI” and “working at OpenAI given that it was founded”, so idk if they would agree with the frame that OpenAI was a ‘rival group’.)
This is what I did, it was just still a pretty small social group, and getting it and “quitting” were part of the same process.
I think it was other subgroups at Leverage, at least primarily. So “mental objects” would be a consideration in favor of making friends outside of the group. Unless one is worried about spreading mental objects to outsiders.
Most of this is answered in the post, e.g. I made it clear that the over-scheduling issue was not a problem for me at MIRI, which is an important difference. I was certainly spending a lot of time outside of work doing psychological work, and I noted friendships including one with a housemate formed around a shared interest in such work (Zoe notes that a lot of things on her schedule were internal psychological work). There wasn’t active prevention of talking to people outside the community but it’s common for it to happen anyway which is influenced by soft social pressure (e.g. looking down on people as “normies”). Zoe also is saying a lot of the pressure at Leverage was soft/nonexplicit, e.g. “being looked down on” for taking normal weekends.
I do remember Nate Soares who was executive director at the time telling me that “work-life balance is overrated/not really necessary” and if I’d been more sensitive to this I might have spent a lot more time on work. (I’m not even sure he’s “wrong” in that the way “normal people” do this has a lot of problems and integrating different domains of life can help sometimes, it still could have been taken as encouragement in the direction of working on weekends etc.)
Just want to register that this comment seemed overly aggressive to me on a first read, even though I probably have many sympathies in your direction (that Leverage is importantly disanalogous to MIRI/CFAR)