Aella
why does lesswrong suddenly feel good and homey
I can confirm this. There’s a transcript from the interview somewhere, I can dig it up if you want.
Yeaaah the response was weird. One, I deliberately only kept it to facts; I didn’t address his tone or the leadup or his framing, I was pretty bare bones like “the concrete claims are wrong.” I have a little annoyed if he thinks that’s frame control he has no idea. I suspect he might be seriously misunderstanding my writings on frame control.
But also like… for example this paragraph
”Many of the substances one can imagine employing here — most saliently, rohypnol, the date rape drug; but also others — would put people into compromised states in which they could not consent to further sexual activity imposed on them by people who may not even have known that their sexual partner was thus compromised.”
Afaik this isn’t information from the anonymous source, this is pure speculation on the author’s part where he independently brings up a date rape drug as a suggestion, and also speculates that “drug roulette” is used in conjunction with sexual activity, and where the context is such where there’s no consent involved and the participants would take advantage… And then to go and dismiss all this with “the drug roulette and house rules stuff was hearsay and i represented it as such” feels to me super inconsistent, apparently intentionally misleading, and confusing. I don’t know how to model the mind that would say both these things.
I posted it to Facebook first. I was friends/roommates with Persephone, discussed the post beforehand, and offered (or she asked, maybe?) to post it publicly there to get readership so she could also preserve her anonymity. This was scary for me at the time, as afaik I’d seen no negative discussion about Brent like that, and I was new to the community and didn’t know the temperature/how people would react. Walking into a new community and being the conduit for a bomb dropping on one of its members is not a comfortable experience. I don’t regret it though!
But I never had access to the mittenscautious accounts, and I never had contact with the other poster who had their accounts published. My participation organizing anything was limited almost entirely to making the initial facebook link post.
If you scroll up I summarize it in a tweet just a bit above here
Re the postscript, I go over the claims here
This post is almost entirely factually incorrect, but to go point-by-point
1. For the parties I throw—I assume the person is referring to some of the parties in 2017, as those were the ones that had “a lot of sex”? I agree consent wasn’t very clearly set out, but I’m not sure I regret this. I’ve never had anybody express to me the concerns laid out in the post, this is the first time I’m becoming aware events I’ve thrown have had a negative impact on people. I do genuinely not want this to happen and am now thinking about what and how to change about my events in the future. But I haven’t thrown events with sex in them for years, so I’m guessing I need to be more careful if I decide to do this again? Happy to have feedback from people who’ve attended my events, here.
2. I’ve never played drug roulette or seen drug roulette played at one of my parties, this is a blatantly incorrect claim. I have joked about playing it numerous times, though; maybe someone heard me joking and misunderstood it as me saying I’d done it before? (edit: to be slightly more clear, I have speculated out loud about the specifics of how we could do this if we wanted to, for fun, but I’ve never claimed that I had actually done it before or made any actual plans for doing it)
3. “you are never allowed to talk about it with anyone.”—also blatantly incorrect? Absolutely incorrect if it applies to drug roulette, cause I’ve never done it, but I also have never said this about any other activity to my recollection.4. “Also, there is reason to believe that one of the things Aella enjoys doing is consensual non-consent torture, designed to break people.” This is mostly true, but misleading! I’d just say “consensual torture”—there’s no façade of nonconsent like you’d see in kink play. I just straightforwardly tie people up and hurt them, after very clearly explaining everything, and they’re able to stop any time. Usually it lasts around 20-30 minutes, and I’ve never done it twice on one person. I’ve also had it done to me! It’s mostly just a really interesting experience to be in a lot of pain and see what your mind does, and to meditate on the experience of coping with that intensity. The purpose is definitely not to ‘break’ people. I’m more than happy for all the people I’ve done this with to talk about their experiences. I’ve also been very upfront about doing this with everybody.
5. The mention of attempting to cancel Joscha Bach was not an attempt to cancel, it was more talking about gut feelings, and fails to mention that I made a followup post about this saying “I officially retract my very public yelling about bad JUJU, say while i do have strong bad juju it seems like this isnt really matching onto other people’s experiences, and im considering it to be a false positive, and i want to make this public and say you should downgrade the extent to which you consider my juju guiding in this example and possibly others”
(sorry Joscha I didn’t mean for you to see this, everybody said very nice things about you and I updated in that direction)
6. Idk if I’ve tried to “cancel” MAPLE/OAK? You can read the facebook posts in question here https://www.facebook.com/caroline.f.hubert/posts/10222751244317191 and decide for yourself if this seems like a ‘cancellation’ attempt. This had nothing to do with the director stepping down, I wasn’t aware that happened.
7. Trying to cancel Leverage? Probably the closest to the truth. I do think Leverage seemed to get pretty bad by the end and people should take that very seriously.
8. No, I was not mittenscautious. I did not gather the stories, set up the inbox, I did not make the medium account. The most I did was be the first one to share the post on my facebook page. I was roommates with Persephone at the time.
9. “My intuitive read of this sequence of events, at the time as well as now, was: 1. Brent did something bad. 2. CFAR initiated an investigative process to determine what was to be done. That process reached a certain result. 3. Aella contested that result, and initiated an investigative process of dramatically lower fidelity, but higher memetic virulence. 4. Due to the strength of Aella’s frame, CFAR capitulated and ceded de facto control of the community to her.”
Also untrue. I’d just moved to the bay at the time and barely knew anyone. I think the only substantial commentary I provided here was some comments on a facebook thread (edit: Duncan linked it here, you can find my comments by ctrl-f “Ok I am late to the party”) where there were hundreds of other comments. I would be absolutely shocked if I had any impact whatsoever on CFAR making any decision. I doubt they even knew who I was. I think I probably was more against Brent’s cancellation than the median here (edit: I was still for it, just the majority were ‘very’ for it; I was more tempered with the intensity of the boot); the author of this article and I had a conversation at the time where he asked me to donate money to Brent as iirc he had already done, and I seriously considered it (edit: but decided against, after talking to some people who knew Brent). Unfortunately I think the author blocked me on FB (or deleted it) so I can’t find those messages.
10. ““Why is she doing this? This is undermining my frame. I’m trying to do something and she’s fucking it up.””
I’m pretty sure I didn’t say this, I think I said something more like the Lesswrong comments I made on the post itself, which you can read.
“She said: “yeah, I don’t really mind being the evil thing. Seems okay to me.””
I wouldn’t say this to most other people, because there’s an association with ‘being evil’ that I don’t mean, and I don’t want them to assume. This association is the thing implied here when taken out of context. I assumed the author understood, but now I suspect there was a misunderstanding.
The thing I actually meant you can read in my blog post here, ctrl-f “evil”
11. “And that’s all I have for you. I don’t know how else to end; if this were a cancellation, it might include a bit of “frame control” to try to tell you how to receive all of this and what to do about it. (The end of “Brent: A Warning””
I think he might be implying that I’m doing frame control in that article, except I didn’t write the end of that article. edit: to clarify here in case it was unclear, I do support the banning of Brent from the community, given the level of harm I believe he did to young women. Also, this seems like a misunderstanding of what I meant by ‘frame control’, which might be my fault for being unclear.Anyway; I’m not sure exactly why this post was written? If I have actually caused damage to people I do want to know, and if anyone feels comfortable telling me they were hurt by me I would value that information. But most of the claims here are concretely wrong, and I’m left mostly confused about what’s going on and why.
Yeah, great point. I think my frame control post is overly simplified and not 100% representative of my full worldview, because I don’t have the energy or skill required to put “actually everything is just narrative tho” in there and still maintain my point.
As far as I have the capacity to understand about myself, the ‘reclaiming’ post was true. It happened seven years ago now, and I still haven’t had the issues come back I did prior to that reclaiming moment, and I’ve had no further detection of unhonored or ignored pain.
But uhhh I’m not sure if I have the clarity right now to stab further at my intuitions around this. I’ve got a blog post brewing specifically in response to your sort of question and I suspect it’ll take a while before it’s ready. But I simultaneously want to burn frame control with fire, and also believe it’s not inherently bad. Or something.
I stand by the thing I was trying to communicate in point 1, though I might have communicated poorly. I have met many people who are well established, very smart, who are not socially submissive, who still make the little moves that demonstrate vulnerability. I think Eliezer does this, for example.
To try to parse for me here, what I took away from each point:
1. “Where are the concrete claims that allow people to directly check”
2. Discomfort mixing claims about frame control with claims about Geoff, as lots of bad claims or beliefs can get sneaked in through the former while talking about the latter
3. I had a lot of trouble parsing this one, particularly the paragraph starting with “Uncharitable paraphrase/caricature:”. I’m gathering something like “unease that I am making arguments that override normal good truth-seeking behavior, with the end goal being elevating my [aella’s] ability to be a discerner about things”
So re: one, this… seems true. I would prefer a version of this with concrete claims that allow people to directly check, and am interested in help generating this. I am driven by the belief that there is something—there seems to be a clear pattern of ‘what is my reality’ I’ve seen in me and multiple other people close to me, and there’s something that causes it. That’s about as concrete as I have the capacity to get. To me, the whole thing seems elusive by nature, and I had an option of “write vaguely about an elusive thing” or “not write about it at all.”
For the second point, I think I agree with your words but there’s something in me that… disagrees with the vibe? Or something? I’m not sure. And for what it’s worth, I’ve been brewing on this topic for many years, and made a few serious attempts to write it out well before the whole Leverage thing. Geoff feels kind of incidental to me. Maybe I am wondering if you perceive this as more central-to-Leverage than I perceive it.
But to understand better: if I’d posted a version of this with fully anonymous examples, nothing specifically traceable to Leverage, would that have felt good to you, or would something in it still feel weird?
Third, I’m not sure I understand due to parsing problems, but… I think I have uneasiness about it too? I had discussions with a few people before posting this and expressed things that sounded similar to what I imagine you’re trying to point at. I’m worried the concept is too fuzzy to be used judiciously, or that the self-protective mechanisms required to identify and react to frame control are very close to poison. I don’t know what to do about this exactly; I have another blog post brewing I’m hoping might help. But I think I believe frame control is dangerous enough that it’s worth ‘throw maybe dangerous defenses out there in response’. I am very interested in figuring out how to hone those defenses so they don’t backfire.
I’m slightly confused, because (unless I’m missing one) only one of my examples given was in reference to the live conflict. Unless maybe you mean the generalized timing of the post as a whole, or the other examples given for other events/people unrelated to the community but still ongoing? I am probably not down to post another two separate posts, as writing this was a lot of effort, and I’d probably feel sad if someone else did it for me. Would it just make more sense for me to unlink or remove the one example?
I like the rule, and if it’s possible to come up with engagement guidelines that have asymmetrical results for frame control I would really like that. I couldn’t think of any clear, overarching while writing this post, but will continue to think about this.
And you’re right in that the concept of frame control will get inevitably weaponized. I am afraid of this happening as a result of my post, and I’m not really sure how to handle that.
Ahhh these are fantastic examples that clearly map onto frame controllers I know and I didn’t think of it when writing this post; really great points.
I think there’s a difference here I didn’t really touch upon in the post; I think it’s possible for someone to clearly know a lot more than you, but still make their moves salient. For example; I know two men who are friends, both high status, have ‘followers’, are very smart, and hold extremely similar beliefs. One is the one I mentioned who I had a long talk with, and I consider him to have been doing frame control. The other similarly advocated for his own beliefs, wasn’t open to mine, but his frame was much more salient; he was clear about his moves, and didn’t feel like he was implicitly asking me to submit to him, or something?
Or they can make clear moves to equalize; I know many people with far more expertise than I do who do very subtle social moves constantly to hand power and respect back to me, somehow without pretending that they don’t know more than I do. I’m thinking of this one guy I respect a lot who is a teacher and coach and has a podcast, and he has way more experience and wisdom than me. I had lunch with him once and walked away with the sense that he had just… handed me his heart? Somehow he seemed to be actively imbuing me with power and surrendering himself before me, and at no point did it feel like he was attempting to conceal his own abilities or self-efface to make me comfortable. It was incredible.
Frame Control
Here’s anonymous submission of Leverage’s Basic Information Acknowledgement Checklist document. The submitter said “The text of this document has been copied word for word from the original, except with names redacted.”
I don’t have an object-level opinion formed on this yet, but want to +1 this as more of the kind of description I find interesting, and isn’t subject to the same critiques I had with the original post.
as a tiny, mostly-uninformed data point, i read “if you realized how bad taxation is for the economy, you’d never stop screaming” to have a very diff vibe from Eliezer’s tweet, cause he didn’t use the word bad. I know it’s a small diff but it hits diff. Something in his tweet was amusing because it felt like it was pointing to a presumably neutral thing and making it scary? whereas saying the same thing about a clearly moralistic point seems like it’s doing a different thing.
Again—a very minor point here, just wanted to throw it in.
Also fwiw, I took psychedelics in a relatively memetic-free environment. I’d been homeschooled and not exposed to hippie/drug culture, and especially not significant discussion around enlightenment. I consider this to be one of the reasons my experience was so successful; I didn’t have it in relationship to those memes, and did not view myself as pursuing enlightenment (I know I said I was inwardly pursuing enlightenment in my above comment, but I was mostly riffing off your phrasing; in some sense I think it was true but it wasn’t a conscious thing.)
LSD did not permanently lower my mathematical abilities, and if I suggested that I probably misspoke? I suspect it damaged my memory, though; my memory is worse now than before I took LSD.
And sorry; by ‘everything being ok’ I didn’t mean that I literally think that situation will end up being the ones I want; I mean that I know I will be okay with whatever happens. Very related to my endurance of pain going up by quite a lot, and my anxiety of death disappearing.
Separately, I do think that a lot of the memes around psychedelics are… incomplete? It’s hard to find a good word. Naive? Something around the difference between the aesthetic of a thing and the thing itself? And in that I might agree with you somewhere that “seeking enlightenment” isn’t… virtuous or whatever.
fwiw as a data point here, I spent some time inwardly pursuing “enlightenment” with heavy and frequent doses of psychedelics for a period of 10 months and consider this to be one of the best things I’ve ever done. I believe it raised my resting set point happiness, among other good things, and I am still deeply altered (7 years later).
I do not think this is a good idea for everyone and lots of people who try would end up worse off. But I strongly object to this being seen as virtuous as obsessive masturbation. Sure, it might not be your thing, but this frame seriously misses a huge amount of really important changes in my experience. And I get you might think I’m… brainwashed or something? by drugs? So I don’t know what I could say that would convince you otherwise.
But I did have concrete things, like solving a pretty big section of childhood trauma (like; I had a burning feeling of rage in my chest before, and the burning feeling was gone afterwards), I had multiple other people comment on how different I was now (usually in regards to laughing easier and seeming more relaxed), I lost my anxiety around dying, my relationship to pain altered in such a way that I am significantly more mentally able to endure it than I was before, I also had a radically altered relationship to the physical environment (my living space looked very different before and after), and I produced a lot of art that I hadn’t been producing before. Maybe this one is less concrete, but some part of me feels really deeply at peace, always, like it knows everything is going to be ok and I didn’t have that before.
There’s a way in which I consider what I did wireheading, like really successful wireheading, but I think people often… fail to imagine wireheading properly? And the husk of wireheading, where you’re sort of less of a person, is really terrifying. I agree that the husk-of-wireheading view makes psychedelics seem more sinister.
I’ve been dating Nate for two years (tho wanna clarify we are not doing marriage-kids and we’re both actively looking for more serious other partners).
Nate is profoundly wonderful in many ways, like often surprises me in new ways of wonderfulness, and has raised my standards in partners. He’s deeply caring, attentive, competent, hilarious, and of course brilliant.
Also, many of the complaints about him in the comments resonate with my experience, particularly your description above. I often find that in disputes I feel dismissed, I perceive him as having a significant lack of curiosity about my worldview (and believe he’s explicitly said he’s not curious about perspectives he anticipates to have no value to him).
Iirc he’s explicitly said he doesn’t respect my thinking (edit: he clarifies he respects it in some areas but not others), and from my perspective this radiates off him whenever we fight. I often feel like I have trouble trusting my own mind, I doubt myself, and despite my best attempts I somehow come out of disputes thinking I must be the one who’s wrong. It’s weird to have a partner who’s so shockingly good in so many ways, yet we have maybe the worst fights I’ve ever experienced in romantic relationships. (Though he says other girls he’s dated don’t have this problem and I am unusual)
On one plus side, I’ve found him to be very good at installing concrete changes if you can articulate them to him. A few times I managed to have a specific request about how I’d like him to say things differently, and if he agrees to do so he updates fast, thoroughly, and permanently.
I feel conflicted about posting this here because ??? should this be personal/private ?? but I’m having some sort of massive relief and feeling like actually I’m not insane. And also I am invested in (though not hopeful about) something changing here cause it would be good for our relationship and I assume also MIRI, which I like and believe in.
(I talked to Nate before posting this comment and he was encouraging)