Scott Alexander

Karma: 44,103

Scott Alexander Dec 21, 2021, 9:10 PM
28 points
4
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Occupational Infohazards
Interpreting you as saying that January-June 2017 you were basically doing the same thing as the Leveragers when talking about demons and had no other signs of psychosis, I agree this was not a psychiatric emergency, and I’m sorry if I got confused and suggested it was. I’ve edited my post also.

Scott Alexander Dec 21, 2021, 7:35 PM
17 points
8
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Occupational Infohazards
Sorry, yes, I meant the psychosis was emergency. Non-psychotic discussion of auras/demons isn’t.
I’m kind of unclear what we’re debating now.
I interpret us as both agreeing that there are people talking about auras and demons who are not having psychiatric emergencies (eg random hippies, Catholic exorcists), and they should not be bothered, except insofar as you feel like having rational arguments about it.
I interpret us as both agreeing that you were having a psychotic episode, that you were going further / sounded less coherent than the hippies and Catholics, and that some hypothetical good diagnostician / good friend should have noticed that and suggested you seek help.
Am I right that we agree on those two points? Can you clarify what you think our crux is?
What links here?
- Occupational Infohazards by jessicata (Dec 18, 2021, 8:56 PM; 39 points)

Scott Alexander Dec 21, 2021, 6:29 PM
29 points
15
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Occupational Infohazards
You wrote that talking about auras and demons the way Jessica did while at MIRI should be considered a psychiatric emergency. When done by a practicing psychiatrist this is an impingement on Jessica’s free speech.
I don’t think I said any talk of auras should be a psychiatric emergency, otherwise we’d have to commit half of Berkeley. I said that “in the context of her being borderline psychotic” ie including this symptom, they should have “[told] her to seek normal medical treatment”. Suggesting that someone seek normal medical treatment is pretty different from saying this is a psychiatric emergency, and hardly an “impingement” on free speech. I’m kind of playing this in easy mode here because in hindsight we know Jessica ended up needing treatment, I feel like this makes it pretty hard to make it sound sinister when I suggest this.
You wrote this in response to a post that contained the following and only the following mentions of demons or auras:
“During this time, I was intensely scrupulous; I believed that I was intrinsically evil, had destroyed significant parts of the world with my demonic powers, and was in a hell of my own creation...” [followed by several more things along these lines]
Yes? That actually sounds pretty bad to me. If I ever go around saying that I have destroyed significant parts of the world with my demonic powers, you have my permission to ask me if maybe I should seek psychiatric treatment. If you say “Oh yes, Scott, that’s a completely normal and correct thing to think, I am validating you and hope you go deeper into that”, then once I get better I’ll accuse you of being a bad friend. Jessica’s doing the opposite and accusing MIRI of being a bad workplace for not validating and reinforcing her in this!
I think what we all later learned about Leverage confirms all this. Leverage ~~did the thing Jessica wanted MIRI to do~~ told everyone ex cathedra that demons were real and they were right to be afraid of them, and so they got an epidemic of mass hysteria that sounds straight out of a medieval nunnery. People were getting all sorts of weird psychosomatic symptoms, and one of the commenters said their group house exploded when one member accused another member of being possessed by demons, refused to talk or communicate with them in case the demons spread, and the “possessed” had to move out. People felt traumatized, relationships were destroyed, it sounded awful.
MIRI is under no obligation to ~~validate and signal-boost~~ tolerate individual employees’ belief in demons, including some sort of metaphorical demons. In fact, I think they’re under a mild obligation not to, as part of their role as ~leader-ish in a rationalist community. They’re under an obligation to model good epistemics for the rest of us and avoid more Leverage-type mass hysterias.
One of my heroes is this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmo1a-bimAM
Surinder Sharma, an Indian mystic, claimed to be able to kill people with a voodoo curse. He was pretty convincing and lots of people were legitimately scared. Sanal Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Organization, challenged Sharma to kill him. Since this is the 21st century and capitalism is amazing, they decided to do the whole death curse on live TV. Sharma sprinkled water and chanted magic words around Edamaruku. According to Wikipedia, “the challenge ended after several hours, with Edamaruku surviving unharmed”.
If Leverage had a few more Sanal Edamarukus, a lot of people would have avoided a pretty weird time.
I think the best response MIRI could have had to all this would have been for Nate Soares to challenge Geoff Anders to infect him with a demon on life TV, then walk out unharmed and laugh. I think the second-best was the one they actually did.
EDIT: I think I misunderstood parts of this, see below comments.

Scott Alexander Dec 20, 2021, 5:59 PM
33 points
4
on: Occupational Infohazards
Thanks for this.
I’ve been trying to research and write something kind of like this giving more information for a while, but got distracted by other things. I’m still going to try to finish it soon.
While I disagree with Jessica’s interpretations of a lot of things, I generally agree with her facts (about the Vassar stuff which I have been researching; I know nothing about the climate at MIRI). I think this post gives most of the relevant information mine would give. I agree with (my model of) Jessica that proximity to Michael’s ideas (and psychedelics) was not the single unique cause of her problems but may have contributed.
The main thing I’d fight if I felt fighty right now is the claim that by not listening to talk about demons and auras MIRI (or by extension me, who endorsed MIRI’s decision) is impinging on her free speech. I don’t think she should face legal sanction for talking about this these, but I also don’t think other people were under any obligation to take it seriously, including if she was using these terms metaphorically but they disagree with her metaphors or think she wasn’t quite being metaphorical enough.
What links here?
- ChristianKleineidam's comment on Abuse in LessWrong and rationalist communities in Bloomberg News by whistleblower67 (EA Forum; Mar 8, 2023, 8:33 PM; 15 points)

Scott Alexander Dec 20, 2021, 5:38 PM
17 points
in reply to: TekhneMakre’s comment on: Should I delay having children to take advantage of polygenic screening?
Embryos produced by the same couple won’t vary in IQ too much, and we only understand some of the variation in IQ, so we’re trying to predict small differences without being able to see what’s going on too clearly. Gwern predicts that if you had ten embryos to choose from, understood the SNP portion of IQ genetics perfectly, and picked the highest-IQ without selecting on any other factor, you could gain ~9 IQ points over natural conception.
Given our current understanding of IQ genetics, keeping the other two factors the same, you can gain ~3 points. But the vast majority of couples won’t get 10 embryos, and you may want to select for things other than IQ (eg not having deadly diseases). So in reality it’ll be less than that.
The only thing here that will get better in the future is our understanding of IQ genetics, but it doesn’t seem to be moving forward especially quickly, at some point we’ll exhaust the low- and medium- hanging fruits, and even if we do a great job there the gains will max out at somewhere less than 9 points.
Also, this is assuming someone decides to make polygenic screening for IQ available at some point, or someone puts in the work to make it easy for the average person to do despite being not officially available.
I am not an expert in this and would defer to Gwern or anyone who knows more.

Scott Alexander Dec 20, 2021, 3:27 AM
13 points
on: Getting diagnosed for ADHD if I don’t plan on taking meds?
“Diagnosed” isn’t a clear concept.
The minimum viable “legally-binding” ADHD diagnosis a psychiatrist can give you is to ask you about your symptoms, compare them to extremely vague criteria in the DSM, and agree that you sound ADHD-ish.
ADHD is a fuzzy construct without clear edges and there is no fact of the matter about whether any given individual has it. So this is just replacing your own opinion about whether you seem to fit a vaguely-defined template with a psychiatrist’s only slightly more informed opinion. The most useful things you could get out of this are meds (which it seems you don’t want) accommodations at certain workplaces and schools (as Elizabeth describes in her common), and maybe getting your insurance to pay for certain kinds of therapy—but don’t assume your insurance will actually do this unless you check.
Beyond that minimum viable diagnosis, there are also various complicated formal ADHD tests. Not every psychiatrist will refer you to these, not every insurance company will pay for one of them, and you should be prepared to have to advocate for yourself hard if you want one. If you get one of these, it can tell you eg what percentile you are in for various cognitive skills, for example, 95% of people are better at maintaining focus than you are. Maybe some professional knows how to do something useful with this, but I (a psychiatrist) don’t, and you probably won’t find that professional unless you look hard for them.
If you already have a strong sense of your cognitive strengths and weaknesses and don’t need accommodations, I don’t think the diagnosis would add very much. Even without a diagnosis, if you think you have problems with attention/focus/etc, you can read books aimed at ADHD people to try to see what kind of lifestyle changes you can make.
In very rare cases, you will get a very experienced psychiatrist who is happy to work with you on making lifestyle/routine changes and very good at telling you what to do, but don’t expect this to happen by accident. You’re more likely to get this from an ADHD coach, who will take you as a client whether or not you have an official diagnosis.

Scott Alexander Dec 20, 2021, 3:18 AM
9 points
on: Venture Granters, The VCs of public goods, incentivizing good dreams
I would look into social impact bonds, impact certificates, and retroactive public goods funding. I think these are three different attempts to get at the same insight you’ve had here. There are incipient efforts to get some of them off the ground and I agree that would be great.

Scott Alexander Dec 20, 2021, 3:17 AM
18 points
on: Should I delay having children to take advantage of polygenic screening?
There’s polygenic screening now. It doesn’t include eg IQ, but polygenic screening for IQ is unlikely to be very good any time in the near future. Probably polygenic screening for other things will improve at some rate, but regardless of how long you wait, it could always improve more if you wait longer, so there will never be a “right time”.
Even in the very unlikely scenario where your decision about child-rearing should depend on something about polygenic screening, I say do it now.

Scott Alexander Dec 20, 2021, 2:50 AM
39 points
0
on: Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores?
To contribute whatever information I can here:
1. I’ve been to three of Aella’s parties—without remembering exact dates, something like 2018, 2019, and 2021. While they were pretty wild, and while I might not have been paying close attention, I didn’t see personally see anything that seemed consent-violating or even a gray area, and I definitely didn’t hear anything about “drug roulette”.
2. I had originally been confused by the author’s claim that “Aella was mittenscautious”. Aella was definitely not either of the two women who blogged on that account describing abusive relationships with Brent. After rereading the post, it sounds like the author is saying Aella set up the Medium page for them, which I have no evidence on either way. If true, I would be grateful to her for that—there had been widespread rumors Brent was abusing people before that, but in the absence of common knowledge nothing was being done.
3. There was widespread discontent with CFAR’s original decision not to come down harder on Brent. I knew several people who were angry, none of whom were Aella or seemed especially connected to her. It’s possible Aella was manipulating all of them behind the scenes, but it seems more possible that a lot of rationalists were just naturally concerned that we seemed to be tolerating a person with multiple credible rape/abuse allegations.
Moving from evidence to vague thoughts: there’s a tough balance between not doing “cancel culture” in the bad sense, and also not being tolerant/complacent in the face of bad things. I’m pretty allergic to the bad kind of “cancel culture” but I’ve always felt like Aella strikes this balance correctly. If she in fact helped with mittenscautious I am even more impressed with this.
(I did worry Aella’s “Frame Control” post would make it too easy to try to cancel people for vague hard-to-describe infractions, but I didn’t get the sense Aella herself was trying to do that).

Scott Alexander Oct 21, 2021, 9:41 AM
18 points
in reply to: PhoenixFriend’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
Thanks for this.
I’m interested in figuring out more what’s going on here—how do you feel about emailing me, hashing out the privacy issues, and, if we can get them hashed out, you telling me the four people you’re thinking of who had psychotic episodes?

Scott Alexander Oct 21, 2021, 1:04 AM
31 points
0
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
I agree I’m being somewhat inconsistent, I’d rather do that than prematurely force consistency and end up being wrong or missing some subtlety. I’m trying to figure out what went on in these cases in more details and will probably want to ask you a lot of questions by email if you’re open to that.

Scott Alexander Oct 19, 2021, 9:29 AM
6 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
If this information isn’t too private, can you send it to me? scott@slatestarcodex.com

Scott Alexander Oct 18, 2021, 8:55 PM
42 points
0
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
I’ve posted an edit/update above after talking to Vassar.

Scott Alexander Oct 18, 2021, 7:30 PM
103 points
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
Yes, I agree with you that all of this is very awkward.
I think the basic liberal model where everyone uses Reason a lot and we basically trust their judgments is a good first approximation and we should generally use it.
But we have to admit at least small violations of it even to get the concept of “cult”. Not just the sort of weak cults we’re discussing here, but even the really strong cults like Heaven’s Gate or Jamestown. In the liberal model, someone should be able to use Reason to conclude that being in Heaven’s Gate is bad for them, and leave. When we use the word “cult”, we’re implicitly agreeing that this doesn’t always work, and we’re bringing in creepier and less comprehensible ideas like “charisma” and “brainwashing” and “cognitive dissonance”.
(and the same thing with the concept of “emotionally abusive relationship”)
I don’t want to call the Vassarites a cult because I’m sure someone will confront me with a Cult Checklist that they don’t meet, but I think that it’s not too crazy to argue that some of these same creepy ideas like charisma and so on were at work there. And everyone knows cults can get weird and end in mental illness. I agree it’s weird that you can get that far without robes and chanting or anything, but I never claimed to really understand exactly how cults work, plus I’m sure the drugs helped.
I think believing cults are possible is different in degree if not in kind from Leverage “doing seances...to call on demonic energies and use their power to affect the practitioners’ social standing”. I’m claiming, though I can’t prove it, that what I’m saying is more towards the “believing cults are possible” side.
I’m actually very worried about this! I hate admitting cults are possible! If you admit cults are possible, you have to acknowledge that the basic liberal model has gaps, and then you get things like if an evangelical deconverts to atheism, the other evangelicals can say “Oh, he’s in a cult, we need to kidnap and deprogram him since his best self wouldn’t agree with the deconversion.” I want to be extremely careful in when we do things like that, which is why I’m not actually “calling for isolating Michael Vassar from his friends”. I think in the Outside View we should almost never do this!
But you were the one to mention this cluster of psychotic breaks, and I am trying to provide what I think is a more accurate perspective on them. Maybe in the future we learn that this was because of some weird neuroinflammatory virus that got passed around at a Vassarite meeting and we laugh that we were ever dumb enough to think a person/group could transmit psychotic breaks. But until then, I think the data point that all of this was associated with Vassar and the Vassarites is one we shouldn’t just ignore.

Scott Alexander Oct 18, 2021, 11:24 AM
82 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
I’m having trouble figuring out how to respond to this hostile framing. I mean, it’s true that I’ve talked with Michael many times about ways in which (in his view, and separately in mine) MIRI, CfAR, and “the community” have failed to live up to their stated purposes. Separately, it’s also true that, on occasion, Michael has recommended I take drugs. (The specific recommendations I recall were weed and psilocybin. I always said No; drug use seems like a very bad idea given my history of psych problems.)
[...]
Michael is a charismatic guy who has strong views and argues forcefully for them. That’s not the same thing as having mysterious mind powers to “make people paranoid” or cause psychotic breaks! (To the extent that there is a correlation between talking to Michael and having psych issues, I suspect a lot of it is a selection effect rather than causal: Michael told me once that he specifically seeks out people who are high in Eysenckian psychoticism.) If someone thinks Michael is wrong about something, great: I’m sure he’d be happy to argue about it, time permitting. But under-evidenced aspersions that someone is somehow dangerous just to talk to are not an argument.
I more or less Outside View agree with you on this, which is why I don’t go around making call-out threads or demanding people ban Michael from the community or anything like that (I’m only talking about it now because I feel like it’s fair for the community to try to defend itself after Jessica attributed all of this to the wider community instead of Vassar specifically) “This guy makes people psychotic by talking to them” is a silly accusation to go around making, and I hate that I have to do it!
But also, I do kind of notice the skulls and they are really consistent, and I would feel bad if my desire not to say this ridiculous thing resulted in more people getting hurt.
I think the minimum viable narrative here is, as you say, something like “Michael is very good at spotting people right on the verge of psychosis, and then he suggests they take drugs.” Maybe a slightly more complicated narrative involves bringing them to a state of total epistemic doubt where they can’t trust any institutions or any of the people they formerly thought were their friends, although now this is getting back into the “he’s just having normal truth-seeking conversation” objection. He also seems really good at pushing trans people’s buttons in terms of their underlying anxiety around gender dysphoria (see the Ziz post) , so maybe that contributes somehow. I don’t know how it happens, I’m sufficiently embarrassed to be upset about something which looks like “having a nice interesting conversation” from the outside, and I don’t want to violate liberal norms that you’re allowed to have conversations—but I think those norms also make it okay to point out the very high rate at which those conversations end in mental breakdowns.
Maybe one analogy would be people with serial emotional abusive relationships—should we be okay with people dating Brent? Like yes, he had a string of horrible relationships that left the other person feeling violated and abused and self-hating and trapped. On the other, most of this, from the outside, looked like talking. He explained why it would be hurtful for the other person to leave the relationship or not do what he wanted, and he was convincing and forceful enough about it that it worked (I understand he also sometimes used violence, but I think the narrative still makes sense without it). Even so, the community tried to make sure people knew if they started a relationship with him they would get hurt, and eventually got really insistent about that. I do feel like this was a sort of boundary crossing of important liberal norms, but I think you’ve got to at least leave that possibility open for when things get really weird.

Scott Alexander Oct 18, 2021, 10:43 AM
93 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
I don’t want to reveal any more specific private information than this without your consent, but let it be registered that I disagree with your assessment that your joining the Vassarites wasn’t harmful to you. I was not around for the 2017 issues (though if you reread our email exchanges from April you will understand why I’m suspicious), but when you had some more minor issues in 2019 I was more in the loop and I ended out emailing the Vassarites (deliberately excluding you from the email, a decision I will defend in private if you ask me) accusing them of making your situation worse and asking them to maybe lay off you until you were maybe feeling slightly better, and obviously they just responded with their “it’s correct to be freaking about learning your entire society is corrupt and gaslighting” shtick.

Scott Alexander Oct 18, 2021, 10:34 AM
30 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
It was on the Register of Bans, which unfortunately went down after I deleted the blog. I admit I didn’t publicize it very well because this was a kind of sensitive situation and I was trying to do it without destroying his reputation.

Scott Alexander Oct 17, 2021, 11:44 PM
59 points
0
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
Thanks, if you meant that, when someone is at a very early stage of thinking strange things, you should talk to them about it and try to come to a mutual agreement on how worrying this is and what the criteria would be for psych treatment, instead of immediately dehumanizing them and demanding the treatment right away, then I 100% agree.

Scott Alexander Oct 17, 2021, 11:18 PM
104 points
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
I don’t remember the exact words in our last conversation. If I said that, I was wrong and I apologize.
My position is that in schizophrenia (which is a specific condition and not just the same thing as psychosis), lifetime antipsychotics might be appropriate. EG this paper suggests continuing for twelve months after a first schizophrenic episode and then stopping and seeing how things go, which seems reasonable to me. It also says that if every time you take someone off antipsychotics they become fully and dangerous psychotic again, then lifetime antipsychotics are probably their best bet. In a case like that, I would want the patient’s buy-in, ie if they were medicated after a psychotic episode I would advise them of the reasons why continued antipsychotic use was recommended in their case, if they said they didn’t want it we would explore why given the very high risk level, and if they still said they didn’t want it then I would follow their direction.
I didn’t get a chance to talk to you during your episode, so I don’t know exactly what was going on. I do think that psychosis should be thought of differently than just “weird thoughts that might be true”, as more of a whole-body nerve-and-brain dysregulation of which weird thoughts are just one symptom. I think in mild psychosis it’s possible to snap someone back to reality where they agree their weird thoughts aren’t true, but in severe psychosis it isn’t (I remember when I was a student I tried so hard to convince someone that they weren’t royalty, hours of passionate debate, and it just did nothing). I think if someone has mild psychosis and you can guide them back to reality-based thoughts for a second, that is compassionate and a good thing to do in the sense that it will make them feel better, but also kind of useless because the psychosis still has the same chance of progressing into severe psychosis anyway—you’re treating a symptom. Analogy to eg someone having chest pain from a heart attack, and you give them painkillers for the pain but don’t treat the heart attack.
(although there’s a separate point where it would be wrong and objectifying to falsely claim someone who’s just thinking differently is psychotic or pre-psychotic, given that you did end up psychotic it doesn’t sound like the people involved were making that mistake)
My impression is that some medium percent of psychotic episodes end in permanent reduced functioning, and some other medium percent end in suicide or jail or some other really negative consequence, and this is scary enough that treating it is always an emergency, and just treating the symptom but leaving the underlying condition is really risky.
I agree many psychiatrists are terrible and that wanting to avoid them is a really sympathetic desire, but when it’s something really serious like psychosis I think of this as like wanting to avoid surgeons (another medical profession with more than its share of jerks!) when you need an emergency surgery.

Scott Alexander Oct 17, 2021, 10:08 PM
405 points
1
on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
I want to add some context I think is important to this.
Jessica was (I don’t know if she still is) part of a group centered around a person named Vassar, informally dubbed “the Vassarites”. Their philosophy is complicated, but they basically have a kind of gnostic stance where regular society is infinitely corrupt and conformist and traumatizing and you need to “jailbreak” yourself from it (I’m using a term I found on Ziz’s discussion of her conversations with Vassar; I don’t know if Vassar uses it himself). Jailbreaking involves a lot of tough conversations, breaking down of self, and (at least sometimes) lots of psychedelic drugs.
Vassar ran MIRI a very long time ago, but either quit or got fired, and has since been saying that MIRI/CFAR is also infinitely corrupt and conformist and traumatizing (I don’t think he thinks they’re worse than everyone else, but I think he thinks they had a chance to be better, they wasted it, and so it’s especially galling that they’re just as bad). Since then, he’s tried to “jailbreak” a lot of people associated with MIRI and CFAR—again, this involves making them paranoid about MIRI/CFAR and convincing them to take lots of drugs. The combination of drugs and paranoia caused a lot of borderline psychosis, which the Vassarites mostly interpreted as success (“these people have been jailbroken out of the complacent/conformist world, and are now correctly paranoid and weird”). Occasionally it would also cause full-blown psychosis, which they would discourage people from seeking treatment for, because they thought psychiatrists were especially evil and corrupt and traumatizing and unable to understand that psychosis is just breaking mental shackles.
(I am a psychiatrist and obviously biased here)
Jessica talks about a cluster of psychoses from 2017 − 2019 which she blames on MIRI/CFAR. She admits that not all the people involved worked for MIRI or CFAR, but kind of equivocates around this and says they were “in the social circle” in some way. The actual connection is that most (maybe all?) of these people were involved with the Vassarites or the Zizians (the latter being IMO a Vassarite splinter group, though I think both groups would deny this characterization). The main connection to MIRI/CFAR is that the Vassarites recruited from the MIRI/CFAR social network.
I don’t have hard evidence of all these points, but I think Jessica’s text kind of obliquely confirms some of them. She writes:
“Psychosis” doesn’t have to be a bad thing, even if it usually is in our society; it can be an exploration of perceptions and possibilities not before imagined, in a supportive environment that helps the subject to navigate reality in a new way; some of R.D. Liang’s work is relevant here, describing psychotic mental states as a result of ontological insecurity following from an internal division of the self at a previous time. Despite the witch hunts and so on, the Leverage environment seems more supportive than what I had access to. The people at Leverage I talk to, who have had some of these unusual experiences, often have a highly exploratory attitude to the subtle mental realm, having gained access to a new cognitive domain through the experience, even if it was traumatizing.
RD Laing was a 1960s pseudoscientist who claimed that schizophrenia is how “the light [begins] to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds”. He opposed schizophrenics taking medication, and advocated treatments like “rebirthing therapy” where people role-play fetuses going through the birth canal—for which he was stripped of his medical license. The Vassarites like him, because he is on their side in the whole “actually psychosis is just people being enlightened as to the true nature of society” thing. I think Laing was wrong, psychosis is actually bad, and that the “actually psychosis is good sometimes” mindset is extremely related to the Vassarites causing all of these cases of psychosis.
Unless there were psychiatric institutionalizations or jail time resulting from the Leverage psychosis, I infer that Leverage overall handled their metaphysical weirdness better than the MIRI/CFAR adjacent community. While in Leverage the possibility of subtle psychological influence between people was discussed relatively openly, around MIRI/CFAR it was discussed covertly, with people being told they were crazy for believing it might be possible. (I noted at the time that there might be a sense in which different people have “auras” in a way that is not less inherently rigorous than the way in which different people have “charisma”, and I feared this type of comment would cause people to say I was crazy.) As a consequence, the people most mentally concerned with strange social metaphysics were marginalized, and had more severe psychoses with less community support, hence requiring normal psychiatric hospitalization.
Jessica is accusing MIRI of being insufficiently supportive to her by not taking her talk about demons and auras seriously when she was borderline psychotic, and comparing this to Leverage, who she thinks did a better job by promoting an environment where people accepted these ideas. I think MIRI was correct to be concerned and (reading between the lines) telling her to seek normal medical treatment, instead of telling her that demons were real and she was right to worry about them, and I think her disagreement with this is coming from a belief that psychosis is potentially a form of useful creative learning. While I don’t want to assert that I am 100% sure this can never be true, I think it’s true rarely enough, and with enough downside risk, that treating it as a psychiatric emergency is warranted.
On the two cases of suicide, Jessica writes:
Both these cases are associated with a subgroup splitting off of the CFAR-centric rationality community due to its perceived corruption, centered around Ziz. (I also thought CFAR was pretty corrupt at the time, and I also attempted to split off another group when attempts at communication with CFAR failed; I don’t think this judgment was in error, though many of the following actions were; the splinter group seems to have selected for high scrupulosity and not attenuated its mental impact.)
Ziz tried to create an anti-CFAR/MIRI splinter group whose members had mental breakdowns. Jessica also tried to create an anti-CFAR/MIRI splinter group and had a mental breakdown. This isn’t a coincidence—Vassar tried his jailbreaking thing on both of them, and it tended to reliably produce people who started crusades against MIRI/CFAR, and who had mental breakdowns. Here’s an excerpt from Ziz’s blog on her experience (edited heavily for length, and slightly to protect the innocent):
When I first met Vassar, it was a random encounter in an experimental group call organized by some small-brand rationalist. He talked for about an hour, and automatically became the center of conversation, I typed notes as fast as I could, thinking, “if this stuff is true it changes everything; it’s the [crux] of my life.” (It true, but I did not realize it immediately.) Randomly, another person found the link, came in and said, “hi”. [Vassar] said “hi”, she said “hi” again, apparently for humor. [Vassar] said something terse I forget “well if this is what …”, apparently giving up on the venue, and disconnected without further comment. One by one, the other ~10 people including besides her, including me disconnected disappointedly, wordlessly or just about right after. A wizard was gracing us with his wisdom and she fucked it up. And in my probably-representative case that was just about the only way I could communicate how frustrated I was at her for that.
[Vassar explained how] across society, the forces of gaslighting were attacking people’s basic ability to think and to a justice as a Schelling point until only the built-in Schelling points of gender and race remained, Vassar listed fronts in the war on gaslighting, disputes in the community, and included [local community member ZD] [...] ZD said Vassar broke them out of a mental hospital. I didn’t ask them how. But I considered that both badass and heroic. From what I hear, ZD was, probably as with most, imprisoned for no good reason, in some despicable act of, “get that unsightly person not playing along with the [heavily DRM’d] game we’ve called sanity out of my free world”.
I heard [local community member AM] was Vassar’s former “apprentice”. And I had started picking up jailbroken wisdom from them secondhand without knowing where it was from. But Vassar did it better. After Rationalist Fleet, I concluded I was probably worth Vassar’s time to talk to a bit, and I emailed him, carefully briefly stating my qualifications, in terms of ability to take ideas seriously and learn from him, so that he could get maximally dense VOI on whether to talk to me. A long conversation ensued. And I got a lot from it. [...]
Vassar has had, I think about 6, transfems gravitate to him, join his projects, go on his quests, that I’ve heard. Including Olivia, and Jessica, and I think Devi. Devi had a mental breakdown and detransitioned IIHC. Jessica had a mental breakdown and didn’t detransition. Olivia became an agent of mental breakdown, compulsively breaking others via drug trips because they went through gates they shouldn’t’ve. And didn’t detransition. This all created an awful tension in me. The rationality community was kind of compromised as a rallying point for truthseeking. This was desperately bad for the world. [Vassar] was at the center of, largely the creator of a “no actually for real” rallying point for the jailbroken reality-not-social-reality version of this.
Ziz is describing the same cluster of psychoses Jessica is (including Jessica’s own), but I think doing so more accurately, by describing how it was a Vassar-related phenomenon. I would add Ziz herself to the list of trans women who got negative mental effects from Vassar, although I think (not sure) Ziz would not endorse my description of her as having these.
What was the community’s response to this? I have heard rumors that Vassar was fired from MIRI a long time ago for doing some very early version of this, although I don’t know if it’s true. He was banned from REACH (and implicitly rationalist social events) for somewhat unrelated reasons. I banned him from SSC meetups for a combination of reasons including these. For reasons I don’t fully understand and which might or might not be related to this, he left the Bay Area. This was around the time COVID happened, so everything’s kind of been frozen in place since then.
I want to clarify that I don’t dislike Vassar, he’s actually been extremely nice to me, I continue to be in cordial and productive communication with him, and his overall influence on my life personally has been positive. He’s also been surprisingly gracious about the fact that I go around accusing him of causing a bunch of cases of psychosis. I don’t think he does the psychosis thing on purpose, I think he is honest in his belief that the world is corrupt and traumatizing (which at the margin, shades into values of “the world is corrupt and traumatizing” which everyone agrees are true) and I believe he is honest in his belief that he needs to figure out ways to help people do better. There are many smart people who work with him and support him who have not gone psychotic at all. I don’t think we need to blame/ostracize/cancel him and his group, except maybe from especially sensitive situations full of especially vulnerable people. My main advice is that if he or someone related to him asks you if you want to take a bunch of drugs and hear his pitch for why the world is corrupt, you say no.
EDIT/UPDATE: I got a chance to talk to Vassar, who disagrees with my assessment above. We’re still trying to figure out the details, but so far, we agree that there was a cluster of related psychoses around 2017, all of which were in the same broad part of the rationalist social graph. Features of that part were—it contained a lot of trans women, a lot of math-y people, and some people who had been influenced by Vassar, although Vassar himself may not have been a central member. We are still trying to trace the exact chain of who had problems first and how those problems spread. I still suspect that Vassar unwittingly came up with some ideas that other people then spread through the graph. Vassar still denies this and is going to try to explain a more complete story to me when I have more time.
What links here?