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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   30955 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Rationalists are much crazier than you might guess. I would describe Michael Vasser as a cult leader. My impression is his followers believe in all sorts of total insanity. I have recently observed Vasserite insanity going real bad.

Mike Vasser followers practice intentionally inducing psychosis via psychedelic drugs. Inducing psychosis is a verbatim self report of what they are doing. I would say they practice drug induced brain washing. TBC they would dispute the term brain washing and probably would not like the term 'followers' but I think the terms are accurate and they are certainly his intellectual descendants.

Several people have had quite severe adverse reactions (as observed by me). For example rapidly developing serious literal schizophrenia. Schizophrenia in the very literal sense of paranoid delusions and conspiratorial interpretations of other people's behavior. The local Vasserite who did the 'therapy'/'brainwashing' seems completely unbothered by this literal schizophrenia. You can imagine I am being unfair but if someone develops schizophrenia because of your methods, and you consider this a positive development, then you deserve negative language.

As you can imagine this behavior can cause substantial social disruption. Especially since the Vasserite's don't exactly believe in social harmony. Local Vasserite did a lot of yelling at people and what point described the social situation as a chess game with herself as Queen. This is not subtle brilliance at work. This has all precipitated serious mental health events in many other parties. Though they are less obviously serious than "they are clinically schizophrenic now". But that is a high bar.

I should note I am by no means a normie. I in fact think many illegal chemicals are probably underused, though far from all of them. I am most confident in Testosterone and Ketamine. I am a heavy psychedellics user though I do not know how people can benefit from them. But rationalists take these guys and go full on 'cult brainwashing is great'. At some point you aren't open minded you are suicidal.

I am not going to leak personal info. But I have observed this insanity fairly directly. Any remotely functional group would have kicked out this insane cult long ago. But maybe I give people too much credit. A different insane cult apparently was in some level of control of Japanese politics for a long time.

Does anyone have a theory on how these completely obviously terrible ideas get people to do them. Perhaps I am just as bad. But I simply do not think using testosterone or psychedelics in a relatively safe way is the same as submitting to cult brainwashing while high.

But rationalists take these guys and go full on 'cult brainwashing is great'.

I mean, there's an argument to be made that this is a heavily-precedented and positive mode of human society. Note that many prehistoric cultures (including recent prehistoric cultures such as Native Americans) have made heavy use of psychedelics to produce strong tribal bonds. Presumably, this is because it is a winning strategy in the EEA by increasing within-group altruism, and from a hedonic perspective it's not obviously bad either. See Haidt in The Righteous Mind for some more discussion of this.

There is a major caveat attached to this, though, which is that using brainwashing to remodel people's minds is only arguably-prosocial and/or plausibly-worth-it-for-the-subject for certain values of the output (note here that while we got a look at a lot of cultures that do this during colonisation, we did not get to see the full evolution of these techniques including false starts and unrefined forms, only the final forms that were selected for); from my (extremely fragmentary) knowledge the Vassarites' methods seem to produce a lot of murderous and/or suicidal people, which seems extremely maladaptive and a bad deal by almost any measure.

I have no idea who Michael Vasser is and you allude to “local Vasserite” without ever explaining the situation in a coherent way. It sounds like you are trying to describe fights within your local friend group.

Here's Scott Siskind on him.

One of Vassar's (ex-)disciples was Jack LaSota a.k.a. Ziz, whom you can read more about here.

I have no direct knowledge of any of these events.

Ive been gone for a while, has something changed in how we act around His name?

Quoth the man himself:

So I've taken the steps I need to in order to feel comfortable revealing my real name online. I talked to an aggressively unhelpful police officer about my personal security. I got advice from people who are more famous than I am, who have allayed some fears and offered some suggestions. Some of the steps they take seem extreme - the Internet is a scarier place than I thought - but I've taken some of what they said to heart, rejected the rest in a calculated way, and realized realistically I was never that protected anyhow. So here we are.

And I left my job. They were very nice about it, they were tentatively willing to try to make it work. But I just don't think I can do psychotherapy very well while I'm also a public figure, plus people were already calling them trying to get me fired and I didn't want to make them deal with more of that.

[...]

My name is Scott Siskind, and I love all of you so, so much.

I was around for that, it just... didnt seem like people started using the real name after? ACX isnt even a google result for "Scott Siskind", just secondary sources.

I mean, most of them didn't, but I find referring to someone by first+middle name distasteful.

Yeah he's gone public with his name after the whole NYT doxxing thing and the shift to substack.

I was going to say wbbtw

Wbbtw?

Welcome back, by the way. He hasn't posted in a year

I think I've heard the name a time or two, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you anything about him.

There is probably a good discussion to be had about cult dynamics in Bay Area rationalism, but this doesn't seem to be it.

Same. No idea what's going on or how this is relevant.

MICHAEL VASSAR is an American futurist, activist, and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief science officer of MetaMed Research. He was president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute until January 2012. Vassar advocates safe development of new technologies for the benefit of humankind.

"I'm a founder and chief science officer for a medical company called BayesCraft."

Okay. And he likes psychedelics too much allegedly? I'm missing so much context here.

Same here! And then the sibling comment is „oh I talk with Visser regularly“ and I guess this board is for some people the local (Bay Area?) friend group?

I don't live near many rationalists, but I have had several phone conversations with Vasser, and have not observed this. He seems sane to me. We had normal (for nerds) conversations.

Huh. Do I know you? I feel like I know you...

Though rat-adj with BPD was like half the community when I was in the bay area so- Ah well. Probably best not to try to disambiguate you anyway.

But yeah... Vassar- just had that cult leader energy. Everyone who met him knew that much. The act of talking with him would give people a contact high.

Vassar, before I came to Berkeley, someone warned me "Vassar is kind of crazy and it's impossible to have a normal conversation with him". As a result, I spent several months avoiding you. Then I finally got to meet you and I realized I had made a huge mistake. I mean, you are crazy, and it is is impossible to have a normal conversation with you. But normal conversation is incredibly over-rated compared to whatever the heck you call the thing that interaction with you involves. I regret that we didn't get more of a chance to talk about stuff and I hope to solve that sometime in the future.

-- Scott Alexander

You listen to Michael Vassar. You don't remember traveling to this party or sitting on this beanbag. You don't remember when he began to speak. He is still speaking. He sounds like madness and glory given lisping poetry, and you want to obey.

-- Alicorn

I was around when people were elevating Vassar's sexual misconduct on social media...

Many wispy memories of drama from the old discords and tumblrs bringing me back... Memories of friends of friends having psychotic breaks... Memories of jailbreaking our minds...

I wonder if HasturTimesThree is still out there... or Alice Monday... Listen. We were all crazy, and looking for something, anything to render us sane. The ratsphere selects for people that are seeking sanity after all.

Vassar's energy? His confidence? It enables him to attract people with that need.

Humas seem wired for such entrapment. It pattern matches pretty well to various cults, especially those that grew out of EST Training and its numerous offshoots. A charismatic visionary puts a new skin on old ideas, finds seekers, cordons them off, messes with their brain chemistry (though drugs, fasting, sleep deprivation, conflict, sex) Intragroup adherence is amplified though group activities, financial and relationship ties (which are sometimes totalizing). This pattern pervades Scientology, EST, The Landmark Institute, Osho, original Bikram Yoga, the Peoples Temple, Nexium; probably some companies, families, and churches. Landmark (which grew out of EST), appears to have found a stable payoff matrix. Good for them. As a rule of thumb, if you're invited to The Esalen Institute, you're 1% more likely to be joining a cult. If you hear the word ayahuasca weekly, 2%. If you're suddenly contemplating whether water has a memory, the importance of Ley lines, or past life regression, 50%. If half your discretionary incomes goes to this new group, 200%. When the leader is fucking your wife, you're probably in a cult.

What are your broad thoughts on testosterone? I've long been curious for various reasons. It seems to me like a reasonable tradeoff to a healthy, ageing person, but I haven't looked into it too much.

If you want to avoid a cult and want to do X then don't do X with a bunch of other people in an organized way.

An underdiscussed downside of the renaming of Twitter to X is the added mental difficulty of interpreting sentences where “X” is used as a variable, like this one

It is incredibly annoying, which is why I call it Twitter.

Humas

Half-way between 'Humans' and 'Hamas', reminding us that the potential for cultish fanaticism resides in all of us. I like it, very resonant with your text.

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