As a more peripheral lurker, this post basically doesn't make any sense. I'd definitely recommend adding in background about who these people are, and what's transpired earlier if. Then again, you might be trying to only communicate to a small number of people (though if that's the case I'm not sure why you made this public, rather than DMing it)
In any case, whatever's going on here sounds bad, and I hope you and others feel better.
Previous discussion on the EA Forum about Vassar by @fenneko:
- Bryk, the rationalist-adjacent writer, says a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was a “5-year-old in a hot 20-year-old’s body.”
- Joseph says he also argued that it was normal for a 12-year-old girl to have sexual relationships with adult men and that such relationships were a noble way of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Then, she says, he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She says he slept on the floor of her living room and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning.
- This was also Michael Vassar.
- I know this because of a line from the TIME article:
- "Another woman, who dated the same man [the one who talked about pedophilia with Joseph] several years earlier in a polyamorous relationship, alleges that he had once attempted to put his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping."
- And "the same man" was, of course, Michael Vassar.
- Jax talks about other people in public threads, but I think Vassar is the only one whose alleged behavior was illegal physical abuse rather than rudeness or weird vibes.
- On the extreme end, five women, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, say men in the community committed sexual assault or misconduct against them [...] Women who reported sexual abuse, either to the police or community mediators, say they were branded as trouble and ostracized while the men were protected.
- At least one of these is Vassar (possibly multiple, given how consistent he seems to be).
- Vassar has been banned from EA events for many years, and SlateStarCodex meetups for at least a few years.
DoJ files showing Vassar successfully requested to visit Epstein's private island in 2015: 1, 2, 3
A note before we start: A lot of the sources cited are people who ended up looking kinda insane.
I find it genuinely annoying how almost everyone involved in this corner of the social graph (regardless of their political stance re: Michael) seems to constantly babble in an insane and conspiratorial manner.
This is exactly the strategy that Vassar is using, and probably explicitly taken out of the playbook intelligence services use the world over. This annoyance is designed to get people like you to want to ignore it, and especially not take the victims seriously.
Maybe? I'd be interested for someone to provide such a citation for "the playbook intelligence services use the world over". Otherwise this comment reads vaguely conspiratorial in the manner I am pointing too.
1I don't think there's a global "playbook" but Communist Germany practiced Zersetzung, aka psychological warfare, against potential dissidents with the aim of destabilizing them so nobody would take them seriously. From Wikipedia
Operations were designed to intimidate and destabilise them by subjecting them to repeated disappointment, and to socially alienate them by interfering with and disrupting their relationships with others as in social undermining. The aim was to induce personal crises in victims, leaving them too unnerved and psychologically distressed to have the time and energy for anti-government activism.
I don't know as much about the modern equivalents of this. Keep in mind a lot of this stuff is, well, secret, so it's not as if you can just google "government psychological warfare program".
I also find the "insane and conspiratorial" stuff annoying.
However, just as annoying is how ~everyone looks for any reason to ignore what's going on, demanding that you provide ironclad proof before they'll so much as admit that something might be happening—
—and I know you probably weren't trying to do that - I imagine you were just expressing a frustration, distinct from your model of Vassar, and that you didn't consider the (small) impact expressing this has on the wider social reality. But all the same, this pattern is not unique to you and I hope that we-as-rationalists can learn to apply our rationality to social reality and not just object reality—
—because this pattern of dismissing arguments against someone by demanding ironclad evidence is not what truthseeking looks like. It's rationalization at its worst. Someone being "crazy" is certainly evidence against their testimony, but it's not a disproof.
Truthseeking, applying the full force of rationality to the question, looks more like:
Step outside the frame you're being invited to stay in, the frame of psychological warfare lineage, or the frame of "callout post", or "defending a friend", or whatever is applicable to your specific situation.
Look at the pattern of events. Think about what kind of mind would produce these events. Consider who benefits, and what sort of strategies and goals are implicit in what's happening. Would you, who are presumably a good and upstanding person, cause these sorts of results? How far would your psychology and goals need to be distorted before you started causing this to happen?
Set aside the labels of "abuser" or "predator". Set aside the temptation to excuse people, or say "they didn't mean it" - strategies are often executed on S1; this doesn't make them any less real.
What picture does all this data paint? What patterns can you see when you look at all the data, instead of facing down each argument one at a time and dismissing them one at a time?
And then, ask yourself, if you were talking to a person new to the scene, and they expressed interest in this person, would you be able to honestly recommend getting to know them better? Or would you feel a twinge of unease and an impulse to deflect, or derail, or even warn them?
And if you're truly serious about combining all of the evidence... make a spreadsheet. Write down each thing that happened, make your best guess as to the odds ratios, and actually multiply it. Tweak the numbers a bit, try to ask your gut for a conservative vs an optimistic set of numbers. Get a feel for the range of things. Does it hinge on a single callout post? How many pieces of evidence need to be pushed down for the numbers to look good?
(And then, remember all this, and next time someone brings something up, add it to the pile instead of discarding it after identifying a flaw or two.)
Sometimes you look at the data and as best as you can honestly tell, the pattern is "this was a one-off mishandled thing".
Sometimes it's "person X crashes out a lot and this looks vaguely abusive but they also seem to be improving over time so it's probably fine".
Sometimes it's "they're kind and compassionate everywhere, and this callout post would be wildly out of character for them". This is a totally valid stance to have!
Sometimes it's "this person is sharp edged, but they mostly don't hurt anyone who wasn't warned, and they make an effort to turn ignorant newbies away".
And sometimes it's "this woman is an unstable, controlling asshole with a side hobby of MDMA-brainwashing trans girls".
You never know what you'll find until you open the box and actually look inside, for real, with the full force of your rationality.
What picture does all this data paint? What patterns can you see when you look at all the data, instead of facing down each argument one at a time and dismissing them one at a time?
One possible explanatory pattern is that Michael is an insane and conspiratorial guy and attracts people who are also insane and conspiratorial, and it's easy to push such people into having a meltdown.
I'm sorry, I thought that this was super common knowledge. The "annoyance getting you to ignore it" was one of the main Russian tactics in their 2016 operation against the US.
Drugs can be used to get information, create blackmail material, confuse people, discredit them, or make them irrationally fond of their handler. It's not a commonly used tactic but it is used. We should remember that organized crime is actually a kind of self-organized police force, so certain edges of a State's use of violence smoothly blends into criminal activity.
The time the CIA was drugging people with LSD during MKUltra comes to mind. The Contra cocaine trafficking incident comes to mind. MDMA is a much newer drug than LSD, so if I believed in betting, I'd bet eventually a scandal around the use of it for intelligence purposes will come out. The Soviets would use antipsychotics on internal dissidents, as part of a systematic "make them seem crazy" strategy.
This line of research produced the Unabomber:
Almost every activist organization dealing with certain topics has to expect federal or foreign infiltrators to show up. Many times these infiltrators will advocate becoming violent or will directly try to nucleate violence at the group's protest. Russian disruption of neighboring countries' politics (and American politics in 2016) has a lot of this flavor too. Here's an NPR article about the way ex-intelligence personnel have brought these tactics to more private endeavors.
I strongly suspect a Chinese spy was looking around the community to gather information about Anthropic last year. They seemed to specifically be seeking out events where people might be consuming MDMA, because people on MDMA are more likely to tell you things they otherwise wouldn't, and doing illegal activities with your target creates a bond + blackmail material at the same time.
And finally, many of these are standard cult techniques as well. Cults tend to converge on the similar tactics, regardless of what they are nominally "about," because those tactics work to create a high control environment.
1The examples you give here are certainly plausible strategies for manipulative people to use in general. It was "constantly babble in an insane and conspiratorial manner" that didn't seem to make sense as something an intelligence agency would do, and I don't think any of your links supported it. Apologies if I missed the relevant reference.
(From Claude, skimming-checked by me.)
Stasi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung, "KGB's use of "sluggish schizophrenia" diagnoses to commit dissidents", and FBIs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Methods .
That's pretty understandable. Having pushed through a lot of that, I think it's something like if your priors are that Vassar is retributive and powerful and willing to break norms, it's quite hard to think and talk groundedly about him. For anyone who wants to speak out, I suggest spending some time with healthy vibes people who are far from the rationalist space (ideally people who've never been part of it) for a week or two, and really letting yourself take in the background sense of safety before trying to post publicly.
Getting this post to the level of grounded I managed here took a surprising amount of intentionality and grounding.
I lived with Olivia for a few months in 2024, and it was definitely somewhat mentally destabilizing. My personal feelings about her are of course somewhat complicated, but certainly I think it should be common knowledge that like, taking her perspective on things super seriously for months is a pretty bad idea, and also that she will just be kind of an asshole in many situations.
I do think people (including herself) playing Olivia up as some sort of super dangerous cult leadery person did not help me. Other people's mileage may vary, but I think discussing these things in as grounded a way as possible would at least have been important for helping my mental health. So I tend to emphasize like, the abrasiveness and stuff over, like, the reality distortion field stuff. "This person is really dangerous because they're good with reality distortion fields" is the sort of attitude that will get even the things which were legitimately like totally inane jokes or whatever to lodge themselves in your head and drive you crazy.
(Not to say that you should deny persuasiveness / whatever as phenomena, but like, I dunno, prefer mundane frames for thinking about them and try to stay calm and grounded about it.)
1I think reality distortion fields are a mundane phenomena, if maybe a bit mystically named. I came across them in a Steve Jobs biography, and I think they describe many business leaders succesfully. It's the property of being able to make people believe things they didn't before, with force of charisma.
I don't disagree that maybe we should coin a more mundane frame. I wouldn't call it the same persusasiveness that someone selling a car applies on you, though.
I agree they're basically mundane—but I think that can be difficult to see when inside one, and the name certainly doesn't help.
I think its really important to undesrtand the various ways agents can distort the field of social reality. Social reality is actually the main reality we live in most of the time, and so understanding how it works is super important. Sometimes it's logic is a bit more paradoxical than physics, but this doesn't mean it's entirely illogical or unreasonable. "Reality distortion field" is a great term as long as we understand that the reality being distorted is the social one.
Recently, I started walking and training my friend's dog. Oftentimes people have a hard time getting this dog to cooperate, especially around letting the human pick the route. He tends to try to pull you where he wants to go (usually towards tasty, tasty garbage.) I have very successfully taught this dog to heel for me.
A significant part of doing this is realizing that my expectations are actually a causative factor in the dog's behavior. If I expect the dog not to follow me, the dog will in fact not follow me. If the dog is pulling, I need to accept that reality in the moment while still maintaining just as much, or even increasing, my expectation of the desired behavior in the future.
Reality distortion fields happen when someone is unusually good at maintaining expectation in this way, and uses it for unethical or anti-epistemic purposes. People ethically using this skill are more capable of resisting reality distortion fields and creating structures that enable healthy coordination.
The persuasions of the witch's craft
Is the craft of the witch's persuasions
Canary for whether I have been threatened with legal action over this post, and I guarantee that I will post any attempted threats in the comments.
Just of the people in my network this seems counterfactually responsible for: 1 suicides, indirectly I suspect a second, one (double) suicide attempt+psychosis (mine, many years ago), at least two other people having psychosis, two previously stable people driven into states that I can only describe as profoundly unhinged but not actually psychotic, and one explicit physical boundary crossing (grabbing someones arm when she clearly did not want this and was shaken afterwards). No double counting.
Why are you giving vague piecewise references to other people's interactions with Michael Vassar, when you've had interactions yourself that you could surely be much more detailed and coherent with?
"Here are 5 bad interactions with this person" can be interpreted as "we don't get along well". "Here are 5 different people who had bad interactions with this person" is "that person doesn't get along well with others". This post is showing that certain people have patterns of harming others, as opposed to just having harmed the author.
I thought Vassar is known to seek out people on the margin who have ongoing crises, which complicates the statistical interpretation of vibes from his interactions. It seems more accurate to focus on what he actually does, and whether that is appropriate for the crises he encounters.
My friends and I had a fairly unpleasant set of interactions with Olivia about a year and a half ago, and ended up removing her from our social circles. Every so often, we still encounter people who have gotten hurt by Olivia when they find us and commiserate. So unfortunately, I can confirm that Olivia has not gotten better, and may have actually gotten worse in some ways.
Micheal Vassar’s strategy for saving the world is horrifyingly counterproductive.
governments might shut down his plans
what's the strategy (i'm mostly asking about the part where the world gets saved)? what plans is he working on currently?
Like most macrostrategy-brained cult leaders (e.g. Leverage, Ziz, arguably FTX, etc.) in this space, the answer appear to be some variation of "amass as much power and money as possible and take over the world using AI" e.g. this mail where he pitch a super-secret Epstein-and-Thiel-funded AGI project under Arecebo Observatory.
I would like the world to be saved and think being good and not being evil
There's also the whole thing about having something worthwhile saving. Winning all battles but losing the war is a very sad way to end.
2I have been thinking of writing a series of posts on ~lies and lie detection, and I realize now that I have been focusing too much on the median case (being harmfully marketed on, having your epistemics adjusted towards incorrect to someone elses advantage), instead of the tail risks.
Good reminder.
>Alexander Briand
Please consider contacting a public safety agency in his region and requesting a well check. You may be able to start the process by calling the non-emergency phone # of his local fire department and providing the address of his most likely location.
This is fucking disgusting and deeply disturbing. From the perspective of someone who has never been to the Bay Area the "rationalist atmosphere" there does not seem healthy.
Disagree, at least in my experience. I've lived in Berkeley since 2022. I've never seen (or directly heard about) the aggressive psychological stuff and cults. I've never met the relevant people. I've known one person who invited Vassar to her events (but idk at what points he's lived around here) and shared google docs with him; it is very rare and surprising to see his name on events or google docs; I don't recall seeing either since 2023. From my perspective it looks like the community has successfully exiled the obviously bad actors.
That said, I do select for wholesome and professional environments; I'm less likely than median to see bad actors.
Vassar and crew pick targets pretty carefully. If you have good social instincts, strong mental boundaries, and a healthy moral compass, he will try to cut you out of his circles too.
I don’t agree: Vassar has been uninvited from Lightcone events for many years (I think since 2021, when we started properly running events).
For what it is worth, I met Michael Vassar on an after-party to an event when I was at Lighthaven in 2025. So I assume he is still allowed on the Lighthaven premises under some circumstances? If I had known that he is banned I would have let someone know. Pretty sure it was him because I recognized him from YouTube, and he was talking about dumb things like trying to convince Elon Musk to use the power with DOGE to keep printing money to disempower the US government. The only reason I actually stuck around was to calibrate and compare my impressions of Michael Vassar compared to what I read about him online. Mostly I was confused why people like talking with him, he didn't seem very insightful nor manipulative to me at all, but to be fair he was already slightly intoxicated. Maybe I am too psychologically healthy, and also he didn't want to get anything from me.
Lightcone events =/= Lighthaven
Orgs renting Lighthaven space for money get to decide their own safety policies.
1
1Correct, our bar for banning someone from Lighthaven in full generality, even for your private event where you can do whatever, is much much higher.
1It would have been nice if Ben's root comment had explained this distinction upfront, because it has meaningful impacts on how allies may want to interact with the space. Would you let an organization host an event at Lighthaven where Vassar is a featured speaker?
Makes sense, I'll try to be clearer about that in future.
(As to your question, I don't have a clear yes/no, would depend a lot on context. I care a lot about events at the space feeling comfortable setting their own attendee list, even if sometimes that means having people there who I think have terrible character and/or have committed terrible deeds.)
I don't know how much was transitioned from REACH to Lightcone, but he was banned from REACH in late 2018/early 2019, after Kathy Forth's suicide and Jax Bryk's call-out thread. (cc @testingthewaters)
He was also really really working hard to get unbanned from community spaces during that time. I think he maybe threatened REACH with legal action, but I'm not entirely sure of this.
Thanks for adding this context. I guess there is also a formal/informal distinction (what happens in formal events vs what happens in informal social circles).
Given these comments it seems that the border is more porous than I thought, so mostly reverting to the original comment's position.
He has gotten lots of his acolytes to go to events there on his behalf though. Manifold 2024 was absolutely crawling with them, even if he himself didn't come.
asyapluggedin here - i tried to get alexander briand rasmussen to Resnick Neuropsychiatric on april 19 but failed and put him in a holiday inn for one night, it was all i could afford. you can get in touch with me on any platform via my username. i prefer telegram but i dont super care if you have other preferences.
didnt read anything else yet, just was sent this post bc of alex
from what i skimmed - evil sounds bad, im also not into it - good on you for all this documentation - agreed on prioritizing self-care (i went to al-anon last night. helpful. will be going back.)
Olivia later pressured (someone referred to it as 'bullied') the staff into unbanning her.
This makes it sound like she did so successfully, but it looks like this was an attempt that failed.
where almost everyone seemed like a sexual abuser
There is something to the whole "my boyfriend will punch you in the face if you try anything funny" threat. I'm glad I don't have to worry about violence nowadays, but it's much harder to introduce credible deterrence mechanisms which aren't backed by imminent physical pain.
I would imagine the stereotype of a night club bouncer is not a coincidence.. But nerdy meetups seem to rely on social exclusion more than the threat of physical violence 🤔 could be correlated with expected levels of alcohol consumption?
In your claims, how much of these patterns are "Vassar et al. are doing different and new damaging things every year", and how much is "Vassar et al. have been running the same playbook for approximately the last decade, with differing levels of success over the years, but every year we get more evidence"?
Micheal Vassar’s strategy for saving the world is horrifyingly counterproductive. Olivia’s is worse.
A note before we start: A lot of the sources cited are people who ended up looking kinda insane. This is not a coincidence, it’s apparently an explicit strategy: Apply plausibly-deniable psychological pressure to anyone who might speak up until they crack and discredit themselves by sounding crazy or taking extreme and destructive actions. Here’s Brent Dill explaining it:
(later in the conversation he tries to encourage the person he's talking to kill herself, and threatens her death if she posts the logs. Charming group! I hear Brent was living in Vassar’s garden recently, well after he was removed from the wider community for sexual abuse.)
Examples
Some of the people here I knew before their interactions with Vassar’s sphere to be not just mentally OK, but unusually resilient people. Prime among them is Kathy Forth.
Prior to her suicide, Kathy and I were friends. I witnessed her falls downwards from healthy and capable to anxiety to paranoia, as downstream of what I believe to be genuine sexual abuse she spiralled into a narrative and way of experiencing the world where almost everyone seemed like a sexual abuser. Kathy sent me a message shortly before her suicide containing some documents about Vassar, and asked me to talk about him with a friend of hers as a last request before she killed herself. She’d previously called Vassar the ‘arch-rapist’, and urged me to try and wake everyone up about the harmful psychological dynamics we had both witnessed.
Yudkowsky tweeted 'I mostly experience attempted peer pressure in a very third-person way. When MichaelV and co. try to run a "multiple people yelling at you" operation on me, I experience that as "lol, look at all that pressure” instead *feeling pressured*.'
Perhaps the most glaring example of this comes from Ziz, who already had a cult, but it wasn’t a mind-control-previously-gentle-people-into-murder-cult until after this.
He has also done sessions like this with people unexpectedly being pressured into taking LSD.
Olivia messed with people on the Cyborgism server, though I think that might have gotten deleted.
Olivia later pressured (someone referred to it as 'bullied') the staff into unbanning her.
General pattern
Vassar seems to engage in quite extreme vibes based frame control, using interestingness as a lure to draw people in then bypassing bad vibe checks while manipulating them. This can be fine if you aren’t trying to challenge him, but if you are he resorts to threatening, intimidating, attacking, and trying to psychologically destabilise anyone who opposes him in way which regularly causes mental health crises. There were at least two reports I know of on him which were suppressed by social or legal pressure. For those who do go along with him, he follows a wide range of cultish patterns, and, at least historically, has actively attempted to stop the world waking up to superintelligence misalignment risk for fear that governments might shut down his plans if they took the risk seriously.
Olivia seems to have gone all-in on the evil vibes try to fuck with people’s heads thing, and I keep seeing signs of the damage.
Just of the people in my network this seems counterfactually responsible for: 1 suicides, indirectly I suspect a second, one (double) suicide attempt+psychosis (mine, many years ago), at least two other people having psychosis, two previously stable people driven into states that I can only describe as profoundly unhinged but not actually psychotic, and one explicit physical boundary crossing (grabbing someones arm when she clearly did not want this and was shaken afterwards). No double counting.
I don’t know if there are more people in his sphere who are also doing messy psychological things, or how aware or involved the rest of his sphere is with the darker side, but the dark side observably exists and I suspect others in his sphere will notice odd patterns of thought if they try looking directly at the evidence. Consider pulling on that thread when you’ve got some time to yourself, you deserve to be able to truth-seek in all domains. It seems to help a lot in this domain to be well nourished as a human, having internal alarm bells from lack of self care or not having felt the emotions you need to seems to get in the way. And if you’re never OK, maybe prioritise that for a bit? Aim is more important than effort, and it’s much easier to aim with a clear head.
But why are they so incredibly over-the-top evil about it?
As far as I can tell, it’s about control, especially control to make people fear raising the alarm. If you make someone unsafe, they're easier to control. Especially if you damage their self-model by manipulating them into doing something strongly against their values like lying or sexual abuse or in some cases saying that they’ve sold their soul, their actions are no longer consistent with that self-model, making them less robust and powerful as an agent and less prone to resisting attempts to be further manipulated or pressured into not speaking out.
By the way, if this is you, self model damage is not that hard to come back from. Just act in a way entirely incompatible with the consequentialist values that are being forced on you, something true to the virtues which you valued and want to embody. For example: Speak truths that the world should see, even if it costs you and looks like it increases doom from a myopically consequentialist viewpoint. This is especially true if you want to pass vibechecks by other competent agents in the world, healthy humans are quite remarkably good at telling if you’re acting from virtue.
Apparently Vassar gets a lot of his material from a roleplaying game called Mage: The Ascension, where he seems to have practiced his manipulation, intimidation, and suppression of people noticing it to an art form. Magic isn’t real, but reality distortion fields that work by believing something forcefully enough that others are pulled into believing it are, and going all-in on extreme vibes and pushing your models into other people is one way to reinforce them. It burns the commons of good epistemics and mental health, but it can look locally optimal from a sufficiently myopic and single-player perspective.[1]
I’ve got some detailed and grounded non-mystical models of how this actually works on a psychological gears level, but that is going to have to wait for another post.
Why are you posting this?
I would like the world to be saved and think being good and not being evil is the best path to that.
Humans need to thrive to think clearly, thinking clearly is needed to address x-risk non-counterproductively, and thriving while living in a world-model backed by dark control is not viable.
Vassar as the leader of early MIRI before they rightly distanced themselves from him influenced early culture strongly, by quite intentionally engineering some parts of the memeplex.
Some of the parts I think are especially worth reexamining:
I love many aspects of this culture, from truth-seeking to ambition to genuine openness to possibilities and evaluating strange ideas, but I think we were steered into some strongly inadequate cultural decisions early on that it’s worth re-evaluating even at this late stage of the game.
A lot of the infighting and drama in this community looks to me to be downstream of people having learned habits of not respecting each others psychological boundaries or expecting respect of their own (more precisely: learning to modify their model of the other person and allowing the normal psychological syncing[3] to push those changes into the other person’s own predictive self-model and influence their behaviour), and not having developed the language to talk about the kinds of damage done to a mind when it is reprogrammed by another. I think CFAR’s tendency towards very tangled drama exemplifies this, and although Anna has gone some of the way to distancing herself from the legacy of having been in her own words 'architected'[4] by Micheal Vassar (e.g. 'Allow ourselves to be changed deeply by the knowledge, patterns, character, etc. of anyone who we deeply change.') but I don’t think she’s found the principle needed: Do not mix your agency into another person's, and do not change them without their informed consent, especially via informational channels they are not tracking. People need to run their own agency cleanly to be healthy and effective.
Why now? Why not sooner?
Vassar recently did massive psychological damage to a friend of mine, who has asked not to be named. I don’t have ground truth on what happened there, but I do know my friend was not remotely okay.[5] He messaged me some garbled things about Vassar over the past few months, strangely mentioned that Vassar was talking to him about both me and Kathy Forth still this many years later, and this whole thing eventually pushed me past the massive psychological resistance I have to thinking about Vassar from the time nearly a decade ago when he and Olivia[6] screwed up my life.
I’m sorry friends for having been kind of low availability and stressed for the past couple months while I psyched myself up for this.
When I first became aware of these patterns in 2017, I first tried to talk to Vassar about them directly (prompted by another person who shortly after had a psychotic break and left the community), it seemed obvious that he needed to learn patience to create a memetic environment where people could be flourish to make real progress on alignment. The people around him seemed weirdly hollowed out in a way that was clearly impairing their cognitive flexibility. He refused to engage on the matter, and when I tried to raise the alarm to various people around me, I was met with strange resistance and warnings from a senior member of the community that ‘it tends to go wrong when people oppose him’, then my life got increasingly weird and full of strange pressure until I had a psychotic break[7] which left me with a deep-seated desire to never go anywhere near this toxic waste dump again.
But sometimes you need to shine light on a vulgar mess like this in order to set the world right and have a clear mind and conscience.
I'll end with one harm reduction tip for anyone affected by this kind of thing: actually seriously taking care of yourself as a human both physically and emotionally (esp. letting yourself feel the things that haven't had room to be felt) reduces the tendency of manipulation and bad vibes to distort your cognition. I also encourage you to share your experiences below, writing this has felt quite cathartic despite the fear that came up many times.
[Crossposted to EA Forum: Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer callout post)]
I think the core mistake is he's learned to edit his world model with mind hacking and lots of psychedelics but has mistaken his world model for the actual world, so views other agents which he can't easily manipulate, even highly cooperative ones as costly threats to crush not possible allies with valuable information.
All respect to Gretta, I don’t think this is on her and appreciate her representing the situation there, but anyone with leadership experience with a healthy team will be able to see this is not creating psychological safety in a way that promotes effective agency as is very standard advice
Humans generally share background mental content via high bandwidth subconscious channels, aka, vibes. More in future posts.
Precise wording: ’Micheal Vassar was my architect’
He hasn’t been replying to my messages for a few weeks, if anyone knows his whereabouts I’d appreciate hearing how he’s doing. Edit: He's now got in touch, and is apparently doing better. Everyone can stop messaging him now.
Olivia spent several months explicitly trying to mess with me psychologically while we were co-living, in her own words ‘roleplaying an unfriendly AI trying to take over my brain’, at the same time she was joining Vassar’s cult. Apparently she’s still doing similar things to this day, I’ve run into people damaged by her since and seen traces of more.
Following what I now again believe to be being spiked with LSD, likely by Olivia, in a group house in Berkeley.
And somewhat disorganised thought patterns as a result of fear.