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Does anyone have an explanation as to why Mage: The Ascension is so strongly correlated with nuts behaviour in the rationalist community? Is it some kind of founder effect where an early group of M:TA players spread it and also happened to spread a bunch of insanity? Is it an affinity thing, where the specific lore of M:TA appeals strongly to otherwise-unstable people (like how of course the kind of person who commits a mass shooting will be a Call of Duty obsessive, and this fact says very little about the causal effect of CoD)? Or does M:TA actually shred one's mind in some bizarre way?
(For context, I saw it mentioned here, and iiuc it was central to Brent Dill's abusive group as well. For further context I've never interacted with any of these people nor heard of M:TA in any other situation than rat-adjacent groups.)
Sometimes memes get stronger in a new package. Plato's cave is old news only philosophers care about, but then they made the Matrix movie, and suddenly everyone was like "dude, what if we actually live in a matrix???"
I guess Mage: The Ascension (which I never played, so I have no idea about the details) similarly happens to repackage something in a way that appeals strongly to the kind of people who play RPGs? I am just guessing here, but maybe nerds generally perceive mental manipulation as one of those spooky social skills that are forever out of their r... (read more)
I've played Mage: The Ascension with non-rationalists. My mind was not shredded, I have no mental health diagnoses. Allegedly Zvi has played, or at least read. M:tA is an attack on consensus reality, it could be listed by Games That Change Your Mind, but it's not magic.
11Raemon
I'm fairly confident I heard him talking about it in like 2010/2011 (in a way that rhymed with how it's portrayed in this post)