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.
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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.