[content warning: discussion of severe mental health problems and terrifying thought experiments]

This is a follow-up to my recent post discussing my experience at and around MIRI and CFAR. It is in part a response to criticism of the post, especially Scott Alexander's comment, which claimed to offer important information I'd left out about what actually caused my mental health problems, specifically that they were caused by Michael Vassar. Before Scott's comment, the post was above +200; at the time of writing it's at +61 and Scott's comment is at +382. So it seems like people felt like Scott's comment discredited me and was more valuable than the original post. People including Eliezer Yudkowsky said it was a large oversight, to the point of being misleading, for my post not to include this information. If I apply the principle of charity to these comments and reactions to them, I infer that people think that the actual causes of my psychosis are important.

I hope that at least some people who expressed concern about the causes of people's psychoses will act on that concern by, among other things, reading and thinking about witness accounts like this one.

Summary of core claims

Since many people won't read the whole post, and to make the rest of the post easier to read, I'll summarize the core claims:

As a MIRI employee I was coerced into a frame where I was extremely powerful and likely to by-default cause immense damage with this power, and therefore potentially responsible for astronomical amounts of harm. I was discouraged from engaging with people who had criticisms of this frame, and had reason to fear for my life if I published some criticisms of it. Because of this and other important contributing factors, I took this frame more seriously than I ought to have and eventually developed psychotic delusions of, among other things, starting World War 3 and creating hell. Later, I discovered that others in similar situations killed themselves and that there were distributed attempts to cover up the causes of their deaths.

In more detail:

Multiple people in the communities I am describing have died of suicide in the past few years. Many others have worked to conceal the circumstances of their deaths due to infohazard concerns. I am concerned that in my case as well, people will not really investigate the circu

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