Does Jessica's Anti-Normativity post or Ben's Can Crimes be Discussed Literally & Guilt, Shame, Depravity posts make sense to you? If there's specific posts you want to talk about not making sense / not being clear what the point is, I'm down to chat about them.
For anyone curious about what the sPoOkY and mYsTeRiOuS Michael Vassar actually thinks about various shit, many of his friends have blogs and write about what they chat about, and he's also been on several long form podcasts.
https://naturalhazard.xyz/ben_jess_sarah_starter_pack
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1lJY2HJNttkwwmwIn3kyIA?si=em0lqkPaRzeZ-ctQx_hfmA
https://open.spotify.com/episode/01z3WDSIHPDAOuVp1ZYUoN?si=VOtoDpw9T_CahF31WEhZXQ
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2RzlQDSwxGbjloRKqCh1xg?si=XuFZB1CtSt-FbCweHtTnUA
https://open.spotify.com/episode/33nrhLwrNJJtbZolZsTUGN?si=Sd0dZTANTpy8FS-RFhr4cQ
It's a term Scott Alexander coined a few years ago when he was saying Jessica Taylor was crazy for thinking people could have spooky mind powers that let them exert control over others, right before he said Michael has spooky mind powers that lets him exert control over others.
For the record, I associate with Michael, and thus am very spooky. If anyone wants to make sure I'm not around them during an altered state hit me up and we can coordinate.
This post is my current recommendation for practicing getting a felt sense for the range of emotions you can be experiencing.
https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/labelling-feelings
I'm curious if what your describing is similar to what I'm describing in this post. When I was started paying more attention to emotions I'd often feel these impenetrable clouds of grey that I couldn't discern much content from. https://naturalhazard.xyz/then_and_now
I agree that disguising one's self as "someone who cares about X" doesn't require being good at X, at least when you only have short contained contact with them.
I'm trying to emphasize that I don't think Cade has made any progress in learning to "say the right things". I think he has probably learned more individual words that are more frequent in a rationalist context than not (like the word "priors"), but it seems really unlikely that he's gotten any better at even the grammar of rationalist communication.
Like, I'd be mediumly surprised if he, when talking to a rat, said something like "so what's your priors on XYZ?" I'd be incredibly surprised if he said something like "there's clearly a large inferential distance between your world model and the public's world model, so maybe you could help point me towards what you think the cruxes might be for my next article?"
That last sentence seems like a v clear example of something that both doesn't actually require understanding or caring about epistemology to utter, yet if I heard it I'd assume a certain orientation to epistemology and someone could falsely get me to "let my guard down". I don't think Cade can do things like that. And based on Zack's convo and Vassar's convo with him, and the amount of time and exposure he's had to learn between the two convos, I don't think that's the sort of thing he's capable of.
I might be misunderstanding, I understood the comment I was responding to as saying that Zack was helping Cade do a better job of disguising himself as someone who cared about good epistemics. Something like "if Zack keeps talking, Cade will learn to the surface level features of a good Convo about epistemology and thus, even if he still doesn't know shit, he'll be able to trick more people into thinking he's someone worth talking to."
In response to that claim, I shared an older interview of Cade to demonstrate that his been exposed to people who talk about epistemology for a while, and he did not do a convincing job of pretending to be in good faith then, and in this interview with Zack I don't think he's doing any better a job of seeming like he's acting in good faith.
And while there can still be plenty of reasons to not talk to journalists, or Cade in particular, I really don't think "you'll enable them to mimick us better" is remotely plausible.
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1I can visibly see you training him, via verbal conversation, how to outperform the vast majority of journalists at talking about epistemics.
Metz doesn't seem any better at seeming like he cares about or thinks at all about epistemics than he did in 2021.
Symbiotic would be a mutually beneficial relationship. What I described is very clearly not that
Okay, you made me realize I've been wrong about Michael. Your comment is the single most credible instance I've seen of him causing acute psychosis in an individual. Well, I guess it's more the idea of Michael (and Ben), because no one who reads the linked blog posts or listens to the linked podcasts could mistakenly think your comments had anything to do with their content. I mean, it's possible a casual observer might mistake your earlier characterization of their content as, "isn't this just saying people can sometimes be hypocrites?" as merely garden variety functional illiteracy, but if they knew anything about this website and the high verbal IQ it selects for, they'd know to rule that possibility out immediately.
I'd also forgive someone for mistaking your comments for garden variety tribalism and treating arguments as your soldiers, but again, one needs to take into account the context of the website we're on. There's no way Viliam could expect to stay in good standing with this community if he pretended he couldn't read while also making up a totally fabricated version of what others are saying. Like, maybe if the texts/audio in question were hidden and he had privileged access to them he could leverage his reputation and get people to take his word for it, but they're all on the open internet and people can just read them! He would obviously have zero reason to expect anyone would cover for such flagrant nonsense.
So as unlikely as it seemed on priors, it really does look like Viliam has gone temporarily psychotic, with Michael Vassar as the proximal cause. Honestly this kinda scares me. I previously thought this was just dumb made up drama, but if people really can make people temporarily psychotic like this, it's a huge worldview shift for me and I'm gonna have to take some time to integrate it. I hope at the very least that you're in a safe environment and have loved ones that can help you out.