Valerie Sizemore

The claim isn't that Vassar is some kind of supervillain. It's that Vassar clearly reads a lot and part of his grift is having read information like the ​links above (and probably lots more) as an instruction manual. He's a conspiratorial fellow who wants to spread his way of thinking and is willing to break a few eggs to do it.

A secondary point is that if you take the "arms race" framing seriously then we should expect intelligence services to have operations going on in our vicinity, probably to varying degrees. One tactic from the ​COINTEL program is to... (read more)

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 h... (read more)

It 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?

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... (read more)

Michael's efforts here appear to be "culture building" in the end effects. Him and his acolytes target people with a propensity to psychosis, feed them lots of drugs, and then break their ontology while they are on the drugs. Sometimes this stabilizes into a cult member, sometimes this breaks the person and they get abandoned. The second order "membership" like Olivia replicates the first part of this pattern, but with no actual cult to stabilize them into.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1GB for DNA is a lower bound. That's how much it takes to store the abstract base pair representation. There's lots of other information you'd need to actually build a human and a lot of it is common to all life. Like, DNA spends most of its time not in the neat little X shapes that happen during reproduction, but in coiled up little tangles. A lot of the information is stored in the 3D shape and in the other regulatory machinery attached to the chromosomes.

If all you had was a human genome, the best you could do would be to do a lot of simulation to recon... (read more)

Is it possible that you have an auditory processing disorder? My fiancee has it and this sounds pretty much like her experience with phones.