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-[TODO: Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip
- * Michael's "position" in the community, already not what it once was, was getting debased even further
- * Berkeley REACH investigation; I asked what the charges were; they say it's not a court; I say _I_ don't feel safe in a place that bans Michael for no good reason
- * Kelsey says in Discord that Michael is trying to get re-included
- * I email her with quotes trying to argue that that's not his game
- * She doesn't find the quotes convincing, because she thinks Vassar is a liar
- * (sleep?!?)
- * I call Ben to the stand, then Sarah ("You're a great prosecutor", I say in the channel)
+Michael's reputation in "the community", already not what it once was, continued to be debased even further.
+
+The local community center, the Berkeley REACH,[^reach-acronym-expansion] was conducting an investigation as to whether to exclude Michael (which was mostly moot, as he didn't live in the Bay Area anyway). When I heard that the subcommittee was "very close to releasing a statement", I wrote to them:
+
+[^reach-acronym-expansion]: Rationality and Effective Altruism Community Hub
+
+> I've been collaborating with Michael a lot recently, and I'm happy to contribute whatever information I can to make the report more accurate. What are the charges?
+
+They replied:
+
+> To be clear, we are not a court of law addressing specific "charges." We're a subcommittee of the Berkeley REACH Panel tasked with making decisions that help keep the space and the community safe.
+
+I replied:
+
+> Allow me to rephrase my question about charges. What are the reasons that the safety of the space and the community require you to write a report about Michael? To be clear, a community that excludes Michael on inadequate evidence is one where _I_ feel unsafe.
+
+We arranged a call, during which I angrily testified that Michael was no threat to the safety of the space and the community—which would have been a bad idea if it were the cops, but in this context, I figured my political advocacy couldn't hurt.
+
+Concurrently, I got into an argument with Kelsey Piper about Michael, after she had written on Discord that her "impression of _Vassar_'s threatening schism is that it's fundamentally about Vassar threatening to stir shit up until people stop socially excluding him for his bad behavior". I didn't think that was what the schism was about (Subject: "Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip").
+
+In the course of litigating Michael's motivations (the details of which are not interesting enough to summarize), Kelsey mentioned that she thought Michael had done immense harm to me: that my models of the world and ability to reason were worse than they were a year ago. I thanked her for the concern, and asked her to be more specific.
+
+[TODO: social reality modeling ...]
+
+What Kelsey saw as "Zack is losing his ability to model other people and I'm worried about him", I think Ben and Jessica would see as "Zack is angry about living in [simulacrum level 3](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/) and we're worried about _everyone else_."
+
+[TODO—
* Kelsey in meatspace tells me that Vassar has a benefactor that she can't name; I'm retarded enough to not infer that it's him and she was obfuscating for compliance
...
]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff