memoir: "Vassarite" discourse

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-In October 2021, Jessica [published a memoir about her experiences at MIRI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe), making analogies between sketchy social pressures she had experienced in the core rationalist community (around short AI timelines, secrecy, deference to community leaders, _&c._) and those reported in [Zoe Cramer's recent account of Leverage Research](https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b).
+In October 2021, Jessica [published a post about her experiences at MIRI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe), making analogies between sketchy social pressures she had experienced in the core rationalist community (around short AI timelines, secrecy, deference to community leaders, _&c._) and those reported in [Zoe Cramer's recent account of her time at Leverage Research](https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b).

 
 

-Scott Alexander posted a comment "add[ing] some context [he thought was] important to this", essentially blaming Jessica's problems on her association with Michael Vassar, describing her psychotic episode as a "Vassar-related phenomenon" (!).
+Scott Alexander posted a comment claiming to add important context, essentially blaming Jessica's problems on her association with Michael Vassar, to the point of describing her psychotic episode as a "Vassar-related phenomenon" (!). Alexander accused Vassar of trying "jailbreak" people from normal social reality, which "involve[d] making them paranoid about MIRI/​CFAR and convincing them to take lots of drugs". Yudkowsky posted [a comment that uncritically validated Scott's reliability as a narrator](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=x5ajGhggHky9Moyr8).

 
 

-I thought this was unfair, and [said so](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=GzqsWxEp8uLcZinTy) (and [offered textual evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=yKo2uuCcwJxbwwyBw) against the claim that Michael was _trying_ to drive Jessica crazy). 
+To me, this looked like raw factional conflict: Jessica had some negative-valence things to say about the Caliphate, so Caliphate leaders moved in to discredit her by association. (Quite effectively, as it turned out: the karma score on Jessica's post dropped by more than half, while Alexander's comment got voted up to more than 380 karma.)

 
 

-To me, Scott's behavior looked like raw factional conflict: Jessica had some negative-valence things to say about the Caliphate, so Caliphate leaders move in to discredit her by association. 
+I explained [why I thought Scott was being unfair](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=GzqsWxEp8uLcZinTy) (and [offered textual evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=yKo2uuCcwJxbwwyBw) against the silly claim that Michael was _trying_ to drive Jessica crazy).

 
 

-It was effective, though. After Alexander's comment (and [a comment from Yudkowsky](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=x5ajGhggHky9Moyr8) uncritically accepting Alexander's charge of Vassar "causing psychotic breaks in people"), the karma score on Jessica's post dropped by more than half, while Alexander's comment got voted up to more than 380 karma.
+Scott [disagreed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=XpEpzvHPLkCH7W7jS) that joining the "Vassarites"[^vassarite-scare-quotes] wasn't harmful to me. He revealed that during my March 2019 problems, he had emailed my posse:

 
 

-[TODO my conversation with Scott—
+> accusing them of making your situation worse and asking them to maybe lay off you until you were maybe feeling slightly better, and obviously they just responded with their "it's correct to be freaking about learning your entire society is corrupt and gaslighting" shtick. 

 
 

-> when you had some more minor issues in 2019 I was more in the loop and I ended out emailing the Vassarites (deliberately excluding you from the email, a decision I will defend in private if you ask me) accusing them of making your situation worse and asking them to maybe lay off you until you were maybe feeling slightly better, and obviously they just responded with their "it's correct to be freaking about learning your entire society is corrupt and gaslighting" shtick.
+[^vassarite-scare-quotes]: Scare quotes because "Vassarite" seems to be Alexander's coinage; we didn't call ourselves that.

 
 

- * Scott interviewed me
- * I said 
+But I will _absolutely_ bite the bullet on it being correct to freak out about learning your entire Society is corrupt and gaslighting (as I explained to Scott on Discord a few days later).

 
 

-]
+Imagine living in the Society of Alexander's ["Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) (which I keep linking) in the brief period when the lightening taboo is being established, trying to make sense of everyone you know, suddenly deciding, seemingly in lockstep, that thunder comes before lightning. (When you try to point out that this isn't true and no one believed it five years ago, they point out that it depends on what you mean by the word 'before'.)
+
+Eventually, you would get used to it, but at first, I think this would be legitimately pretty upsetting! If you were already an emotionally fragile person, it might even escalate to a psychiatric emergency through the specific mechanism "everyone I trust is inexplicably lying about lightning → stress → sleep deprivation → temporary psychosis". (That is, it's not that Society being corrupt directly causes mental ilness—that would be silly—but confronting a corrupt Society is very stressful, and that can [snowball into](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/11/11/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-dynamic-systems/) things like lost sleep, and sleep is [really](https://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/27/9134.short) [biologically important](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6048360/).)
+
+This is a pretty bad situation to be in—to be faced with the question, "Am _I_ crazy, or is _everyone else_ crazy?" But one thing that would make it slightly less bad is if you had a few allies, or even just _an_ ally—someone to confirm that the obvious answer, "It's not you," is, in fact, obvious.
+
+But in a world where [everyone who's anyone](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) agrees that thunder comes before lightning—including all the savvy consequentialists who realize that being someone who's anyone is an instrumentally convergent strategy for acquiring influence—anyone who would be so imprudent to take your everyone-is-lying-about-lightning concerns seriously, would have to be someone with ... a nonstandard relationship to social reality. Someone meta-savvy to the process of people wanting to be someone who's anyone. Someone who, honestly, is probably some kind of _major asshole_. Someone like—Michael Vassar!
+
+From the perspective of an outside observer playing a Kolmogorov-complicity strategy, your plight might look like "innocent person suffering from mental illness in need of treatment/management", and your ally as "bad influence who is egging the innocent person on for their own unknown but probably nefarious reasons". If that outside observer chooses to draw the category boundaries of "mental illness" appropriately, that story might even be true. So why not quit making such a fuss, and accept treatment? Why fight, if fighting comes at a personal cost? Why not submit?
+
+I had my answer. But I wasn't sure that Scott would understand.
+
+To assess whether joining the "Vassarites" was harmful to me, one would need to answer: as compared to what? In the counterfactual where Michael vanished from the world in 2016, I think I would have been just as upset about the same things for the same reasons, but with fewer allies and fewer ideas to make sense of what was going on in my social environment.

 
 

-In December, Jessica published [a followup post explaining the circumstances of her psychotic episode in more detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards).
+Additionally, it's really obnoxious when people have tried to use my association with Michael to try to discredit the content of what I was saying—interpreting me as Michael's pawn. Gwen, one of the "Zizians", in a blog post about her grievances against CfAR, has [a section on "Attempting to erase the agency of everyone who agrees with our position"](https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position), complaining about how people try to cast her and Somni and Emma as Ziz's minions, rather than acknowledging that they're separate people with their own ideas who had good reasons to work together. I empathized a lot with this. My thing, and separately Ben Hoffman's [thing about Effective Altruism](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/drowning-children-rare/), and separately Jessica's thing in the OP, don't really have a whole lot to do with each other, except as symptoms of "the so-called 'rationalist' community is not doing what it says on the tin" (which itself isn't a very specific diagnosis). But insofar as our separate problems did have a hypothesized common root cause, it made sense for us to talk to each other and to Michael about them.

 
 

-[TODO: Scott concedes: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=RGKkmyvyoeWe2LB7d ]
+Was Michael using me, at various times? I mean, probably. But just as much, _I was using him_. Particularly with the November 2018–April 2019 thing (where I and the "Vassarite" posse kept repeatedly pestering Scott and Eliezer to clarify that categories aren't arbitrary): that was the "Vassarites" doing an _enormous_ favor for _me_ and _my_ agenda. (If Michael and crew hadn't had my back, I wouldn't have been anti-social enough to keep escalating.) And here Scott was trying to get away with claiming that _they_ were making my situation worse? That's _absurd_. Had he no shame?
+
+I _did_, I admitted, have some specific, nuanced concerns—especially since the December 2020 psychiatric disaster, with some nagging doubts beforehand—about ways in which being an inner-circle "Vassarite" might be bad for someone, but at the moment, I was focused on rebutting Scott's story, which was silly. A defense lawyer has an easier job than a rationalist—if the prosecution makes a terrible case, you can just destroy it, without it being your job to worry about whether your client is separately guilty of vaguely similar crimes that the incompetent prosecution can't prove.
+
+[TODO— 
+
+"what you think is support" is actually a different thing
+
+(In December, Jessica published [a followup post explaining the circumstances of her psychotic episode in more detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards).
+
+Scott concedes: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=RGKkmyvyoeWe2LB7d 
+
+]

 
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