Does anyone have an explanation as to why Mage: The Ascension is so strongly correlated with nuts behaviour in the rationalist community? Is it some kind of founder effect where an early group of M:TA players spread it and also happened to spread a bunch of insanity? Is it an affinity thing, where the specific lore of M:TA appeals strongly to otherwise-unstable people (like how of course the kind of person who commits a mass shooting will be a Call of Duty obsessive, and this fact says very little about the causal effect of CoD)? Or does M:TA actually shred one’s mind in some bizarre way?
(For context, I saw it mentioned here, and iiuc it was central to Brent Dill’s abusive group as well. For further context I’ve never interacted with any of these people nor heard of M:TA in any other situation than rat-adjacent groups.)
Apparently Vassar gets a lot of his material from a roleplaying game called Mage: The Ascension, where he seems to have practiced his manipulation, intimidation, and suppression of people noticing it to an art form. Magic isn’t real, but reality distortion fields that work by believing something forcefully enough that others are pulled into believing it are, and going all-in on extreme vibes and pushing your models into other people is one way to reinforce them. It burns the commons of good epistemics and mental health, but it can look locally optimal from a sufficiently myopic and single-player perspective.
So I would strongly guess it’s just a founder effect from Vassar.
I’ve talked and corresponded with Michael a lot over the last 17 years (not regularly during all that time, but pretty frequently during 2017–2020), and I don’t recall him ever saying anything about Mage: The Ascension. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s never played—I never asked him about it—but it seems like some amount of absence of evidence undermining the “gets a lot of his material” claim.
I would strongly guess that you’re contributing to the phenomenon where gossip networks just make things up.
I’ve played Mage: The Ascension with non-rationalists. My mind was not shredded, I have no mental health diagnoses. Allegedly Zvi has played, or at least read. M:tA is an attack on consensus reality, it could be listed by Games That Change Your Mind, but it’s not magic.
Sometimes memes get stronger in a new package. Plato’s cave is old news only philosophers care about, but then they made the Matrix movie, and suddenly everyone was like “dude, what if we actually live in a matrix???”
I guess Mage: The Ascension (which I never played, so I have no idea about the details) similarly happens to repackage something in a way that appeals strongly to the kind of people who play RPGs? I am just guessing here, but maybe nerds generally perceive mental manipulation as one of those spooky social skills that are forever out of their reach… but once you make a game where mental manipulation is just a number that you can increase, suddenly the idea of increasing the number sounds appealing.
Also, it makes you conceptualize the skill as a general number, as opposed to a more distributed “different techniques work on different people, there is no such thing as being universally persuasive, e.g. the rationalist will laugh at a homeopath, and the normies will laugh at x-risk” thing, which may be useful for people like Vassar who can then claim that their number is high. (Which is a hyperstition: If you convince people that you have mental powers, that will make them pay more attention to you, and that gives you actual power over them.) But I repeat, just blindly guessing here.
Does anyone have an explanation as to why Mage: The Ascension is so strongly correlated with nuts behaviour in the rationalist community? Is it some kind of founder effect where an early group of M:TA players spread it and also happened to spread a bunch of insanity? Is it an affinity thing, where the specific lore of M:TA appeals strongly to otherwise-unstable people (like how of course the kind of person who commits a mass shooting will be a Call of Duty obsessive, and this fact says very little about the causal effect of CoD)? Or does M:TA actually shred one’s mind in some bizarre way?
(For context, I saw it mentioned here, and iiuc it was central to Brent Dill’s abusive group as well. For further context I’ve never interacted with any of these people nor heard of M:TA in any other situation than rat-adjacent groups.)
Plex’s post had this:
So I would strongly guess it’s just a founder effect from Vassar.
I’ve talked and corresponded with Michael a lot over the last 17 years (not regularly during all that time, but pretty frequently during 2017–2020), and I don’t recall him ever saying anything about Mage: The Ascension. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s never played—I never asked him about it—but it seems like some amount of absence of evidence undermining the “gets a lot of his material” claim.
I would strongly guess that you’re contributing to the phenomenon where gossip networks just make things up.
I’m fairly confident I heard him talking about it in like 2010/2011 (in a way that rhymed with how it’s portrayed in this post)
I’ve played Mage: The Ascension with non-rationalists. My mind was not shredded, I have no mental health diagnoses. Allegedly Zvi has played, or at least read. M:tA is an attack on consensus reality, it could be listed by Games That Change Your Mind, but it’s not magic.
Sometimes memes get stronger in a new package. Plato’s cave is old news only philosophers care about, but then they made the Matrix movie, and suddenly everyone was like “dude, what if we actually live in a matrix???”
I guess Mage: The Ascension (which I never played, so I have no idea about the details) similarly happens to repackage something in a way that appeals strongly to the kind of people who play RPGs? I am just guessing here, but maybe nerds generally perceive mental manipulation as one of those spooky social skills that are forever out of their reach… but once you make a game where mental manipulation is just a number that you can increase, suddenly the idea of increasing the number sounds appealing.
Also, it makes you conceptualize the skill as a general number, as opposed to a more distributed “different techniques work on different people, there is no such thing as being universally persuasive, e.g. the rationalist will laugh at a homeopath, and the normies will laugh at x-risk” thing, which may be useful for people like Vassar who can then claim that their number is high. (Which is a hyperstition: If you convince people that you have mental powers, that will make them pay more attention to you, and that gives you actual power over them.) But I repeat, just blindly guessing here.