You have my (mostly abstract, fortunately/unfortunately) sympathies for what you went through, and I’m glad for you that you sound to be doing better than you were.
Having said that: my (rough) sense, from reading this post, is that you’ve got a bunch of “stuff” going on, some of it plausibly still unsorted, and that that stuff is mixed together in a way that I feel is unhelpful. For example, the things included at the beginning of the post as “necessary background” don’t feel to me entirely separate from what you later describe occurring; they mostly feel like an eclectic, esoteric mixture of mental practices—some of which I have no issue with!—stirred together into a hodgepodge of things that, taken together, may or may not have had a contribution to your later psychosis—and the fact that it is hard to tell is, to my mind, a sort of meta-level sign for concern.
Of course, I acknowledge that you have better introspective access to your own mind than I do, and so when you say those things are separable, safe, and stable, I do put a substantial amount of credence on you being right about that. It just doesn’t feel that way to me, on reading. (Nor do I intend to try and make you explain or justify anything, obviously. It’s your life.)
On the whole, however, reading this post mostly reinforced my impression that the rationalist memeplex seems to disproportionately attract the walking wounded, psychologically speaking—which wouldn’t be as big a deal if it weren’t currently very unclear to me which direction the causality runs. I say this, even as a (relatively) big fan of the rationalist project as a whole.
I always thought that this impression I had that the rationalist memeplex was an attractor for people like that was simply survivorship bias on people reporting their experience. This impression was quite reinforced by the mental health figures on the SSC surveys once the usual confounders were controlled for.
You have my (mostly abstract, fortunately/unfortunately) sympathies for what you went through, and I’m glad for you that you sound to be doing better than you were.
Having said that: my (rough) sense, from reading this post, is that you’ve got a bunch of “stuff” going on, some of it plausibly still unsorted, and that that stuff is mixed together in a way that I feel is unhelpful. For example, the things included at the beginning of the post as “necessary background” don’t feel to me entirely separate from what you later describe occurring; they mostly feel like an eclectic, esoteric mixture of mental practices—some of which I have no issue with!—stirred together into a hodgepodge of things that, taken together, may or may not have had a contribution to your later psychosis—and the fact that it is hard to tell is, to my mind, a sort of meta-level sign for concern.
Of course, I acknowledge that you have better introspective access to your own mind than I do, and so when you say those things are separable, safe, and stable, I do put a substantial amount of credence on you being right about that. It just doesn’t feel that way to me, on reading. (Nor do I intend to try and make you explain or justify anything, obviously. It’s your life.)
On the whole, however, reading this post mostly reinforced my impression that the rationalist memeplex seems to disproportionately attract the walking wounded, psychologically speaking—which wouldn’t be as big a deal if it weren’t currently very unclear to me which direction the causality runs. I say this, even as a (relatively) big fan of the rationalist project as a whole.
I always thought that this impression I had that the rationalist memeplex was an attractor for people like that was simply survivorship bias on people reporting their experience. This impression was quite reinforced by the mental health figures on the SSC surveys once the usual confounders were controlled for.