Just of the people in my network this seems counterfactually responsible for: 1 suicides, indirectly I suspect a second, one (double) suicide attempt+psychosis (mine, many years ago), at least two other people having psychosis, two previously stable people driven into states that I can only describe as profoundly unhinged but not actually psychotic, and one explicit physical boundary crossing (grabbing someones arm when she clearly did not want this and was shaken afterwards). No double counting.
Why are you giving vague piecewise references to other people’s interactions with Michael Vassar, when you’ve had interactions yourself that you could surely be much more detailed and coherent with?
“Here are 5 bad interactions with this person” can be interpreted as “we don’t get along well”. “Here are 5 different people who had bad interactions with this person” is “that person doesn’t get along well with others”. This post is showing that certain people have patterns of harming others, as opposed to just having harmed the author.
I thought Vassar is known to seek out people on the margin who have ongoing crises, which complicates the statistical interpretation of vibes from his interactions. It seems more accurate to focus on what he actually does, and whether that is appropriate for the crises he encounters.
Do you think it is more important to dissect the way that people communicate, or to protect vulnerable people from predators?
My takeaway from this post is that an exceptionally evil man has caused significant harm to the rationalist community, leading directly to deaths and damaging the community’s ability to do extremely important work. Is that not your primary takeaway?
Do you think it is more important to dissect the way that people communicate, or to protect vulnerable people from predators?
And this is how you end up with baseless, unprovably vague accusations that no one can observe are obvious nonsense lest they too be tarred as “exceptionally evil.”
It is in fact much more important to protect what communication norms one might have that safeguard against this, even at great cost to “vulnerable people.”
The rationalist community makes itself vulnerable to bad actors when it lacks the ability to just “be normal about things” and strongly reject bad behavior.
It’s great to ask clarifying questions and weigh evidence appropriately. But the central premise here isn’t in doubt. If survivors speak out and the go-to response is to nitpick the way in which they communicated about the harm, that just tells me you aren’t safe people.
this is exactly how prominent rationalists reacted to my coming forward about SA, and I feel bad for any woman coerced into letting her guard down in these communities
Ehhh. I think my actual objection is more that clear high-quality discussion of possibly-harmful people is not in fact bad for vulnerable people, and in fact is plausibly good for them.
They considered the article hyperbolic and told me to stop talking to Vassar. Which at first glance is weird because the article doesn’t bring up Vassar at all, and Vassar blocked me from contacting him a while ago. But it makes sense because rationalists associate complaining about dishonesty with Vassar and his companions, because that’s something Vassar does a lot.
Either way, I still think the article was reasonable, and the fact that rationalists dismiss it as Vassarite nonsense seems like a problem to me. The dissatisfaction with dishonesty might very well be the “paranoia” OP was talking about; it’s hard to tell because they were not very specific about it.
Edit: Oops, I looked at the chat logs and I did bring up Vassar as part of the conversation, so that probably contributed to being told to stop talking to him. But I think the point still stands that people associate him with complaining about dishonesty.
Unfortunately, there exists more than one kind of harm; sometimes you trade off one risk against another. If you keep skipping the part where you find the truth, because the other parts are more urgent, it has a potential to end up wrong.
Do you think it is more important to dissect the way that people communicate, or to protect vulnerable people from predators?
Can you explain how these are incompatible goals?
My takeaway from this post is that an exceptionally evil man has caused significant harm to the rationalist community, leading directly to deaths and damaging the community’s ability to do extremely important work. Is that not your primary takeaway?
It’s kind of unclear to me. Unless I’m missing/forgetting something, the main concrete accusation in the OP is the personhood contract, which is pretty weird but seems unlikely to cause this much damage.
You can pursue both goals, but you have chosen not to, and I find that alarming.
There are many, many concrete accusations in this post. It doesn’t particularly matter whether there is a “main” one. Vassar is a serial psychological and sexual abuser, and has caused multiple deaths. That is bad.
Plex opening up about his experiences with this abuser was a terrifying thing to do. The appropriate response in this circumstance is to respond with empathy. If you aren’t going to do that, it is better not to say anything at all. I understand that we are on LessWrong, and this is where people usually gain status by bantering about epistemic technicalities, but there is more than one genre of post, and this is one where that general rule does not apply.
If you want to know specific pieces of information, you can just ask about those directly without making it sound like you don’t believe him or any of Vassar’s other accusers.
I have generally been assuming that this is just a case of not knowing how to respond appropriately. But if you actually don’t believe them, just say that and out yourself. Shankar already made it clear that he doesn’t care about people and he would gladly sacrifice their lives to maintain the verbal games he gets to play with his friends. Do you agree with him about that? Do you think structures that differentially protect abusers are good?
You can pursue both goals, but you have chosen not to, and I find that alarming.
My reference to “when you’ve had interactions yourself that you could surely be much more detailed and coherent with” was meant to point the OP at something more informative for protecting vulnerable people from predators.
There are many, many concrete accusations in this post. It doesn’t particularly matter whether there is a “main” one. Vassar is a serial psychological and sexual abuser, and has caused multiple deaths. That is bad.
There was a sexual abuse allegation in the OP (“arch-rapist”). I don’t know if that allegation was among the ones you consider to be concrete, but it’s not among the ones I consider to be concrete, and the OP also dismissed her approach to sexual abuse allegations as “paranoid”, so...
Plex opening up about his experiences with this abuser was a terrifying thing to do. The appropriate response in this circumstance is to respond with empathy. If you aren’t going to do that, it is better not to say anything at all. I understand that we are on LessWrong, and this is where people usually gain status by bantering about epistemic technicalities, but there is more than one genre of post, and this is one where that general rule does not apply.
I’m not convinced, for reasons that might be clearer below.
If you want to know specific pieces of information, you can just ask about those directly without making it sound like you don’t believe him or any of Vassar’s other accusers.
The OP doesn’t even believe Vassar’s other accusers! (“Paranoid”!) Why should I fully believe them?
I have generally been assuming that this is just a case of not knowing how to respond appropriately. But if you actually don’t believe them, just say that and out yourself. Shankar already made it clear that he doesn’t care about people and he would gladly sacrifice their lives to maintain the verbal games he gets to play with his friends. Do you agree with him about that? Do you think structures that differentially protect abusers are good?
I believe that Vassar has been encouraging a worldview that others would call insanely paranoid. I believe that he’s been “pressuring” people to LSD, if by “pressuring” you mean something like “telling people to take it”. (For comparison, one time two men dragged me into a room and forced olanzapine into my mouth; that seems more extreme than telling someone to use a drug, so it seems a bit whiny to me if telling people to take LSD has been upgraded to “pressuring”. I don’t know how appropriate LSD or olanzapine is to use in either of the circumstances.) I am confused about the sexual assault allegations. I believe that people near Vassar have had psychotic breaks, and that Vassar could be a cause of that, though my own experience having a psychotic break makes me think people are making too big of a deal about that.
I also suspect the “insanely paranoid” worldview is to a substantial extent true, and that the surrounding (non-Vassarite) community is essentially abusing the people Vassar talked to by denying it. It’s not clear to me that thing like suicides aren’t better attributed to that abuse than to what Vassar has been doing. I think vague accusations help abusers to reverse the victim and offender, and that the terrifyingness of sharing the whole story may be that the whole story makes things look better for Vassar and worse for plex. (Though a complication here is that one way to become vulnerable to abuse is to be a transgressor, as one’s transgressions give opportunities for blackmail and scapegoating and so on. So abusers might target transgressors, and without protection for the transgressors, it’s hard for them to call out the abusers.)
That said, Vassar has been banned by Lightcone, and I don’t take Lightcone to be the sorts of people who’d gang up on Vassar for no good reason. Maybe I should ask @Ben Pace for more info about why he is banned.
I don’t particularly want to go into all the various considerations, but for my own events, someone threatening a libel suit is sufficient reason for them to no longer be welcome.
I am appalled that a private citizen threatening a libel suit against a third party would be reason for a ban. Especially with no indication that you checked whether someone had actually libeled them.
My current belief is that they’re extremely lopsided offense-biased weapons that people use to silence tons of legitimate criticism, and that it will have disastrous chilling effects on any discourse that it’s considered a plausible weapon in. It has long been on my to-do list to write a post arguing for this position sometime, I have taken this as a nudge to prioritize it a bit further.
(Also, actually following through on a threat of libel is not required for me to ban someone, I have on more than one occasion had an implicit or explicit threat of libel made at me with a clear intention of getting me to shut up or back down from publicly sharing true information, without the person following through.)
(Also also, I don’t promise to do investigations for every person I decide—for whatever reason—to not invite to events that I run. Even though it sounds fair, and even though I receive emails from people demanding this from me, that way leads madness, stress, and ultimately quitting my job.)
“A threat of libel” is worded as though threatening to sue someone for an injury were aggression, but an actionable injury was not. The substance of your comment reads to me consistently with this. The OP suffers from a similar flaw.
Though a complication here is that one way to become vulnerable to abuse is to be a transgressor, as one’s transgressions give opportunities for blackmail and scapegoating and so on. So abusers might target transgressors, and without protection for the transgressors, it’s hard for them to call out the abusers.
It’s worse than that, plenty of abusers will straight up coerce one victim into abusing another. This also serves to break people for other purposes, because once you’ve gotten someone to violate their morals in an extreme way, you have evidence to use against their very self-conceptions as a moral person the next time.
Why are you giving vague piecewise references to other people’s interactions with Michael Vassar, when you’ve had interactions yourself that you could surely be much more detailed and coherent with?
“Here are 5 bad interactions with this person” can be interpreted as “we don’t get along well”. “Here are 5 different people who had bad interactions with this person” is “that person doesn’t get along well with others”. This post is showing that certain people have patterns of harming others, as opposed to just having harmed the author.
I thought Vassar is known to seek out people on the margin who have ongoing crises, which complicates the statistical interpretation of vibes from his interactions. It seems more accurate to focus on what he actually does, and whether that is appropriate for the crises he encounters.
Do you think it is more important to dissect the way that people communicate, or to protect vulnerable people from predators?
My takeaway from this post is that an exceptionally evil man has caused significant harm to the rationalist community, leading directly to deaths and damaging the community’s ability to do extremely important work. Is that not your primary takeaway?
And this is how you end up with baseless, unprovably vague accusations that no one can observe are obvious nonsense lest they too be tarred as “exceptionally evil.”
It is in fact much more important to protect what communication norms one might have that safeguard against this, even at great cost to “vulnerable people.”
The rationalist community makes itself vulnerable to bad actors when it lacks the ability to just “be normal about things” and strongly reject bad behavior.
It’s great to ask clarifying questions and weigh evidence appropriately. But the central premise here isn’t in doubt. If survivors speak out and the go-to response is to nitpick the way in which they communicated about the harm, that just tells me you aren’t safe people.
this is exactly how prominent rationalists reacted to my coming forward about SA, and I feel bad for any woman coerced into letting her guard down in these communities
Ehhh. I think my actual objection is more that clear high-quality discussion of possibly-harmful people is not in fact bad for vulnerable people, and in fact is plausibly good for them.
Maybe for context: my most recent Vassar-themed experience was sharing this article with a bunch of rationalists: https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2025/01/24/hsu-and-morandinis-fraudulent-autogynephilia-study/
They considered the article hyperbolic and told me to stop talking to Vassar.
Which at first glance is weird because the article doesn’t bring up Vassar at all, and Vassar blocked me from contacting him a while ago.But it makes sense because rationalists associate complaining about dishonesty with Vassar and his companions, because that’s something Vassar does a lot.Either way, I still think the article was reasonable, and the fact that rationalists dismiss it as Vassarite nonsense seems like a problem to me. The dissatisfaction with dishonesty might very well be the “paranoia” OP was talking about; it’s hard to tell because they were not very specific about it.
Edit: Oops, I looked at the chat logs and I did bring up Vassar as part of the conversation, so that probably contributed to being told to stop talking to him. But I think the point still stands that people associate him with complaining about dishonesty.
Unfortunately, there exists more than one kind of harm; sometimes you trade off one risk against another. If you keep skipping the part where you find the truth, because the other parts are more urgent, it has a potential to end up wrong.
Can you explain how these are incompatible goals?
It’s kind of unclear to me. Unless I’m missing/forgetting something, the main concrete accusation in the OP is the personhood contract, which is pretty weird but seems unlikely to cause this much damage.
You can pursue both goals, but you have chosen not to, and I find that alarming.
There are many, many concrete accusations in this post. It doesn’t particularly matter whether there is a “main” one. Vassar is a serial psychological and sexual abuser, and has caused multiple deaths. That is bad.
Plex opening up about his experiences with this abuser was a terrifying thing to do. The appropriate response in this circumstance is to respond with empathy. If you aren’t going to do that, it is better not to say anything at all. I understand that we are on LessWrong, and this is where people usually gain status by bantering about epistemic technicalities, but there is more than one genre of post, and this is one where that general rule does not apply.
If you want to know specific pieces of information, you can just ask about those directly without making it sound like you don’t believe him or any of Vassar’s other accusers.
I have generally been assuming that this is just a case of not knowing how to respond appropriately. But if you actually don’t believe them, just say that and out yourself. Shankar already made it clear that he doesn’t care about people and he would gladly sacrifice their lives to maintain the verbal games he gets to play with his friends. Do you agree with him about that? Do you think structures that differentially protect abusers are good?
My reference to “when you’ve had interactions yourself that you could surely be much more detailed and coherent with” was meant to point the OP at something more informative for protecting vulnerable people from predators.
There was a sexual abuse allegation in the OP (“arch-rapist”). I don’t know if that allegation was among the ones you consider to be concrete, but it’s not among the ones I consider to be concrete, and the OP also dismissed her approach to sexual abuse allegations as “paranoid”, so...
I’m not convinced, for reasons that might be clearer below.
The OP doesn’t even believe Vassar’s other accusers! (“Paranoid”!) Why should I fully believe them?
I believe that Vassar has been encouraging a worldview that others would call insanely paranoid. I believe that he’s been “pressuring” people to LSD, if by “pressuring” you mean something like “telling people to take it”. (For comparison, one time two men dragged me into a room and forced olanzapine into my mouth; that seems more extreme than telling someone to use a drug, so it seems a bit whiny to me if telling people to take LSD has been upgraded to “pressuring”. I don’t know how appropriate LSD or olanzapine is to use in either of the circumstances.) I am confused about the sexual assault allegations. I believe that people near Vassar have had psychotic breaks, and that Vassar could be a cause of that, though my own experience having a psychotic break makes me think people are making too big of a deal about that.
I also suspect the “insanely paranoid” worldview is to a substantial extent true, and that the surrounding (non-Vassarite) community is essentially abusing the people Vassar talked to by denying it. It’s not clear to me that thing like suicides aren’t better attributed to that abuse than to what Vassar has been doing. I think vague accusations help abusers to reverse the victim and offender, and that the terrifyingness of sharing the whole story may be that the whole story makes things look better for Vassar and worse for plex. (Though a complication here is that one way to become vulnerable to abuse is to be a transgressor, as one’s transgressions give opportunities for blackmail and scapegoating and so on. So abusers might target transgressors, and without protection for the transgressors, it’s hard for them to call out the abusers.)
That said, Vassar has been banned by Lightcone, and I don’t take Lightcone to be the sorts of people who’d gang up on Vassar for no good reason. Maybe I should ask @Ben Pace for more info about why he is banned.
I don’t particularly want to go into all the various considerations, but for my own events, someone threatening a libel suit is sufficient reason for them to no longer be welcome.
I am appalled that a private citizen threatening a libel suit against a third party would be reason for a ban. Especially with no indication that you checked whether someone had actually libeled them.
My current belief is that they’re extremely lopsided offense-biased weapons that people use to silence tons of legitimate criticism, and that it will have disastrous chilling effects on any discourse that it’s considered a plausible weapon in. It has long been on my to-do list to write a post arguing for this position sometime, I have taken this as a nudge to prioritize it a bit further.
(Also, actually following through on a threat of libel is not required for me to ban someone, I have on more than one occasion had an implicit or explicit threat of libel made at me with a clear intention of getting me to shut up or back down from publicly sharing true information, without the person following through.)
(Also also, I don’t promise to do investigations for every person I decide—for whatever reason—to not invite to events that I run. Even though it sounds fair, and even though I receive emails from people demanding this from me, that way leads madness, stress, and ultimately quitting my job.)
“A threat of libel” is worded as though threatening to sue someone for an injury were aggression, but an actionable injury was not. The substance of your comment reads to me consistently with this. The OP suffers from a similar flaw.
It’s worse than that, plenty of abusers will straight up coerce one victim into abusing another. This also serves to break people for other purposes, because once you’ve gotten someone to violate their morals in an extreme way, you have evidence to use against their very self-conceptions as a moral person the next time.