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.
They both are injuries? The same as punching someone in the face is injurious whether in self defense or as an attack. The correct thing to do when someone starts getting violent is to stop them from continuing. This sometimes requires violence, hence often injuries. Sometimes the violent person hasn’t yet actually punched anyone, but is doing things that strongly imply that they are planning on hurting someone. Such situations also call for stopping the violent person from continuing, even though no actual injury has happened yet.
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.
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.
They both are injuries? The same as punching someone in the face is injurious whether in self defense or as an attack. The correct thing to do when someone starts getting violent is to stop them from continuing. This sometimes requires violence, hence often injuries. Sometimes the violent person hasn’t yet actually punched anyone, but is doing things that strongly imply that they are planning on hurting someone. Such situations also call for stopping the violent person from continuing, even though no actual injury has happened yet.
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.