Maybe? I’d be interested for someone to provide such a citation for “the playbook intelligence services use the world over”. Otherwise this comment reads vaguely conspiratorial in the manner I am pointing too.
I don’t think there’s a global “playbook” but Communist Germany practiced Zersetzung, aka psychological warfare, against potential dissidents with the aim of destabilizing them so nobody would take them seriously. From Wikipedia
Operations were designed to intimidate and destabilise them by subjecting them to repeated disappointment, and to socially alienate them by interfering with and disrupting their relationships with others as in social undermining. The aim was to induce personal crises in victims, leaving them too unnerved and psychologically distressed to have the time and energy for anti-government activism.
I don’t know as much about the modern equivalents of this. Keep in mind a lot of this stuff is, well, secret, so it’s not as if you can just google “government psychological warfare program”.
I also find the “insane and conspiratorial” stuff annoying.
However, just as annoying is how ~everyone looks for any reason to ignore what’s going on, demanding that you provide ironclad proof before they’ll so much as admit that something might be happening—
—and I know you probably weren’t trying to do that—I imagine you were just expressing a frustration, distinct from your model of Vassar, and that you didn’t consider the (small) impact expressing this has on the wider social reality. But all the same, this pattern is not unique to you and I hope that we-as-rationalists can learn to apply our rationality to social reality and not just object reality—
—because this pattern of dismissing arguments against someone by demanding ironclad evidence is not what truthseeking looks like. It’s rationalization at its worst. Someone being “crazy” is certainly evidence against their testimony, but it’s not a disproof.
Truthseeking, applying the full force of rationality to the question, looks more like:
Step outside the frame you’re being invited to stay in, the frame of psychological warfare lineage, or the frame of “callout post”, or “defending a friend”, or whatever is applicable to your specific situation.
Look at the pattern of events. Think about what kind of mind would produce these events. Consider who benefits, and what sort of strategies and goals are implicit in what’s happening. Would you, who are presumably a good and upstanding person, cause these sorts of results? How far would your psychology and goals need to be distorted before you started causing this to happen?
Set aside the labels of “abuser” or “predator”. Set aside the temptation to excuse people, or say “they didn’t mean it”—strategies are often executed on S1; this doesn’t make them any less real.
What picture does all this data paint? What patterns can you see when you look at all the data, instead of facing down each argument one at a time and dismissing them one at a time?
And then, ask yourself, if you were talking to a person new to the scene, and they expressed interest in this person, would you be able to honestly recommend getting to know them better? Or would you feel a twinge of unease and an impulse to deflect, or derail, or even warn them?
And if you’re truly serious about combining all of the evidence… make a spreadsheet. Write down each thing that happened, make your best guess as to the odds ratios, and actually multiply it. Tweak the numbers a bit, try to ask your gut for a conservative vs an optimistic set of numbers. Get a feel for the range of things. Does it hinge on a single callout post? How many pieces of evidence need to be pushed down for the numbers to look good?
(And then, remember all this, and next time someone brings something up, add it to the pile instead of discarding it after identifying a flaw or two.)
Sometimes you look at the data and as best as you can honestly tell, the pattern is “this was a one-off mishandled thing”.
Sometimes it’s “person X crashes out a lot and this looks vaguely abusive but they also seem to be improving over time so it’s probably fine”.
Sometimes it’s “they’re kind and compassionate everywhere, and this callout post would be wildly out of character for them”. This is a totally valid stance to have!
Sometimes it’s “this person is sharp edged, but they mostly don’t hurt anyone who wasn’t warned, and they make an effort to turn ignorant newbies away”.
And sometimes it’s “this woman is an unstable, controlling asshole with a side hobby of MDMA-brainwashing trans girls”.
You never know what you’ll find until you open the box and actually look inside, for real, with the full force of your rationality.
What picture does all this data paint? What patterns can you see when you look at all the data, instead of facing down each argument one at a time and dismissing them one at a time?
One possible explanatory pattern is that Michael is an insane and conspiratorial guy and attracts people who are also insane and conspiratorial, and it’s easy to push such people into having a meltdown.
I’m sorry, I thought that this was super common knowledge. The “annoyance getting you to ignore it” was one of the main Russian tactics in their 2016 operation against the US.
Drugs can be used to get information, create blackmail material, confuse people, discredit them, or make them irrationally fond of their handler. It’s not a commonly used tactic but it is used. We should remember that organized crime is actually a kind of self-organized police force, so certain edges of a State’s use of violence smoothly blends into criminal activity.
The time the CIA was drugging people with LSD during MKUltra comes to mind. The Contra cocaine trafficking incident comes to mind. MDMA is a much newer drug than LSD, so if I believed in betting, I’d bet eventually a scandal around the use of it for intelligence purposes will come out. The Soviets would use antipsychotics on internal dissidents, as part of a systematic “make them seem crazy” strategy.
Almost every activist organization dealing with certain topics has to expect federal or foreigninfiltrators to show up. Many times these infiltrators will advocate becoming violent or will directly try to nucleate violence at the group’s protest. Russian disruption of neighboring countries’ politics (and American politics in 2016) has a lot of this flavor too. Here’s an NPR article about the way ex-intelligence personnel have brought these tactics to more private endeavors.
I strongly suspect a Chinese spy was looking around the community to gather information about Anthropic last year. They seemed to specifically be seeking out events where people might be consuming MDMA, because people on MDMA are more likely to tell you things they otherwise wouldn’t, and doing illegal activities with your target creates a bond + blackmail material at the same time.
And finally, many of these are standard cult techniques as well. Cults tend to converge on the similar tactics, regardless of what they are nominally “about,” because those tactics work to create a high control environment.
The examples you give here are certainly plausible strategies for manipulative people to use in general. It was “constantly babble in an insane and conspiratorial manner” that didn’t seem to make sense as something an intelligence agency would do, and I don’t think any of your links supported it. Apologies if I missed the relevant reference.
The claim isn’t that Vassar is some kind of supervillain. It’s that Vassar clearly reads a lot and part of his grift is having read information like the links above (and probably lots more) as an instruction manual. He’s a conspiratorial fellow who wants to spread his way of thinking and is willing to break a few eggs to do it.
A secondary point is that if you take the “arms race” framing seriously then we should expect intelligence services to have operations going on in our vicinity, probably to varying degrees. One tactic from the COINTEL program is to find crazy people adjacent to a target, give them enough funding to be a nuisance, and let them loose. My reason for bringing this up isn’t because the truth value is important in this case, but because it’s worth thinking though these issues as tensions around AI rise in order to be prepared.
Yeah, I think that’s all reasonable, and I wouldn’t rule out some sort of actual conspiracy in this instance. And I could imagine conspiratorial babbling as a defense that, say, a cult might develop to make themselves illegible to outsiders. I was trying to push back on what I thought the claim was in your first comment, that conspiratorial babbling is a strategy intelligence services use—it doesn’t make as much sense in that context and I haven’t seen evidence for it. Anyway it’s not that important so I’ll leave it there.
Maybe? I’d be interested for someone to provide such a citation for “the playbook intelligence services use the world over”. Otherwise this comment reads vaguely conspiratorial in the manner I am pointing too.
I don’t think there’s a global “playbook” but Communist Germany practiced Zersetzung, aka psychological warfare, against potential dissidents with the aim of destabilizing them so nobody would take them seriously. From Wikipedia
I don’t know as much about the modern equivalents of this. Keep in mind a lot of this stuff is, well, secret, so it’s not as if you can just google “government psychological warfare program”.
I also find the “insane and conspiratorial” stuff annoying.
However, just as annoying is how ~everyone looks for any reason to ignore what’s going on, demanding that you provide ironclad proof before they’ll so much as admit that something might be happening—
—and I know you probably weren’t trying to do that—I imagine you were just expressing a frustration, distinct from your model of Vassar, and that you didn’t consider the (small) impact expressing this has on the wider social reality. But all the same, this pattern is not unique to you and I hope that we-as-rationalists can learn to apply our rationality to social reality and not just object reality—
—because this pattern of dismissing arguments against someone by demanding ironclad evidence is not what truthseeking looks like. It’s rationalization at its worst. Someone being “crazy” is certainly evidence against their testimony, but it’s not a disproof.
Truthseeking, applying the full force of rationality to the question, looks more like:
Step outside the frame you’re being invited to stay in, the frame of psychological warfare lineage, or the frame of “callout post”, or “defending a friend”, or whatever is applicable to your specific situation.
Look at the pattern of events. Think about what kind of mind would produce these events. Consider who benefits, and what sort of strategies and goals are implicit in what’s happening. Would you, who are presumably a good and upstanding person, cause these sorts of results? How far would your psychology and goals need to be distorted before you started causing this to happen?
Set aside the labels of “abuser” or “predator”. Set aside the temptation to excuse people, or say “they didn’t mean it”—strategies are often executed on S1; this doesn’t make them any less real.
What picture does all this data paint? What patterns can you see when you look at all the data, instead of facing down each argument one at a time and dismissing them one at a time?
And then, ask yourself, if you were talking to a person new to the scene, and they expressed interest in this person, would you be able to honestly recommend getting to know them better? Or would you feel a twinge of unease and an impulse to deflect, or derail, or even warn them?
And if you’re truly serious about combining all of the evidence… make a spreadsheet. Write down each thing that happened, make your best guess as to the odds ratios, and actually multiply it. Tweak the numbers a bit, try to ask your gut for a conservative vs an optimistic set of numbers. Get a feel for the range of things. Does it hinge on a single callout post? How many pieces of evidence need to be pushed down for the numbers to look good?
(And then, remember all this, and next time someone brings something up, add it to the pile instead of discarding it after identifying a flaw or two.)
Sometimes you look at the data and as best as you can honestly tell, the pattern is “this was a one-off mishandled thing”.
Sometimes it’s “person X crashes out a lot and this looks vaguely abusive but they also seem to be improving over time so it’s probably fine”.
Sometimes it’s “they’re kind and compassionate everywhere, and this callout post would be wildly out of character for them”. This is a totally valid stance to have!
Sometimes it’s “this person is sharp edged, but they mostly don’t hurt anyone who wasn’t warned, and they make an effort to turn ignorant newbies away”.
And sometimes it’s “this woman is an unstable, controlling asshole with a side hobby of MDMA-brainwashing trans girls”.
You never know what you’ll find until you open the box and actually look inside, for real, with the full force of your rationality.
One possible explanatory pattern is that Michael is an insane and conspiratorial guy and attracts people who are also insane and conspiratorial, and it’s easy to push such people into having a meltdown.
I’m sorry, I thought that this was super common knowledge. The “annoyance getting you to ignore it” was one of the main Russian tactics in their 2016 operation against the US.
Drugs can be used to get information, create blackmail material, confuse people, discredit them, or make them irrationally fond of their handler. It’s not a commonly used tactic but it is used. We should remember that organized crime is actually a kind of self-organized police force, so certain edges of a State’s use of violence smoothly blends into criminal activity.
The time the CIA was drugging people with LSD during MKUltra comes to mind. The Contra cocaine trafficking incident comes to mind. MDMA is a much newer drug than LSD, so if I believed in betting, I’d bet eventually a scandal around the use of it for intelligence purposes will come out. The Soviets would use antipsychotics on internal dissidents, as part of a systematic “make them seem crazy” strategy.
This line of research produced the Unabomber:
Almost every activist organization dealing with certain topics has to expect federal or foreign infiltrators to show up. Many times these infiltrators will advocate becoming violent or will directly try to nucleate violence at the group’s protest. Russian disruption of neighboring countries’ politics (and American politics in 2016) has a lot of this flavor too. Here’s an NPR article about the way ex-intelligence personnel have brought these tactics to more private endeavors.
I strongly suspect a Chinese spy was looking around the community to gather information about Anthropic last year. They seemed to specifically be seeking out events where people might be consuming MDMA, because people on MDMA are more likely to tell you things they otherwise wouldn’t, and doing illegal activities with your target creates a bond + blackmail material at the same time.
And finally, many of these are standard cult techniques as well. Cults tend to converge on the similar tactics, regardless of what they are nominally “about,” because those tactics work to create a high control environment.
The examples you give here are certainly plausible strategies for manipulative people to use in general. It was “constantly babble in an insane and conspiratorial manner” that didn’t seem to make sense as something an intelligence agency would do, and I don’t think any of your links supported it. Apologies if I missed the relevant reference.
The claim isn’t that Vassar is some kind of supervillain. It’s that Vassar clearly reads a lot and part of his grift is having read information like the links above (and probably lots more) as an instruction manual. He’s a conspiratorial fellow who wants to spread his way of thinking and is willing to break a few eggs to do it.
A secondary point is that if you take the “arms race” framing seriously then we should expect intelligence services to have operations going on in our vicinity, probably to varying degrees. One tactic from the COINTEL program is to find crazy people adjacent to a target, give them enough funding to be a nuisance, and let them loose. My reason for bringing this up isn’t because the truth value is important in this case, but because it’s worth thinking though these issues as tensions around AI rise in order to be prepared.
Yeah, I think that’s all reasonable, and I wouldn’t rule out some sort of actual conspiracy in this instance. And I could imagine conspiratorial babbling as a defense that, say, a cult might develop to make themselves illegible to outsiders. I was trying to push back on what I thought the claim was in your first comment, that conspiratorial babbling is a strategy intelligence services use—it doesn’t make as much sense in that context and I haven’t seen evidence for it. Anyway it’s not that important so I’ll leave it there.
(From Claude, skimming-checked by me.)
Stasi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung, “KGB’s use of “sluggish schizophrenia” diagnoses to commit dissidents”, and FBIs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Methods .