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.
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.