The standard rationalist defense I’ve noticed against this amounts to mental cramping. Demand everything go through cognition, and anything that seems to try to route around cognition gets a freakout/shutdown/”shame it into oblivion” kind of response. The stuff that disables this immune response is really epistemically strange — things like prefacing with “Here’s a fake framework, it’s all baloney, don’t believe anything I’m saying.” Or doing a bunch of embodied stuff to act low-status and unsure. A Dark Artist who wanted to deeply mess with this community wouldn’t have to work very hard to do some serious damage before getting detected, best as I can tell (and as community history maybe illustrates).
Can you spell this out a little more? Did Brent and LaSota employ baloney-disclaimers and uncertainty-signaling in order to bypass people’s defenses?
Can you spell this out a little more? Did Brent and LaSota employ baloney-disclaimers and uncertainty-signaling in order to bypass people’s defenses?
I think Brent did something different from what I’m describing — a bit more like judo plus DOS attacks.
I’m not as familiar with LaSota’s methods. I talked with them several times, but mostly before I learned to detect the level of psychological impact I’m talking about with any detail. Thinking back to those interactions, I remember it feeling like LaSota was confidently asserting moral and existential things that threatened to make me feel inadequate and immoral if I didn’t go along with what they were saying and seek out the brain hemisphere hacking stuff they were talking about. And maybe even then I’d turn out to be innately “non-good”.
(Implied here is a type of Dark hack I find most folk don’t have good defenses against other than refusing to reason and blankly shutting down. It works absurdly well on people who believe they should do what they intellectually conclude makes sense to do.)
The thing I was referring to is something I personally stumbled across. IME rationalists on the whole are generally more likely to take in something said in a low-status way. It’s like the usual analyze-and-scrutinize machinery kind of turns off.
One of the weirder examples is, just ending sentences as though they’re questions? I’m guessing it’s because ending each thing with confidence as a statement is a kind of powerful assertion. But, I mean, if the person talking is less confident then maybe what they’re saying is pretty safe to consider?
(I’m demoing back & forth in that paragraph, in case that wasn’t clear.)
I think LaSota might have been doing something like this too, but I’m not sure.
(As a maybe weird example: Notice how that last sentence is in fact caveated, but it’s still confident. I’m quite sure this is my supposition. I’m sure I’m not sure of the implied conclusion. I feel solid in all of this. My impression is, this kind of solidity is a little (sometimes a lot) disturbing to many rationalists (with some exceptions I don’t understand very well — like how Zvi and Eliezer can mostly get away with brazen confidence without much pushback). By my models, the content of the above sentence would have been easier to receive if rewritten along the lines of, “I’m really not sure, but based on my really shaky memories, I kinda wonder if LaSota might have been doing something like this too — but don’t believe me too much!”)
Notice how that last sentence is in fact caveated, but it’s still confident. I’m quite sure this is my supposition. I’m sure I’m not sure of the implied conclusion. I feel solid in all of this.
Can you spell this out a little more? Did Brent and LaSota employ baloney-disclaimers and uncertainty-signaling in order to bypass people’s defenses?
I think Brent did something different from what I’m describing — a bit more like judo plus DOS attacks.
I’m not as familiar with LaSota’s methods. I talked with them several times, but mostly before I learned to detect the level of psychological impact I’m talking about with any detail. Thinking back to those interactions, I remember it feeling like LaSota was confidently asserting moral and existential things that threatened to make me feel inadequate and immoral if I didn’t go along with what they were saying and seek out the brain hemisphere hacking stuff they were talking about. And maybe even then I’d turn out to be innately “non-good”.
(Implied here is a type of Dark hack I find most folk don’t have good defenses against other than refusing to reason and blankly shutting down. It works absurdly well on people who believe they should do what they intellectually conclude makes sense to do.)
The thing I was referring to is something I personally stumbled across. IME rationalists on the whole are generally more likely to take in something said in a low-status way. It’s like the usual analyze-and-scrutinize machinery kind of turns off.
One of the weirder examples is, just ending sentences as though they’re questions? I’m guessing it’s because ending each thing with confidence as a statement is a kind of powerful assertion. But, I mean, if the person talking is less confident then maybe what they’re saying is pretty safe to consider?
(I’m demoing back & forth in that paragraph, in case that wasn’t clear.)
I think LaSota might have been doing something like this too, but I’m not sure.
(As a maybe weird example: Notice how that last sentence is in fact caveated, but it’s still confident. I’m quite sure this is my supposition. I’m sure I’m not sure of the implied conclusion. I feel solid in all of this. My impression is, this kind of solidity is a little (sometimes a lot) disturbing to many rationalists (with some exceptions I don’t understand very well — like how Zvi and Eliezer can mostly get away with brazen confidence without much pushback). By my models, the content of the above sentence would have been easier to receive if rewritten along the lines of, “I’m really not sure, but based on my really shaky memories, I kinda wonder if LaSota might have been doing something like this too — but don’t believe me too much!”)
Does that answer what you’d hoped?
Perhaps relevant: Nate Soares does this too, based on one of his old essays. And I think it works very well for him.