The short version of my current stance on Vassar is that:
(1) I would not trust him to conform to local rules or norms. He also still seems to me to precipitate psychotic episodes in his interlocutors surprisingly often, to come closer to advocating physical violence than I would like (e.g. this tweet), and to have conversational patterns that often disorient his interlocutors and leave them believing different things while talking to Michael than they do a bit later.
(2) I don’t have overall advice that people ought to avoid Vassar, in spite of (1), because it now seems to me that he is trying to help himself and others toward truth, and I think we’re bottlenecked on that enough that I could easily imagine (2) overshadowing (1) for individuals who are in a robust place (e.g., who don’t feel like they are trapped or “have to” talk to a person or do a thing) and who are choosing who they want to talk to. (There were parts of Michael’s conversational patterns that I was interpreting as less truth-conducive a couple years ago than I am now. I now think that this was partly because I was overanchored on the (then-recent) example of Brent, as well as because I didn’t understand part of how he was doing it, but it is possible that it is current-me who is wrong.) (As one example of a consideration that moved me here: a friend of mine whose epistemics I trust, and who has known Vassar for a long time, said that she usually in the long-run ended up agreeing with her while-in-the-conversation self, and not with her after-she-left-the-conversation self.)
Also I was a bit discomfited when my previous LW comment was later cited by folks who weren’t all that LW-y in their conversational patterns as a general “denouncement” of Vassar, although I should probably have predicted this, so, that’s another reason I’d like to try to publicly state my revised views. To be clear, I do not currently wish to “denounce” Vassar, and I don’t even think that’s what I was trying to do last time, although I think the fault was mostly mine that some people read my previous comment as a general denouncement.
Also, to be clear, what I am saying here is just that on the strength of my own evidence (which is not all evidence), (1) and (2) seem true to me. I am not at all trying to be a court here, or to evaluate any objections anyone else may have to Vassar, or to claim that there are no valid objections someone else might have, or anything like that. Just to share my own revised impression from my own limited first-hand observations.
He also still seems to me to precipitate psychotic episodes in his interlocutors surprisingly often
This is true, but I’m confused about how to relate to it. Part of Michael’s explicit strategy seems to be identifying people stuck in bad equilibria, and destabilizing them out of it. If I were to take an evolutionary-psychology steelman of what a psychotic episode is, a (highly uncertain) interpretation I might make is that a psychotic episode is an adaptation for escaping such equilibria, combined with a negative retrospective judgment of how that went. Alternatively, those people might be using psychedelics (which I believe are in fact effective for breaking people out of equilibria), and getting unlucky with the side effects. This is bad if it’s not paired with good judgment about which equilibria are good vs. bad ones (I don’t have much opinion on how good his judgment in this area is). But this seems like an important function, which not enough people are performing.
The short version of my current stance on Vassar is that:
(1) I would not trust him to conform to local rules or norms. He also still seems to me to precipitate psychotic episodes in his interlocutors surprisingly often, to come closer to advocating physical violence than I would like (e.g. this tweet), and to have conversational patterns that often disorient his interlocutors and leave them believing different things while talking to Michael than they do a bit later.
(2) I don’t have overall advice that people ought to avoid Vassar, in spite of (1), because it now seems to me that he is trying to help himself and others toward truth, and I think we’re bottlenecked on that enough that I could easily imagine (2) overshadowing (1) for individuals who are in a robust place (e.g., who don’t feel like they are trapped or “have to” talk to a person or do a thing) and who are choosing who they want to talk to. (There were parts of Michael’s conversational patterns that I was interpreting as less truth-conducive a couple years ago than I am now. I now think that this was partly because I was overanchored on the (then-recent) example of Brent, as well as because I didn’t understand part of how he was doing it, but it is possible that it is current-me who is wrong.) (As one example of a consideration that moved me here: a friend of mine whose epistemics I trust, and who has known Vassar for a long time, said that she usually in the long-run ended up agreeing with her while-in-the-conversation self, and not with her after-she-left-the-conversation self.)
Also I was a bit discomfited when my previous LW comment was later cited by folks who weren’t all that LW-y in their conversational patterns as a general “denouncement” of Vassar, although I should probably have predicted this, so, that’s another reason I’d like to try to publicly state my revised views. To be clear, I do not currently wish to “denounce” Vassar, and I don’t even think that’s what I was trying to do last time, although I think the fault was mostly mine that some people read my previous comment as a general denouncement.
Also, to be clear, what I am saying here is just that on the strength of my own evidence (which is not all evidence), (1) and (2) seem true to me. I am not at all trying to be a court here, or to evaluate any objections anyone else may have to Vassar, or to claim that there are no valid objections someone else might have, or anything like that. Just to share my own revised impression from my own limited first-hand observations.
This is true, but I’m confused about how to relate to it. Part of Michael’s explicit strategy seems to be identifying people stuck in bad equilibria, and destabilizing them out of it. If I were to take an evolutionary-psychology steelman of what a psychotic episode is, a (highly uncertain) interpretation I might make is that a psychotic episode is an adaptation for escaping such equilibria, combined with a negative retrospective judgment of how that went. Alternatively, those people might be using psychedelics (which I believe are in fact effective for breaking people out of equilibria), and getting unlucky with the side effects. This is bad if it’s not paired with good judgment about which equilibria are good vs. bad ones (I don’t have much opinion on how good his judgment in this area is). But this seems like an important function, which not enough people are performing.