Not a direct response to the post, but on the same broad topic:
It seems to me that many people (e.g., me and several people I’ve discussed this with) have not so much an intrinsic aversion to pain as a fear of how we’ll act if in pain. (As the main effect. I do also simply like not being in pain, but the fear of how the pain will impact my actions is/was often the larger of these two.) So, for example, a person will avoid seeking out bad news about their project not so much because they mind the pain as such, but because they aren’t sure whether they’ll act funny or have trouble working or similar if they’re suddenly sad. Or a person will try to manage their moods not so much to avoid the mood as such, as to avoid being grouchy toward those near them, or to avoid being a downer at the party.
In my experience, increases in my ability to try in deep/effective ways have several times come via decreases in how afraid I was of being sad/upset (and/or increases in my ability to act well despite being sad/upset). Acquiring less of a need to manage my own mood was important and useful for me. When trying to put up a pretense of “everything is okay and I’m fine,” I couldn’t think properly. (I still have some of that, and it is still a barrier to thinking, but less.)
This has seemed true for me despite it also seeming true that when I am trying my best, I am often/usually free and happy. (And that if I look for where I have a “posture of pain”, I can often thereby locate a place where my form is poor and is wasting my energy.) Trying well for me has often involved a sort of happiness.… but first it has often involved pain/fear/similar as I integrate what I do not know how to integrate.
(None of this is intended as advice. I don’t know you, whoever you are who is reading this, and I don’t have a good grasp of how you’re currently put-together and kind-of-stable.)
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.