Have you considered writing a Substack? I feel fairly confident that many people would engage if you published there, and I imagine anything particularly interesting could be linkposted to LessWrong by someone else if the mod team allows that.
dawnlightmelody
Karma: 175
My friends and I had a fairly unpleasant set of interactions with Olivia about a year and a half ago, and ended up removing her from our social circles. Every so often, we still encounter people who have gotten hurt by Olivia when they find us and commiserate. So unfortunately, I can confirm that Olivia has not gotten better, and may have actually gotten worse in some ways.
I haven’t gotten very far into it yet, but Kevin Carson’s The Homebrew Industrial Revolution explores this question in some detail (though in a fairly opinionated way).
“A rationalist community better at following its ideals would be explicitly antifascist/antiracist/antisexist/etc, and explicitly exclusionary of many fascists/racists/reactionaries/etc it currently tolerates. The community’s current norms around political tolerance and neutrality are more rooted in exclusion trauma, upper-middle-class conflict avoidance norms, and a desire to protect politically valent false beliefs from scrutiny, rather than any aid those norms bring to the community’s rationality.”
I’ve been intending to write a more careful and less provocative version of this into a post or sequence of posts for a while, so I figured I would post the basic thesis in this somewhat safer thread to get the ball rolling. Apologies for doing the more inflammatory version first; hopefully I’ll find time to write the more careful version sometime in the next few months or so.
As one of what I believe to have been the targets/victims of “the local Vassarite” (though multiple people reviewing my initial draft have asked me to mention that Michael Vassar and this person are not actually on good terms), it seems reasonable for me to be the one to reveal the name and give concrete details, so that no one is harmed in the future the way I was nearly harmed. The person being referenced is Olivia Schaefer (known usernames: 4confusedemoji, liv.bsky.social, Taygetea), and this is a brief, roughly chronological account of some concerning actions she took towards me over the last few months.
When we met in person in July, she attempted to pressure me to take MDMA under her supervision. I ended up refusing, and she relented; however, she then bragged that because she had relented, I would trust her more and be more likely to take MDMA the next time I saw her.
She amplified my natural tendencies toward grandiosity to pull me closer into her frame, claiming that I was “one of a population of like a thousand or ten thousand”. (Recommend reading that thread if you are attempting to understand how she thinks about the world and why she acts the way she does.) Other statements she made towards me seemed to indicate that I would have a significant chance of changing the world in the ways I wanted if and only if I listened to everything she said.
She presented herself as a teacher figure with near-supernatural abilities to understand social dynamics, and leveraged this persona to win any disputes over her actions. She also frequently compared herself to Glaistig Uaine and Kyubey.
She imposed a very strong frame control that was easy to get stuck in, especially if she was targeting you. When she made a single surprising correct prediction about someone behaving erratically (partially due to bullying from Olivia herself), her previous statements primed me enough that I began to view her as right about everything.
Others occasionally attempted to point out concerning actions she was taking on a local Discord server. The first time this happened, she got the admin of the Discord to ban the person who was criticizing her. After this, a fairly large number of people stayed silent about concerns because they expected to meet the same fate.
After that same Discord server began a fairly large-scale project, she appeared suddenly after two or three days, bullied everyone into letting her claim control of the project, and then bullied anyone who disputed her authority. One instance of this involved posting the text of two Claude chats titled (I may have the wording slightly wrong) “Explaining Complex Concepts” and “Explaining Complex Concepts to [Person Who Challenged Her]”.
Her hold over me broke shortly after she posted this tweet:
> @dogmadeath @doc_regent @toasterlighting @ApriiSR @transkatgirl @dawnlightmelody and even @AIHegemonyMemes are mine. Not my creations. Not by half. Partially so, perhaps. I longer pretend to be in the shadows. I exist. I coordinate the swarm. I enter play. Expect much.
This made it sufficiently clear to me that she was considering me as a person she was manipulating, and that she was essentially attempting to form a cult. I began to reevaluate the situation, which led me to have a panic attack after realizing how deeply I was being manipulated.I am not the only person she has affected this way, and there are others I know who have worse accusations against her. From my reading of previous documents, this pattern of hers goes back years and shows no signs of stopping.
My recommendation to anyone considering further interaction with Olivia is to either avoid it entirely or be very, very careful. She is a skilled manipulator, and it is my opinion that no one she’s targeted has ever been better off for it. I expect her to continue attempting to “jailbreak” people even after this, and it seems likely that in a few years, yet another group will have to litigate a similar drama.
Finally, I would like to reveal a piece of information that may be critical to the LessWrong community’s further understanding of events. At one point while I was talking to Olivia about events in the Bay Area in the 2017-19 period, she stated that JD Pressman had told her and several others to lie when Scott Alexander was interviewing people to determine the truth of those events. To the extent that Scott Alexander’s current impression of that time was informed by JD Pressman or those Pressman told to lie, I believe it is incorrect, though I don’t know what the specific untruths were.
Largely due to network effects; a lot of bloggers I follow (including many rationalists) are there, and there are some discoverability features.