I think its really important to undesrtand the various ways agents can distort the field of social reality. Social reality is actually the main reality we live in most of the time, and so understanding how it works is super important. Sometimes it’s logic is a bit more paradoxical than physics, but this doesn’t mean it’s entirely illogical or unreasonable. “Reality distortion field” is a great term as long as we understand that the reality being distorted is the social one.
Recently, I started walking and training my friend’s dog. Oftentimes people have a hard time getting this dog to cooperate, especially around letting the human pick the route. He tends to try to pull you where he wants to go (usually towards tasty, tasty garbage.) I have very successfully taught this dog to heel for me.
A significant part of doing this is realizing that my expectations are actually a causative factor in the dog’s behavior. If I expect the dog not to follow me, the dog will in fact not follow me. If the dog is pulling, I need to accept that reality in the moment while still maintaining just as much, or even increasing, my expectation of the desired behavior in the future.
Reality distortion fields happen when someone is unusually good at maintaining expectation in this way, and uses it for unethical or anti-epistemic purposes. People ethically using this skill are more capable of resisting reality distortion fields and creating structures that enable healthy coordination.
The persuasions of the witch’s craft
Is the craft of the witch’s persuasions
Valerie Sizemore
It would have been nice if Ben’s root comment had explained this distinction upfront, because it has meaningful impacts on how allies may want to interact with the space. Would you let an organization host an event at Lighthaven where Vassar is a featured speaker?
I’m sorry, I thought that this was super common knowledge. The “annoyance getting you to ignore it” was one of the main Russian tactics in their 2016 operation against the US.
Drugs can be used to get information, create blackmail material, confuse people, discredit them, or make them irrationally fond of their handler. It’s not a commonly used tactic but it is used. We should remember that organized crime is actually a kind of self-organized police force, so certain edges of a State’s use of violence smoothly blends into criminal activity.
The time the CIA was drugging people with LSD during MKUltra comes to mind. The Contra cocaine trafficking incident comes to mind. MDMA is a much newer drug than LSD, so if I believed in betting, I’d bet eventually a scandal around the use of it for intelligence purposes will come out. The Soviets would use antipsychotics on internal dissidents, as part of a systematic “make them seem crazy” strategy.
This line of research produced the Unabomber:
Almost every activist organization dealing with certain topics has to expect federal or foreign infiltrators to show up. Many times these infiltrators will advocate becoming violent or will directly try to nucleate violence at the group’s protest. Russian disruption of neighboring countries’ politics (and American politics in 2016) has a lot of this flavor too. Here’s an NPR article about the way ex-intelligence personnel have brought these tactics to more private endeavors.
I strongly suspect a Chinese spy was looking around the community to gather information about Anthropic last year. They seemed to specifically be seeking out events where people might be consuming MDMA, because people on MDMA are more likely to tell you things they otherwise wouldn’t, and doing illegal activities with your target creates a bond + blackmail material at the same time.
And finally, many of these are standard cult techniques as well. Cults tend to converge on the similar tactics, regardless of what they are nominally “about,” because those tactics work to create a high control environment.
Michael’s efforts here appear to be “culture building” in the end effects. Him and his acolytes target people with a propensity to psychosis, feed them lots of drugs, and then break their ontology while they are on the drugs. Sometimes this stabilizes into a cult member, sometimes this breaks the person and they get abandoned. The second order “membership” like Olivia replicates the first part of this pattern, but with no actual cult to stabilize them into.
Vassar and crew pick targets pretty carefully. If you have good social instincts, strong mental boundaries, and a healthy moral compass, he will try to cut you out of his circles too.
He was also really really working hard to get unbanned from community spaces during that time. I think he maybe threatened REACH with legal action, but I’m not entirely sure of this.
He has gotten lots of his acolytes to go to events there on his behalf though. Manifold 2024 was absolutely crawling with them, even if he himself didn’t come.
This is exactly the strategy that Vassar is using, and probably explicitly taken out of the playbook intelligence services use the world over. This annoyance is designed to get people like you to want to ignore it, and especially not take the victims seriously.
1GB for DNA is a lower bound. That’s how much it takes to store the abstract base pair representation. There’s lots of other information you’d need to actually build a human and a lot of it is common to all life. Like, DNA spends most of its time not in the neat little X shapes that happen during reproduction, but in coiled up little tangles. A lot of the information is stored in the 3D shape and in the other regulatory machinery attached to the chromosomes.
If all you had was a human genome, the best you could do would be to do a lot of simulation to reconstruct all the other stuff. Probably doable, but would require a lot of “relearning.”
The brain also uses DNA for storing information on the form of methylation patterns in individual neurons.
It is in her brainstem. Which while that makes it very difficult to treat, it probably increases her chances of being revived intact.
Is it possible that you have an auditory processing disorder? My fiancee has it and this sounds pretty much like her experience with phones.
There is a conversation going on about her on the CI Facebook page that seems to indicate that she has been in contact with them. According to info there, her name is Kim Suozzi. Also they will set up a fund at CI for her, once she becomes a member and they vet her story. So If you are considering donating, but worried its a scam, it might be best to hold off until then.
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.