Viliam

• Viliam 20 Oct 2021 11:35 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Perhaps this is an opportunity to create an internal document on “unhealthy behaviors” that would list the screwups and the lessons learned, and read it together regularly, like a safety training? (Analogically to how organizations that get their computers hacked or documents stolen, describe how it happened as a part of their safety training.) Perhaps with anonymous feedback whether someone has a concern that MIRI or CFAR is slipping into some bad pattern again.

  Also, it might be useful to hire an external psychologist who would in regular intervals have a discussion with MIRI/​CFAR employees. And to provide this document to the psychologist, so they know what risks to focus on. (Furthermore I think the psychologist should not be a rationalist; to provide a better outside view.)

  For starters, someone could create the first version of the document by extracting information from this debate.

  EDIT: Oops, on second reading of your comment, it seems like you already have something like this. Uhm, maybe a good opportunity to update/​extend the document?

  *

  As a completely separate topic, it would be nice to have a table with the following columns: “Safety concern”, “What happened in MIRI/​CFAR”, “What happened in Leverage (as far as we know)”, “Similarities”, “Differences”. But this is much less important, in long term.

• Viliam 20 Oct 2021 11:00 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Kenny ’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Uhh. Sadly, this attitude is quite common, so I will try to explain. Some people are in general more gullible or easier to impress, yes. But that is just a part of equation. The remaining parts are:

  • everyone is more vulnerable to manipulation that is compatible with their already existing opinions and desires;

  • people are differently vulnerable at different moment of their lives, so it’s a question of luck whether you encounter the manipulation at your strongest or weakest moment;

  • the environment can increase or decrease your resistance: how much free time you have, how many people make a coordinated effort to convince you, whether you have enough opportunity to meet other people or stay alone and reflect on what is happening, whether something keeps you worried and exhausted, etc.

  So, some people might easily believe in Mother Gaia, but never in Artificial Intelligence, for other people it is the other way round. You can manipulate some people by appealing to their selfish desires, other people by appealing to their feelings of compassion.

  Many people are just lucky that they never met a manipulative group targetting specifically their weaknesses, exactly at a vulnerable moment of their lives. It is easy to laugh at people whose weaknesses are different from yours, when they fail in a situation that exploits their weaknesses.

• Viliam 20 Oct 2021 10:34 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: mingyuan’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Seems to me that, given the current situation, it would probably be good to wait maybe two more days until this debate naturally reaches the end. And then restart the debate about Leverage.

  Otherwise, we risk having two debates running in parallel, interfering with each other.

  The comments section of this post is full of CFAR and MIRI employees attempting to do collaborative truth-seeking. The only comments made by Leverage employees in comparable threads were attempts at reputation management. That alone tells you a lot!

  Then it is good that this debate happened. (Despite my shock when I saw it first.) It’s just the timing with regards to the debate about Leverage that is unfortunate.

• Viliam 19 Oct 2021 19:49 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Yes, humor makes the difference between “unfair” and “hyperbolic”. (Or the hyperbole makes the humor. Uhhh… explaining humor isn’t my forte.)

  However, countersignaling is risky, and your reaction is an evidence for that.

  Also, there is a chance that my perception is wrong. I made my decision unconsciously; my System 1 decided so for reasons not completely transparent to me, and then it took some effort to also see it from the opposite perspective. (I suppose the line “now, some snark” is something that an actually hostile person would not write; they would just do it, without labeling it as such.)

• Viliam 19 Oct 2021 18:54 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Hm, I thought that the upsetting thing is how neural networks work in general. Like the ones that can correctly classify pictures with 99% probability… and then you slightly adjust a few pixels in such way that a human sees no difference, but the neural network suddenly makes a completely absurd claim with high certainty.

  And, if you are using neural networks to solve important problems, and become aware of this, then you realize that despite them doing a great job in 99% of situations and a random stupid thing in the remaining 1%, there is actually no limit to how insanely wrong they can get, and that it can happen in circumstances that would seem perfectly harmless to you. That the underlying logic is just… inhuman.

  (To make an analogy, imagine that you hire a human to translate from French to English. The human is pretty good but not perfect, which means that he gets 99% right. In the remaining 1% he either translates the word incorrectly or says that he doesn’t know. These two options are the only results you expect. -- Now instead of a human, you hire a robot. He also translates 99% correctly and 1% incorrectly or with no output. But in addition to this, if you give him a specifically designed input, he will say a complete absurdity. Like, he would translate “UN CHAT” as “A CAT”, but when you strategically add a few dots and make it “ỤN ĊHAṬ”, he will suddenly insist that is means “CENTRUM FOR APPLIED RATIONALITY” and will assign a 99.9999999% certainty to this translation. Note that this is not its usual reaction to dots; the input papers usually contain some impurities or random dots, and the algorithm has always successfully ignored them… until now. -- The answer is not just wrong, but absurdly wrong, it happened in the situation where you felt quite sure nothing wrong can happen, and the robot didn’t even feel uncertain.)

  Obviously, Eliezer is saying that there is a plausible but extremely upsetting idea that could be learned by studying neural networks sufficiently competently.

  So, I think that you got this part wrong (and that putting “obviously” in front of it makes this weirdly ironic in given context), and the following conclusions are therefore also wrong.

  Eliezer is simply saying (not “constantly screaming”) “do not trust neural networks, they randomly make big errors”. That message, even if perceived 100% correctly, should not cause a psychotic break in the average listener.

• Viliam 19 Oct 2021 17:41 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  I was like: “finally a snarky comment that I can upvote”. :D

  To be able to laugh at yourself and criticism of yourself, is a mark of mental health. I am happy this community still has it. Especially in the context of discussing cultishness, suprresion of criticism, mental health, etc.

  What is true is already true; if we are hypocritical about something, I would prefer to be aware of it. Furthermore, I would prefer to be told so in a friendly way and here, rather than in a hostile way and somewhere else. Because sooner or later someone else will notice it, too.

  To address specific points, well… cactus person is a fiction, not a biography. MIRI/​CFAR is not a cult; some things were problematic, but they can talk about them openly and fix them. Leverage… needs a separate longer conversation instead of a sidenote for a snarky comment; and frankly we do not have lot of data about them, though that fact itself is also some kind of evidence. Vassarites are not a cult, but Michael is a person you should not introduce to people you care about. Zizians… I didn’t even know they existed until I read this article, probably also not a cult, but a very unhealthy community nonetheless (for some reason they remind me of the “incel” subreddits, with all that self-reinforcing all-encompassing negativity).

  I believe that the more “mentally fragile” someone is, the easier it is to push them over the edge. Vassar seems to seek out fragile people. So rather than “avoid Vassar, he can give you psychosis”, it is “if you are biologically prone to have a psychosis someday, avoid Vassar, he can trigger it, and he considers that the right thing to do”. Otherwise, talk to him freely, you may find him impressive or boring; either way, say no to the drugs he will recommend to you.

  The drugs seem to be in the Bay Area water supply (metaphorically or literally? no one really knows for sure), that is another reason to move somewhere else sooner rather than later. In Bay Area, you probably can’t avoid meeting junkies every day, this shifts your “Overton window”—you assume that if you take 100 times less drugs than them, you are okay; but you don’t realize it is still 100 times more than the rest of the planet. Sometimes the easiest way to change yourself is to change your environment.

• Viliam 19 Oct 2021 12:35 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Goal-Factoring was first called “use fungibility”, a technique I taught within a class called “microeconomics 1” at the CFAR 2012 minicamps prior to Geoff doing any teaching.

  As a participant of Rationality Minicamp in 2012, I confirm this. Actually, found the old textbook, look here!

• Viliam 19 Oct 2021 11:55 UTC

  27 points

  in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  exiting would increase social isolation (increasing social dependence on a small number of people), which is a known risk factor

  If exiting makes you socially isolated, it means that (before exiting) all/​most of your contacts were within the group.

  That suggests that the safest way to exit is to gradually start meeting new people outside the group, start spending more time with them and less time with other group member, until the majority of your social life happens outside the group, which is when you should quit.

  Cults typically try to prevent you from doing this, to keep the exit costly and dangerous. One method is to monitor you and your communications all the time. (For example, Jehovah Witnesses are always out there in pairs, because they have a sacred duty to snitch on each other. Another way is to keep you at the group compound where you simply can’t meet non-members. Yet another way is to establish a duty to regularly confess what you did and who you talked to, and to chastise you for spending time with unbelievers.) Another method is simply to keep you so busy all day long that you have no time left to interact with strangers.

  To revert this—a healthy group will provide you enough private free time. (With the emphasis on all the three words: “free”, “private”, and “enough”.)

  Both Zoe and I were at one time “in a cult”

  We know that Zoe had little free time, she had to spend a lot of time reporting her thoughts to her supervisors, and she was pressured to abandon her hobbies and not socialize.

  2–6hr long group debugging sessions in which we as a sub-faction (Alignment Group) would attempt to articulate a “demon” which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our systems using debugging tools.

  it was suggested I cancel my intended trip to Europe to show my commitment, which I did.

  There was no vacation policy, which seemed good, but in reality panned out in my having no definitively free, personal time that couldn’t be infringed upon by expectations of project prioritization.

  One day, I was debugging with a supervisor and we got to the topic of my desire to perform as an actor. [...] he thought that wanting to do acting [...] was “honestly sociopathic.”

  We were kept extremely busy. [...] Here are four screenshots of my calendar, showing an average month in my last 6 months at Leverage.

  I was regularly left with the feeling that I was low status, uncommitted, and kind of useless for wanting to socialize on the weekends or in the evenings.

  Also, the group belief that if you meet outsiders they may “mentally invade you”, the rival groups (does this refer to rationalists and EAs? not sure) will “infiltrate” you with “demons”, and ordinary people will intentionally or subconsciously “leave objects” in you… does not sound like it would exactly encourage you to make friends outside the group, to put it mildly.

  Now, do you insist that your experience in MIRI/​CFAR was of the same kind? -- Like, what was your schedule, approximately? Did you have free weekends? Were you criticized for socializing with people outside MIRI/​CFAR, especially with “rival groups”? Did you have to debug your thoughts and exorcise the mental invasions left by your interaction with nonmembers? If possible, please be specific.

• Viliam 19 Oct 2021 10:06 UTC

  28 points

  in reply to: Unreal’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  The conflation between Leverage and CFAR is made by the article. Most explicitly here...

  Most of what was considered bad about the events at Leverage Research also happened around MIRI/​CFAR, around the same time period (2017-2019).

  ...and generally, the article goes like “Zoe said that X happens in Leverage. A kinda similar thing happens in MIRI/​CFAR, too.” The entire article (except for the intro) is structured as a point-by-point comparison with Zoe’s article.

  Most commenters don’t buy it. But I imagine (perhaps incorrectly) that if a person unfamiliar with MIRI/​CFAR and rationalist community in general would read the article, their impression would be that the two are pretty similar. This is why I consider it quite important to explain, very clearly, that they are not. This debate is public… and I expect it to be quote-mined (by RationalWiki and consequently Wikipedia).

  I hope it is fine for me to try to investigate the nature of these group dynamics.

  Sure, go ahead!

  I will put forth that a silent minority has existed at CFAR, in the past, and that their experience was difficult and pretty traumatic for them. And I have strong reasons to believe they’re still ‘not over it’.

  I would be happy to hear about their experience. Generally, the upvotes here are pretty much guaranteed. Specific accusations can be addressed—either by “actually, you got this part wrong” or by “oops, that was indeed a mistake, and here is what we are going to do to prevent this from happening again”.

  (And sometimes by plain refusal, like “no, if you believe that you are possessed by demons and need to exorcise them, the rationalist community will not play along; but we can recommend a good therapist”. Similarly, if you like religion, superstition, magic, or drugs, please keep them at home, do not bring them to community activities, especially not in a way that might look like the community endorses this.)

  Dear silent minority, if you are reading this, what can we do to allow you to speak about your experience? If you need anonymity, you can create a throwaway account. If you need a debate where LessWrong moderators cannot interfere, one of you can create an independent forum and advertize it here. If you are afraid of some, dunno, legal action or whatever, could you please post a proposal of a public commitment that MIRI/​CFAR should take to allow you to speak freely?

  (I might regret giving this advice but heck, just contact David Gerard from RationalWiki, he will be more than happy to hear and publish any dirt you have on MIRI/​CFAR or anyone in the rationalist community.)

  Any other proposals, what specifically could MIRI/​CFAR do, or stop doing, to allow the silent minority to talk about their difficult and traumatic experience with the rationalist community and its organizations?

• Viliam 19 Oct 2021 8:56 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Thanks.

  I mostly assumed this; I suppose in the opposite case someone probably would have already mentioned that. But I prefer to have it confirmed explicitly.

• Viliam 19 Oct 2021 8:50 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  gave someone an ill-advised drug combination and they had a bad time

  I don’t remember specific names, but something similar happened at one of the first rationality minicamps. Technically, this was not about drugs but some supplements (i.e. completely legal things), but there was someone mixing various kinds of powders and saying “yeah, trust me, I have a lot of experience with this, I did a lot of research, it is perfectly safe to take a dose this high, really”, and then an ambulance had to be called.

  So, I assume you meant that Olivia goes even far beyond this, right?

• Viliam 19 Oct 2021 8:36 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Perhaps the proper word here might be “manipulation” or “bad influence”.

• Viliam 18 Oct 2021 23:38 UTC

  80 points

  in reply to: Unreal’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Please allow me to point out one difference between the Rationalist community and Leverage that is so obvious and huge that many people possibly have missed it.

  The Rationalist community has a website called LessWrong, where people critical of the community can publicly voice their complaints and discuss them. For example, you can write an article accusing their key organizations of being abusive, and it will get upvoted and displayed on the front page, so that everyone can add their part of the story. The worst thing the high-status members of the community will do to you is publicly post their disagreement in a comment. In turn, you can disagree with them; and you will probably get upvoted, too.

  Leverage Research makes you sign an NDA, preventing you from talking about your experience there. Most Leverage ex-members are in fact afraid to discuss their experience. Leverage even tries (unsuccessfully) to suppress the discussion of Leverage on LessWrong.

  Considering this, do you find it credible that the dynamics of both groups is actually very similar? Because that seems to be the narrative of the post we are discussing here—the very post that got upvoted and is displayed publicly to insiders and outsiders alike. I do strongly object against making this kind of false equivalence.

  it’s pretty important to be willing to engage the hidden /​ silent /​ unpopular minority

  The hidden /​ silent /​ unpopular minority members can post their criticism of MIRI/​CFAR right here, and most likely it will get upvoted. No legal threats whatsoever. No debugging sessions with their supervisor. Yes, some people will probably disagree with them, and those will get upvoted, too.

  You know, this reminds me of comparison between dictatorships and democracies. In a dictatorship, the leader officially has a 100% popular support. In a democracy, maybe 50% of people say that the country sucks and the leadership is corrupt. Should we take these numbers at the face value? Should we even discount them both to the same degree and say “if the dictatorship claims to have 100% popular support, but in fact only 20% of people are happy with the situation, then if the democracy claims to have 50% popular support, we should apply the same ratio and conclude that only 10% of people are happy?”.

  Because it seems to me that you are making a similar claim here. We know that some people are afraid to talk publicly about their experience in Leverage. You seem to assume that there must be a similar group of people afraid to talk publicly about their experience in MIRI/​CFAR. I think this is unlikely. I assume that if someone is unhappy about MIRI/​CFAR doing something, there is probably a blog post about it somewhere (not necessarily on LessWrong) already.

  On the other side of it, why do people seem TOO DETERMINED to turn [Michael Vassar] into a scapegoat?

  Do you disagree with specific actions being attributed to Michael? Do you disagree with the conclusion that it is a good reason to avoid him and also tell all your friends to avoid him?

• Viliam 18 Oct 2021 17:35 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  That… must have hurt a lot.

  (I hope your story is right.)

• Viliam 18 Oct 2021 17:24 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Michael is very good at spotting people right on the verge of psychosis

  ...and then pushing them.

  Michael told me once that he specifically seeks out people who are high in Eysenckian psychoticism.

  So, this seems deliberate. He is not even hiding it, if you listen carefully.

• Viliam 18 Oct 2021 15:54 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  congrats on realizing that all of this is not okay.

  Ironically, some people realized something similar long ago, but...

• Viliam 18 Oct 2021 15:33 UTC

  −3 points

  in reply to: 4thWayWastrel’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Is “rationalist types” an euphemism for aspergers? In that case, “aspergers creating a new theory of cognition, applying it on themselves, and only getting feedback from other aspergers studying the same theory” sounds like something that could easily spiral out of control.

• Viliam 18 Oct 2021 13:01 UTC

  60 points

  in reply to: farp’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  Some context, please. Imagine the following scenario:

  • Victim A: “I was hurt by X.”

  • Victim B: “I was hurt by Y.”

  There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, whether it happens the same day, the next day, or week later. Maybe victim B was encouraged by (reactions to) victim A’s message, maybe it was just a coincidence. Nothing wrong with that either.

  Another scenario:

  • Victim A: “I was hurt by X.”

  • Victim B: “I was also hurt by X (in a different way, on another day etc.).”

  This is a good thing to happen; more evidence, encouragement for further victims to come out.

  But this post is different in a few important ways. First, Jessicata piggybacks on Zoe’s story a lot, insinuating analogies, but providing very little actual data. (If you rewrote the article to avoid referring to Zoe, it would be 10 times shorter.) Second, Jessicata repeatedly makes comparison between Zoe’s experience at Leverage and her experience at MIRI/​CFAR, and usually concludes that Leverage was less bad (for reasons that are weird to me, such as because their abuse was legible, or because they provided space for people to talk about demons and exorcise them). Here are some quotes:

  I want to disagree with a frame that says that the main thing that’s bad was that Leverage (or MIRI/​CFAR) was a “cult”. This makes it seem like what happened at Leverage is much worse than what could happen at a normal company. But, having read Moral Mazes and talked to people with normal corporate experience (especially in management), I find that “normal” corporations are often quite harmful to the psychological health of their employees, e.g. causing them to have complex PTSD symptoms, to see the world in zero-sum terms more often, and to have more preferences for things to be incoherent.

  Leverage was an especially legible organization, with a relatively clear interior/​exterior distinction, while CFAR was less legible, having a set of events that different people were invited to, and many conversations including people not part of the organization. Hence, it is easier to attribute organizational responsibility at Leverage than around MIRI/​CFAR.

  Unless there were psychiatric institutionalizations or jail time resulting from the Leverage psychosis, I infer that Leverage overall handled their metaphysical weirdness better than the MIRI/​CFAR adjacent community. While in Leverage the possibility of subtle psychological influence between people was discussed relatively openly, around MIRI/​CFAR it was discussed covertly, with people being told they were crazy for believing it might be possible.

  Leverage definitely had large problems with these discussions, and perhaps tried to reach more intersubjective agreement about them than was plausible (leading to over-reification, as Zoe points out), but they seem less severe than the problems resulting from refusing to have them, such as psychiatric hospitalization and jail time.

  Despite the witch hunts and so on, the Leverage environment seems more supportive than what I had access to. The people at Leverage I talk to, who have had some of these unusual experiences, often have a highly exploratory attitude to the subtle mental realm, having gained access to a new cognitive domain through the experience, even if it was traumatizing.

  An ex-Leverage person I know comments that “one of the things I give Geoff the most credit for is actually ending the group when he realized he had gotten in over his head. That still left people hurt and shocked, but did actually stop a lot of the compounding harm.” (While Geoff is still working on a project called “Leverage”, the initial “Leverage 1.0” ended with most of the people leaving.) This is to some degree happening with MIRI and CFAR, with a change in the narrative about the organizations and their plans, although the details are currently less legible than with Leverage.

  I hope that those that think this is “not that bad” (perhaps due to knowing object-level specifics around MIRI/​CFAR justifying these decisions) consider how they would find out whether the situation with Leverage was “not that bad”, in comparison, given the similarity of the phenomena observed in both cases; such an investigation may involve learning object-level specifics about what happened at Leverage. I hope that people don’t scapegoat; in an environment where certain actions are knowingly being taken by multiple parties, singling out certain parties has negative effects on people’s willingness to speak without actually producing any justice.

  ...uhm, does this sound a bit like a defense of Leverage, or at least saying “Zoe, your experience in Leverage was not as bad as my experience in MIRI/​CFAR”? That is poor taste, especially when the debate about Zoe’s experience hasn’t finished yet.

  Third, this comparison and downplaying is made even worse by the fact that many supposed analogies are not that much analogical:

  • Zoe had mental trauma after her experience in Leverage. Jessicata had mental trauma after her experience in MIRI/​CFAR, and after she started experimenting with drugs, inspired by critics of MIRI/​CFAR.

  • Zoe had to sign an NDA, covering lot of what was happening in Leverage, and now she worries about possible legal consequences of her talking about her abuse. Jessicata didn’t have to sign anything… but hey, she was once discouraged from writing a blog on AI timeline… which is just as bad, except much worse because MIRI/​CFAR is less transparent about being evil. (Sorry, I am too sarcastic here, I find it difficult to say these things with a straight face.)

  • Zoe was convinced by Leverage that everything that happened to her was her own fault. Jessicata joined a group of MIRI/​CFAR haters who believed that everything was evil but especially MIRI/​CFAR, and then she ended up believing that she was evil… yeah, again, fair analogy! Leverage at least tells you openly that you are a loser, but the insidious MIRI/​CFAR uses some super complicated plot, manipulating their haters to convince you about the same thing.

  • etc. (I am out of time, and also being sarcastic is against the norms of LW, so I better end here.)

  In summary, it is the combination of: piggybacking on another victim’s story, making analogies that are not really analogies, and then downplaying the first victim’s experience… plus the timing right in the middle of debating the first victim’s experience… that makes it so bad.

• Viliam 18 Oct 2021 10:40 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  For a moment I actually wondered whether this was a genius-level move by Leverage, but then I decided that I am just being paranoid. But it did derail the previous debate successfully.

  On the positive side, I learned some new things. Never heard about Ziz before, for example.

  EDIT:

  Okay, this is probably silly, but… there is no connection between the Vassarites and Leverage, right? I just realized that my level of ignorance does not justify me dismissing a hypothesis so quickly. And of course, everyone knows everyone, but there are different levels of “knowing people”, and… you know what I mean, hopefully. I will defer to judgment of people from Bay Area about this topic.

• Viliam 18 Oct 2021 10:31 UTC

  −1 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  It might be useful to have a global blacklist somewhere. Possible legal consequences, if someone decides to sue you for libel. (Perhaps the list should only contain the names, not the reasons?)

  EDIT: Nevermind. There are more things I would like to say about this, but this is not the right place. Later I may write a separate article explaining the threat model I had in mind.