Posts
Comments
(Note: I feel nervous posting this under my own name, in part because my Dad is considering transitioning at the moment and I worry he'd read it as implying some hurtful thing I don't mean, but I do want to declare the conflict of interest that I work at CFAR or MIRI).
The large majority of folks described in the OP as experiencing psychosis are transgender. Given the extremely high base rate of mental illness in this demographic, my guess is this is more explanatorily relevant than the fact that they interacted with rationalist institutions or memes.
I do think the memes around here can be unusually destabilizing. I have personally experienced significant psychological distress thinking about s-risk scenarios, for example, and it feels easy to imagine how this distress could have morphed into something serious if I'd started with worse mental health.
But if we're exploring analogies between what happened at Leverage and these rationalist social circles, it strikes me as relevant to ask why each of these folks were experiencing poor mental health. My impression from reading Zoe's writeup is that she thinks her poor mental health resulted from memes/policies/conversations that were at best accidentally mindfucky, and often intentionally abusive and manipulative.
In contrast, my impression of what happened in these rationalist social circles is more like "friends or colleagues earnestly introduced people (who happened to be drawn from a population with unusually high rates of mental illness) to upsetting plausible ideas."