
"Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer callout post)" by plex
From LessWrong (Curated & Popular) by LessWrong
April 21, 2026 · 16 min
About this episode
The episode critiques the counterproductive strategies proposed by Micheal Vassar and Olivia Schaefer for saving the world.
Micheal Vassar's strategy for saving the world is horrifyingly counterproductive. Olivia's is worse. A note before we start: A lot of the sources cited are people who ended up looking kinda insane. This is not a coincidence, it's apparently an explicit strategy: Apply plausibly-deniable psychological pressure to anyone who might speak up until they crack and discredit themselves by sounding crazy or taking extreme and destructive actions. Here's Brent Dill explaining it: (later in t...
Topics covered
- psychological pressure
- counterproductive strategies
- mental health
- social dynamics
- extreme actions
Keywords
- Micheal Vassar
- Olivia Schaefer
- psychological pressure
- counterproductive
- extreme actions
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