Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond

[-]AnonymousAcquaintance9mo334

Ophelia (also called Felix, the German who died in the shootout with border patrol) was an acquaintance of mine, though I hadn't heard anything from or about her in a couple of years. I had read her as a nonviolent nerd, possibly overzealous in protecting her community but definitely not the murdery type. My big questions are about how she got from the person I remember to this. Did she actually try to draw a gun on a cop in the middle of a shootout? It seems likely, as the reporting all seems to be consistent with that, and I don't know why the cops would lie about that when the shooting would likely have been justified either way. If so, what drove her to that point? Even if not, how did she get so involved with such a murderous bunch? What were they trying to do with all that tactical gear in rural Vermont?

How would I notice if I or a friend of mine started to go down a similar road? Ophelia wasn't stupid, whatever happened to her is probably a danger for smart people. I can obviously avoid people associated with ziz, and hemispheric sleep, but is there more I should be thinking about?

[-]Slimepriestess9mo319

okay AMA i guess.

7Mateusz Bagiński9mo

Eli wrote: I would be very surprised if there was no "inner Ziz crew", as inner circles around leaders / prominent figures in a community seem like a default thing that forms in movements/cultural groups. But is it true that you don't think this inner circle is a coordinated group responsible for the murders?

[-]Slimepriestess9mo25-2

i think an important thing to remember is that i recorded this interview prior to Audere's arrest and the link between Jamie and Ziz and Ophelia being made public. At the time the situation was a lot more open ended and proposing that everything was linked in a conspiratorial manner seemed like somewhat of a stretch to justify without evidence. That said, a lot of new evidence has in fact come to light, which presents the events as being fairly interrelated, and so at this point to claim there's no connection between any of these things would be kinda dumb of me. How organized is this inner group? idk, but it seems pretty clear that people are at least talking to each other and coordinating on things in some way.

6Mateusz Bagiński9mo

Why is it the case that a majority of Zizians that we hear about in the news is trans/nb/queer? (If this is representative of Zizians in general, why is it true of Zizians in general?)

[-]Eli Tyre9mo*345

My read:

"Zizian ideology" is a cross between rationalist ideas (the historical importance of AI, a warped version timeless decision theory, that more is possible with regards to mental tech) and radical leftist/anarchist ideas (the state and broader society are basically evil oppressive systems, strategic violence is morally justified, veganism), plus some homegrown ideas (all the hemisphere stuff, the undead types, etc).

That mix of ideas is compelling primarily to people who are already deeply invested in both rationality ideas and leftist / social justice ideas, an demographic which is predominantly trans women.

Further, I guess there's a lot of bigoted / oppressive societal dynamics that are more evident to trans people than they are to, say, me, because they have more direct experience with those dynamics. If you personally feel marginalized and oppressed by society, it's an easier sell that society is broadly an oppressive system.

Plus very straightforward social network effects, where I think many trans rationalists tend to hang out with other trans rationalist (for normal "people like to hang out to people they relate to" reasons), and so this group initially formed from that social sub-network.

6Matrice Jacobine9mo

From zizians.info:

3Liskantope9mo

Regarding your point about being bigender, I recall that Suri Dao, as I knew them on Tumblr around 2016-2019-ish, identified as bigender, and indeed it was the first time I'd ever heard of the term or concept. I'm not sure I've heard anyone else describe themself that way since, and I never really understood the concept then as Dao tried to explain it or since then either. (The closest I can approximate it to a gender identity I do kind of understand is "genderfluid".) I don't think Dao ever mentioned the hemispheric stuff in connection to it. Is/was this a widespread gender identity among rationalists or even in the wider population that I've been ignorant of? Or is it mainly a concept found among those who subscribe to Ziz's ideas?

5Mateusz Bagiński9mo

It's not unique to Zizians or some slightly broader rationalist circle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-binary_gender#Bigender

2Liskantope9mo

Thanks! That's both a more coherent explanation of the term than I've seen, and solid evidence (even mentioning studies from 2016) that it's quite independent from Zizianism. Kind of dumb that I didn't just Google it or Wikipedia it in the first place, in place of my last comment.

1[comment deleted]9mo

5Viliam9mo

(not the OP) Well, Ziz is trans. So if you are trans and rationalist, there are only a few people like that literally in the entire world, so you will probably feel a strong connection.

9Slimepriestess9mo

Founder effects? like, i don't exactly think it's anything "about the ideology" that makes it more appealing to trans/queer ppl, and there are non-trans zizians, so it seems to me more like it's just a consequence of who ziz is and where she was originally recruiting from (queer rationalist discord servers)

[-]Friendly Monkey9mo*119

I disagree but not confident I could write an explanation that's both legible and not losing lots of info by simplifying into "oppressed people more likely to want to oppose oppression". When I saw the question I was looking forwards to you writing a good answer to it, actually. To hint at some starting points, why is queer anarchism a thing? How do different minds decide who they are?

1ryubyss9mo

Transsexual people, let's face it, do seem to have problems than the general population. We have to deal with GD for one thing, which I know all about firsthand. Hence the term FNT (Fucking Neurotic Transsexual) that used to circulate. (Yes, I prefer for various reasons to use the out-of-favor term "transsexual".) We also have high rates of autism. Anecdotally, I think that all but a few of the autogynephilic trans women I have met have had some variety of autism.I think we have more than usual capacity to get involved in cults. I have a lot to say about cults, generally, but will not get into it.

7Mateusz Bagiński9mo

Trans people are over-represented in the rationalist community, relative to general population. It should be evident to anybody who hangs out with a lot of rationalists (at least in "big rationality hubs") or attends big rationality meetups. But I think I also saw some census data (either SSC/ACX or the LW census) confirming that.

4Viliam9mo

"Over-represented relative to general population" and "only a few" can both be simultaneously true. Like, if in the general population on average 1 in 1000 is trans, and among the rationalists it is 1 in 100, and you have 1000 rationalists living in the Bay Area... that still means only 10 trans rationalists you can talk to if you live in the Bay Area, one of them is Ziz. (The numbers are made up, just as an example.)

[-]Matrice Jacobine9mo195

In the largest LW survey, 10.5% of users were transgender. This also increase the most deep in the community you are: 18% restricting to those who are either "sometimes" or "all the times" in the community, 21% restricting to those who are "all the times" in the community.

9Viliam9mo

Oh. I somehow missed/forgot that. I guess it makes more sense this way. Like, the more transgenders there are in the community, the smaller the fraction of Zizians among them. With the numbers I originally assumed, Ziz's conversion ratio would be shockingly high. Now it makes more sense. Thank you, this changes my perspective on the situation.

4ChristianKl9mo

Without having looked at the survey numbers recently, I think the percentage of rationalists who identify as trans in the United States are a lot higher than what you see in Europe. If you only have been at European meetups, it's natural to assume lower rates.

2Lukas Finnveden8mo

Source? I thought 2016 had the most takers but that one seems to have ~5% trans. The latest one with results out (2023) has 7.5% trans. Are you counting "non-binary" or "other" as well? Or referring to some other survey.

1Matrice Jacobine8mo

I'm using the 2016 survey and counting non-binary yes.

3Matrice Jacobine9mo

(not OP) high base rates of transgenderism in LW-rationalism, particularly the sections that would be the most sensible to tenets of Ziz's ideology (high interest in technical aspects of mathematical decision theory, animal rights, radical politics), while being on average more socially vulnerable, and Ziz herself apparently believed that trans women were inherently more capable of accepting her "truth" for more mystical g/acc-ish reasons (though I can't find first-hand confirmation rn)

3Mateusz Bagiński9mo

I'm aware of high rates among LWers but it's still far from what we see among Zizians that we hear a lot about. interesting

3Mateusz Bagiński9mo

@Matrice Jacobine do you have a link to where Ziz talks about that?

4Matrice Jacobine9mo

I don't really want to go through sinceriously.fyi at this point but it's implicit in her attacks on CFAR as "transphobic" for not accepting her belief system at least.

6Viliam9mo

No specific link either, but if you know the usual "female brain in a male body" explanation, Ziz kinda has a more nuanced version of this, where each brain hemisphere is a separate personality, so you can have e.g. one male and one female hemisphere in a male body. (And "if you don't believe an X person when they interpret their own lived experience, that makes you X-phobic" is a standard woke trope.)

5Michael Roe9mo

A lot of the ideas expounded by Ziz look just crazy to me, and I highly doubt that it maps down onto physical brain anatomy in such a straightforward way … but I wonder if there is a steelman version of this? E.g. take the Buddhist doctrines of no-self, that no one actually has a coherent self, humans just don’t work that way, and then note that any one individual person is usually neither wholly stereotypically-male or stereotypically-female.

[-]Viliam9mo111

I think there is a conflation of two different things:

Human brain has two hemispheres which communicate through a relatively lower-bandwidth channel, which means they process a lot of things independently.
There is the dissociative identity disorder / alter ego / tulpa phenomenon, where a human can produce two or more identities. This is probably something that exists on a spectrum, where the extreme forms are full different personalities with dissociative amnesia; imaginary friends and brainwashing are somewhere in the middle; and the everyday forms are role-playing or different moods.

If I understand it correctly, Ziz assumes that these two are the same thing. Which is pseudoscientific, and in my opinion clearly wrong.

First, because there can be more than two identities (but no one has more than two brain hemispheres, I suppose). Yes, two is the most famous number, but that's simply because two is the smallest integer that is greater than one, and more personalities are less frequent.

Second, even if there are exactly two identities, there is no evidence mapping them to two hemispheres (as opposed to each of them using both hemispheres), and a lot of obvious evidence against that, f... (read more)

1Milan W9mo

Epistemic status: Confidence: Strong idea, weakly held. Provenance: My own lived experience, put down in words by myself before even hearing about Ziz. All I know about Zizianism I have learned very recently (mostly from this thread), and I have a very negative opinion of it. Masculinity and feminity have a biological basis, but most people's experience of them are strongly influenced by cultural factors. These cultural factors have been selected for being economically beneficial to agrarian societies. They are quite misaligned with what is beneficial for the happiness of post-industrial individuals. Poor societies made up of dumb people could not afford to not pigeonhole everyone into "straight men" and "straight women". We can now afford to have those categories and also the whole LGBTQ set of categories, although sometimes with a bit of friction when it bumps against the poorest and dumbest parts of our society. These frictions (and also in some cases a descriptive inadequacy of the LGBTQ labels) hurt people. Still, most individuals who are confident that their environment affords them to do so would probably benefit from a bit of experimentation / de-pigeon-holing. When/if we get to a good post-TAI future, we will be able to afford to drop the concepts of discrete genders and discrete sexual orientations altogether. This will be a good thing, because it will make individuals freer.

1Milan W9mo

Did Ziz intend this to be seen as a metaphor (or) to be taken literally?

9localdeity9mo

I think the hemisphere stuff is quite literal. I think it's general knowledge that the right eye feeds into the left side of the brain, and vice versa (Actually, looking it up, it is the case that the left is controlled by the right and vice versa, but I see some claims that the information feeds into both sides, in a nearly balanced manner[1]; but I don't know if Ziz knows that); and Ziz's whole "unihemispheric sleep" thing tells you to keep one eye closed and distract the other eye so that eventually one hemisphere falls asleep. 1. ^ Claude sez: "When nerve fibers cross at the optic chiasm, approximately 53-55% of nerve fibers cross to the opposite hemisphere, while 45-47% remain on the same side. This means that each hemisphere receives slightly different proportions of visual information from both eyes." Wiki on Optic chiasm confirms: "The number of axons that do not cross the midline and project ipsilaterally depends on the degree of binocular vision of the animal (3% in mice and 45% in humans do not cross)".

[-]Mateusz Bagiński9mo*160

It's not about the eyes, it's about the part of the visual field.

The image from the right half of the visual field (left part of each retina) feeds into the left hemisphere and the image from the left half of the visual field (right part of each retina) feeds into the right hemisphere.

Since in humans each eye observes both sides of the visual field, you need to have ~50% of each eye's fibers (each corresponding to something like a pixel) to go to each hemisphere.

In vertebrates where the overlap in visual fields of each eye is minimal (e.g. horses, rabbits), each eye serves mostly one half of the visual field exclusively, so the entire image from the left eye feeds into the right hemisphere and ditto right eye -> left hemisphere.

[-]Viliam9mo102

So the Zizian technology, which involves sleep deprivation and then having one eye closed and the other eye open (as a way to make one personality sleep), seems completely unsupported by what we know about human biology.

It's just creating a split personality, in a way that has nothing to do with the hemispheres. But if you believe that your personalities are already there, waiting in the hemispheres until you find them, it probably helps with the process of creating them (which then feels like a confirmation of the theory).

5ChristianKl9mo

The process of creating alternative personalities is one that works via hypnotic suggestion if you get the critical factor out of the way. Making someone sleep derivated and dosing off a bit does sound like a trance induction. Of course, creating expectancy by having that neat theory, also helps with the process of creating additional personalities.

3Mateusz Bagiński9mo

To the extent that they tried to ground this tech in this particular neuro stuff, then yeah sure but did they even? (These threads are getting long, I'm not remembering everything that was said upstream nor am I reading all of this very carefully.)

6Viliam9mo

I don't know. (Which is a convenient way to end this thread.) Some information is at https://zizians.info/ but it is far from complete, when it comes to the technical details of Zizianism.

1Milan W9mo

This ""unihemispheric sleep" thing seems like it came from crazy and is an excellent way to produce even more crazy. A tale as old as time: small group of people produce some interesting ideas and all is mostly fine until they either take too many drugs or get the bright idea of intentionally messing up their sleep. This starts a self reinforcing loop of drugs / messed up sleep causing crazy causing drugs / messed up sleep causing even more crazy.

5Viliam9mo

Sleep deprivation is a traditional mind-control technique in cults; makes it difficult to disbelieve. Of course you can't just tell your recruits "I need you to be sleep-deprived so that you will find my teaching more credible". Instead, there is so little time and so much work to do. Also, waking up early is healthy (but somehow we forget that going to bed early is healthy, too). Using sleep deprivation as a way to "know yourself" is an interesting new take. You don't even have to organize the work and the early meditations/prayers, your recruits will voluntarily keep themselves sleep-deprived even when there is absolutely nothing to do. Amazing!

5Viliam9mo

See the Zizian "Infohazardous Glossary": Seems quite literal.

3Milan W9mo

The title "infohazardous glossary" sounds pretty insane. The contents of that webpage also strike me as pretty insane. The page is also structured as a glossary, and the concepts explained within it have very likely contributed to the insanity of the people who have heavily interacted with them. Therefore, the title "infohazardous glossary" seems pretty accurate after all. My policy with this kind of stuff is to consider it harmful but also to consider it harmful to be scared of it's harmfulness. Generally disregard, but also maybe play with it for a little bit if I'm feeling curious and sane. It is interesting yes, but also mostly wrong and can be harmful to those who are on an epistemically/emotionally shaky place right now.

[-]Viliam9mo1412

I am thankful that the glossary exists, because it makes it easier to decode various Zizian writings, and makes it more difficult to sanewash Ziz.

For example, now I have a convenient proof that Ziz literally believes that there are two persons in each human. Not as a vague metaphor for "people are complicated". Literally two. Literally in everyone. Literally persons, in a way that it makes sense to describe them individually as male or female, good or "nongood". Literally believing that you can talk with the individual persons, make them argue against each other, make one murder another.

Which is convenient, because currently I am working on an article explaining how the popular "left brain, right brain" theory is complete bullshit from the scientific perspective. Which means, the Zizian model is bullshit, because it builds on the popular misconception. -- Without the glossary, if I succeed to write the article and it turned out to be convincing, fans of Ziz could simply say "but of course Ziz didn't mean it that way, stop strawmanning her". But now we have written evidence that yes, Ziz meant it literally that way, therefore all the supposed insights people gained from talking to t... (read more)

3dirk9mo

Ziz believes her entire hemisphere theory is an infohazard (IIRC she believes it was partially responsible for Pasek's death), so terms pertaining to it are separate from the rest of her glossary.

3Milan W9mo

Oh. That's nice of her.

3Viliam9mo

Not sure about the literal meaning of the gender of the hemispheres. But the idea that there are two fundamentally different people in your brain is a central thing in Zizianism -- that each "core" can be good or evil, and therefore there are double-good people (Ziz), single-good people (followers of Ziz), and evil people (most of the population). From my perspective, this entire thing is completely crazy. But if someone already takes it for true, then... I suppose adding the "different parts of your brain can have different gender" part does not increase the total implausibility significantly.

3Mateusz Bagiński9mo

Now that I think about it, this sounds very much like "every person is born with the original sin and need our technology sacraments to be saved from damnation".

[-]Viliam9mo120

My visual metaphor is the angel and the devil sitting on your shoulders, each whispering in one of your ears. Except, they live inside your respective brain hemispheres, because obviously literal angels and devils are unscientific, but left and right brain are the Science™.

That makes Ziz like Jesus, born without sin. Explained by having two angels, conveniently.

(Also, both the angels and the devils can be male or female, which provides a ~~theological~~ Rationalist foundation for explaining trans-sexuality. Makes it easier to recruit among trans-sexual rationalists. Know yourself, by listening to the only person who has the knowledge.)

5ChristianKl9mo

You said in the interview with Ken, that the Zizian.info explanation of unihermispheric sleep does not match the concepts as they are actually used. From the outside, it seems like the unihermispheric sleep model could make one find confidence that the two different personality that come out of the debucketing process actually resemble the two hemispheres. If the theory about unihermispheric sleep is unimportant, what makes Ziz believe that the debucketing process actually has anything to do with brain hemispheres?

2Viliam9mo

Also, what makes Ziz believe that there are always "two [cores] per organism" (source)?

3MinekPo19mo

hi ! as you can probably infer i don't use LW , but i wanted to reach out and this seemed to be the most reasonable place . sorry if i don't format or reason in the way expected here , i'm not a rationalist nor do i know the site culture . anyway , about a month ago , the fediverse instance eightpoint.app was nuked and defaced , as far as i can tell , by Laurelai Bailey (LB) , over claims of the admin referencing you (and abstractWeapon , not sure what the relationship between the two of you is) , claiming in a pastebin (that has since been deleted , but is available via the internet archive) that you're affiliated with "cult that’s confirmed to have two kills to its name and has actively shielded a cis man raping his way through the west coast trans community" . the tumblr links she(?) provided have a very lengthy essay about your alleged affiliation with the people Zizzians clashed with and tells the story of Linds confrontation with them from the Zizzians perspective , from what i can tell . the whole text is not written very clearly i'm not that sure . i got reminded of this this from Rebecca Watson's video on the Zizzians and i'm trusting her research , especially as the way she described her research doesn't sound especially pleasant , with those tumblr writeups appearing to reinforce that . honestly i'm still confused over what LB ment .

2Slimepriestess9mo

well uh....that pastebin seems exceptionally confused in addition to being written by notorious serial rapist and federal informant Lauralei Bailey? let's go through the claims here anyway though just for consistency * it seems to be implying that i'm "the leader of the cult" or something to that effect? which is an absolutely hilarious claim. * i have no idea who this "12" that is being referred to is. * the pastebin seems to be implying that i/"the cult" am protecting/allied with "a cis man raping his way through the west coast trans community" which i am guessing is an extremely confused reference to JD? also a hilarious claim for anyone who actually knows the situation. * The flowerbynoothername post linked where i confess to having worked with JD was written after i wrote my own callout of JD where i also declared myself a zizian before someone pulled me aside and was like 'it's not very anarchist to put that much weight in one person's perspective' which, fair enough. LB seems extremely confused about the situation overall and i would not consider her a reliable source of information, which also makes it extremely sus that she seems to have used this extremely confused understanding of the situation to justify defacing that fediverse instance.

0MinekPo19mo

12 aka freya (it/its pronouns) is the admin of 8P and has enjoyed your work from what i'm aware of , causing LB (who has also been on 8P in the past , though she hid her identity) to lash out for some reason . also RW's telling of the story paints the Zizzians as attacking Lind , whole that post instead only mentions Lind killing Emma . honestly considering that the daisy account is also gone now , i'm not sure there will be any resolution with 12 also saying its confused why LB is against you , except "her being just, well, a bitch" in its DMs to me . probably not gonna add more unless i can find LB's 8P 2 that she mentioned also 12 fangirling in my DMs about you lol .

1Slimepriestess9mo

tell 12 to DM me i am so curious what exactly all this is about.

3retryvarying9mo

It seems like "Zizian" isn't a title people this cluster like, since that implies things are more centralized around Ziz. It does seem like there's a social cluster here though. What's a name that you (or the group) would suggest? I appreciated your call to have people talk to you all instead of cutting off contact, and your willingness to talk! I agree with it in spirit. I also think someone might want zero stabbings or shootings happening nearby. Especially for physical communities where would you suggest drawing the line of who is not going to do any stabbing or shooting? Do you think there's going to be another death within this social graph? Do you think there's going to be another person killed by this social graph, even in self-defense? Prediction Prediction

7Raemon9mo

Presumably the "someone dies" means like, within a few years, and not because of x-risk or a major pandemic.

4Mateusz Bagiński9mo

I interpreted it as: not by "usual means", but rather something like suicide or murder.

1AnonymousAcquaintance9mo

Do you think the zizian philosophy, with its particular interpretation of TDT, will cause Teresa to reject a plea deal and go to trial? I'd love to see more details of the shootout come out, but that really only seems likely if there is a trial, and as far as I can tell Teresa is the only one alive to try. Or maybe also Jamie as the one who provided the guns used?

[-]niplav9mo*185

Here's a podcast with @Slimepriestess on the whole affair. I'm not particularly involved in any of this, and had some violent disagreements with things said in the podcast^[1], but found it informative on the whole. Listen with a critical ear.

E.g. that the right thing to do wrt to people in the Ziz-egregome is to talk to them—if there is a social scene near yours where people start dropping like flies then it's good & wise to say "I will leave and not interact with those people, leaving them alone." Put on your own mask first. (Also the claim that Ziz "did the math" with relation to making decisions using FDT-ish theories—which IIUC isn't possible because (1) FDT-ish theories aren't fully formalized yet and (2) the formalized parts are extremely computationally demanding to execute.) Plus a smattering of other things. ↩︎

[-]Eli Tyre9mo*7711

I think that Octavia is confused / mistaken about a number of points here, such that her testimony seems likely to be misleading to people without much context.

[I could find citations for many of my claims here, but I'm going to write and post this fast, mostly without the links, for the time being. I am largely going off of my memory of blog post comments that I read months to years ago, and my memory is fallible. I'll try to accurately represent my epistemic status inline. If anyone knows the links that I'm referring to, feel free to put them in the comments. Same if you think that I'm misremembering something.

To Octavia, if I've gotten any of the following wrong, I encourage you to correct it. I apologize for any rudeness. I'm speaking somewhat more bluntly here than I often would, because it seems more important than usual to help people get clear models of the situation, urgently.]

Octavia is not a Zizian in the relevant sense

Most importantly, I think she is mistaken about whether or not she is "a Zizian".

There are at least types of people that the term "Zizian" might refer to:

Someone who has read Sinceriously.fyi and is generally sympathetic to Ziz's philosophy.
A member of a r

... (read more)

[-]Nick_Tarleton9mo*3017

Also the claim that Ziz "did the math" with relation to making decisions using FDT-ish theories

IMO Eliezer correctly identifies a crucial thing Ziz got wrong about decision theory:

... the misinterpretation "No matter what, I must act as if everyone in the world will perfectly predict me, even though they won't." ...

also:

i think "actually most of your situations do not have that much subjunctive dependence" is pretty compelling personally

it's not so much that most of the espoused decision theory is fundamentally incorrect but rather that subjunctive dependence is an empirical claim about how the world works, can be tested empirically, and seems insufficiently justified to me

and:

however i think the obvious limitation of this kind of approach is that it has no model for ppl behaving incoherent ways except as a strategy for gaslighting ppl about how accountable you are for your actions. this is a real strategy ppl often do but is not the whole of it imo

this is implied by how, as soon as ppl are not oppressing you "strategically", the game theory around escalation breaks. by doing the Ziz approach, you wind up walking into bullets that were not meant for you, or maybe

... (read more)

7A_donor9mo

Oh... huh. @Eliezer Yudkowsky, I think I figured it out. In a certain class of altered state,[1] a person's awareness includes a wider part of their predictive world-model than usual. Rather than perceiving primarily the part of the self model which models themselves looking out into a world model, the normal gating mechanisms come apart and they perceive much more of their world-model directly (including being able to introspect on their brain's copy of other people more vividly). This world model includes other agents. Those models of other agents in their world model are now existing in an much less sandboxed environment. It viscerally feels like there is extremely strong entanglement between their actions and those of the agents that might be modelling them, because their model of the other agents is able to read their self-model and vice versa, and in that state they're kinda running it right on the bare-metal models themselves. Additionally, people's models of other people generally use themselves as a template. If they're thinking a lot about threats and blackmail and similar, it's easy for that to leak into expecting others are modelling this more than they are. So their systems strongly predict that there is way more subjunctive dependence than is real, due to how the brain handles those kind of emergencies.[2] Add in the thing where decision theory has counterintuitive suggestions and tries to operate kinda below the normal layer of decision process, plus people not being intuitively familiar with it, and yea, I can see why some people can get to weird places. Not reasonably predictable in advance, it's a weird pitfall, but in retrospect fits. Maybe it's a good idea to write an explainer for this to try and mitigate this way people seem to be able to implode. I might talk to some people. 1. ^ The schizophrenia/psychosis/psychedelics-like cluster, often caused by being in extreme psychological states like those caused by cults and extreme pe

3AprilSR9mo

I could imagine something vaguely sorta like this being true but that isn't like, something I'd confidently predict is a common sort of altered mental state to fall into, having been in altered states somewhere around that cluster. I'd suspect that like, maybe there's a component where they intuitively overestimate the dependence relative to other people, but probably it involves deliberate decisions to try to see things a certain way and stuff like that. (Though actually I have no idea what "strength of subjunctive dependence" really means, I think there are unsolved philosophical problems there.)

[-]Multicore9mo*103

The same interviewer has now done two more podcasts on Ziz.

With Adrusi:

With @jessicata:

Edit: Another one with toasterlighting/Celene Nightengale. This one is mostly about Audere, the alleged murderer of the landlord.

7Multicore9mo

Major claims in the podcast that go against the way many people have been describing the situation: * It's not a "cult" in the sense of demanding unquestioning obedience to an authority figure who enforces a dogma. (Though it fits other definitions of "cult" like "insular group with unusual beliefs".) It's a loose group of people who read each others' blogs and argued with each other on the same Discord servers. Ziz isn't in charge in any meaningful sense. * The group's extreme actions aren't primarily due to the esoteric beliefs that take 100 pages of jargon-filled blog posts to explain, but due to Taking Seriously things like radical veganism ("Everyone who isn't vegan is complicit in the horrors of factory farming, and therefore evil.") and left-anarchism ("The government's authority is illegitimate, landlords are parasites, vigilante justice is cool and good.")

[-]Nick_Tarleton9mo3014

Few people who take radical veganism and left-anarchism seriously either ever kill anyone, or are as weird as the Zizians, so that can't be the primary explanation. Unless you set a bar for 'take seriously' that almost only they pass, but then, it seems relevant that (a) their actions have been grossly imprudent and predictably ineffective by any normal standard + (b) the charitable^[1] explanations I've seen offered for why they'd do imprudent and ineffective things all involve their esoteric beliefs.

I do think 'they take [uncommon, but not esoteric, moral views like veganism and anarchism] seriously' shouldn't be underrated as a factor, and modeling them without putting weight on it is wrong.

^{^}
to their rationality, not necessarily their ethics

[-]Matrice Jacobine9mo313

Violence by radical vegans and left-anarchists has historically not been extremely rare. Nothing in Zizians' actions strike me as particularly different (in kind if not in competency) than, say, the Belle Époque illegalists like the Bonnot Gang, or the Years of Lead leftist groups like the Red Army Fraction or the Weather Underground.

[-]Friendly Monkey9mo*3010

due to Taking Seriously things like radical veganism

I take seriously radical animal-suffering-is-bad-ism^[1], but we would only save a small portion of animals by trading ourselves off 1-for-1 against animal eaters, and just convincing one of them to go vegan would prevent at least as many torturous animal lives in expectation, while being legal. I think there must be additional causes, like the weird decision theory people have mentioned, although I think even that is insufficiently explanatory, as I explain near the end.

That said, taking animal suffering seriously does change the moral status of killing an average knowing animal-eater to something which is deontologically understandable, even if it's still strategically very bad.

So while I don't endorse the actions, I mostly feel empathy for Ophelia and the others and hope that they'll be okay. Maybe it's like how I'd feel empathy for an altruist who couldn't handle living in this world and committed suicide, cause that's also strategically bad and reckless.. but very understandable to me, as one who knows how alienating it can be.

I haven't seen others on LW with this sentiment, maybe they've felt afraid to express it (as I do). I... (read more)

3Richard_Kennaway9mo

That is a justification for not personally being Ziz. But obviously it would have cut no ice with Ziz. And why should it? An individual must choose whether to pursue peaceful or violent action, because if you are Taking the Ideas Seriously then either one will demand your whole life, and you can’t do everything. A movement, on the other hand, can divide its efforts, fighting on all fronts while maintaining a more or less plausible deniability of any connection between them. This is a common strategy. For example, Sinn Fein and the IRA, respectively the legal and illegal wings of one side of the conflict over Northern Ireland. It doesn’t even have to be explicitly organised. Some will take the right-hand path and some the left anyway. And so here we are.

7Friendly Monkey9mo

But this isn't me arbitrarily choosing peacefulness, I'm saying that killing ~random people is ineffective, this argument should go through for anyone who cares about effectiveness. I can see a version of your argument that's limited to when peaceful actions are over-saturated enough that additional units of effort would be most effective when put into violent actions. I wouldn't be surprised to see historical examples of this across movements. (Obviously this claim wouldn't be particular to animal suffering reduction)

1Richard_Kennaway9mo

Synergy is a thing. Multiple ways of opposing the enemy, deployed together, not sequentially: peaceful and violent, legal and illegal, public and covert, good cop and bad cop, club and open hand, talk peace and carry a big stick.

3localdeity9mo

@Friendly Monkey , I'm replying to your reaction: There are people who require multiple methods of persuasion before they act in the way you want. One category is decisionmakers for an organization, who have actually been persuaded by intimidation, but they can't just say that, because they would look weak and possibly as though they're defecting against the organization or its aims, so they need to sell it as some high-minded decision they've come to of their own accord. Or it could be the reverse: decisionmakers who are persuaded by your ideological arguments, but are funded / otherwise kept in charge by those who don't care or have contempt for the ideology, so they need to sell it to their funders (presumably in private) as, "Hey, look, let's be realistic here, if we do this then they'll do that and we absolutely can't afford that. But if we do this other thing, that won't happen, and would it really be so bad? And we'll tell the public that recent events have made us realize how important [...]". In both cases, it's essential for you to have someone doing the intimidation and someone publicizing the high-minded arguments, and usually it works best if these are different people. (For example, if an intellectual who is respected by the mainstream (but only agreed with by a minority) starts making threats, that seems likely to lose them mainstream acceptance—such an ugly thing to be involved with, carrying out the threats even more so—and thus, for that reason among others, making the threats credible is more difficult than it would be for a thug who has nothing to lose.) So, for those decisionmakers, if you have intimidation but not a public-friendly face (a book-publishing intellectual, an organization doing charity events, etc.), you get nothing, and if you have the friendly face but not intimidation, you also get nothing, but if you have both, then you win their support. It's not a matter of "intimidation and friendliness each independently get dimini

4dr_s9mo

Which other people have described the situation otherwise and where? Genuine question, I'm pretty much learning about all of this here.

4Raemon9mo

Not that I have particularly clear evidence about the inner workings of the sphere here, but, what's your reasoning for thinking:

4Multicore9mo

To be clear these are just patterns of claims made by Slimepriestess in the linked podcast, and I have no corroborating evidence. But for example at 2:06:00 in the video she says: With other variations of the same claims elsewhere in the video.

[-]lc9mo*288

I know you're not endorsing the quoted claim, but just to make this extra explicit: running terrorist organizations is illegal, so this is the type of thing you would also say if Ziz was leading a terrorist organization, and you didn't want to see her arrested.

6Raemon9mo

Oh, I maybe flipped the sign on what you meant to be saying.

5Multicore9mo

Oh, I see, one could reasonably misinterpret the bullet points in my original comment as being about "the way many people have been describing the situation" rather than "major claims in the podcast". Sorry for the ambiguity.

[-]ChirpingSubagent9mo180

There are a lot of journalists and documentarians who are inquiring about this, wanting to write articles and make documentaries.

What are people's heuristics for how to speak well with journalists and to choose whether and which journalists to talk with? Here are two that I've heard:

Small-town journalists tend to be much less politicized than those who write for a national outlet.
It's good to always be "off the record" when speaking, and then say you're happy to provide written quotes on-the-record via email afterward. This means you can (a) be deliberate in your wording, and (b) have proof if they misquote you!

[-]Cellar__Door9mo2515

I'd be careful about talking to journalists at all, and default to not doing it. People writing about these murders have an incentive to make the Bay Area rationalist community sound bizarre, depraved, or salacious, and I'm sure some of them won't hesitate. Like the cops, journalists know how to make you feel like they're your best opportunity to get justice, and some will use that to get you to let down your guard. "Off the record" is not a legally binding agreement, and even if they don't attribute your quote, they can still twist it to make it sound like someone told them something sinister. It's tempting to try to set the record straight! But unless you're skilled in managing the media or have a reason to trust the specific person you're talking to (and a way to verify their identity), I'd steer clear.

In the corporate / government world, the standard is to have one informed, skilled person whose job it is to interface with media, and everyone else's job is to direct the media to that person. Is there someone in the community who wants to take that role?

8ChristianKl9mo

Before talking to a journalist, read articles by the journalist to get an idea about the kind of narrative they are likely to write.

0frontier649mo

The majority of journalists are in the top 5% most evil people in the whole world. If you care about getting the truth out about something do not talk to journalists at all unless: 1) it's being recorded by both you and them; and 2) you have the ability to get your recording in front of the public. Most journalists will literally just lie about what you say to them to the public in order to make their story. I am in a position where journalists often try to ask for comments and my policy is never talk to them. The few times I have made the mistake of giving them a couple comments they have literally lied about what I said to them in their subsequent article. I guess if the story you're trying to tell is interesting and aligns with the journalist's worldview there's a chance they won't deliberately misquote you. But if its something important then you shouldn't run that risk.

8Viliam9mo

Despite my negative experience (gave an interview twice, was deliberately misquoted both times), I think there are some ways to mitigate the risk: Check the articles the journalist wrote before. Do they include some careful thinking and nuance; do they present arguments both for and against, such as Scott Alexander's blogs? That it's probably okay. Do they express the mainstream view, or do they align perfectly with the views of the owner of the news? That means your words will be twisted until they fit the narrative (or twisted to sound idiotic, if that is not possible). Is it something like clickbait about science? Expect your words to be twisted for maximum clickbait. Is the communication like "you say something, and then it's up to the journalist how he reports that"? That is the most dangerous way. Sometimes you can make a deal that you need to approve the written version before it gets published. Many journalists will refuse, using a convenient excuse (an internal policy, the need to meet a deadline). Is the communication like "you talk in front of a camera, then the debate is published online"? Watch the previous videos. Are the interviewees talking for minutes, or are individual sentences cut out of their speeches? The latter seems dangerous. The former... there is still a risk of the journalist trying to put things in your mouth (see "so what you're saying is" Jordan Peterson meme), but you can see whether they were aggressive this way in their previous interviews, and to a certain degree you can defend yourself if that happens. You could make a deal that you will record and publish your own version of the debate. I think that most journalists are bad, but there are ways to filter them out. (I hesitate to write this, but I think that Joe Rogan has some qualities of a good journalist. I disapprove of his choice of interviewees, and that he often just gives a platform to horrible people without even slightly pushing back against them. But he is not guilt

1frontier649mo

Did you ever have a positive experience where the interviewer didn't misquote you?

2Viliam9mo

In one of those two cases, the entire "quote" was one sentence, completely made up (and crazy). The other case was a mixed bag, where most statements were quoted correctly (not literally, but in a way that didn't change their meaning, and I am perfectly okay with that), but there was one specific thing where the journalist clearly wanted me to say something, tried various ways of "but wouldn't it be possible that..." and "you can't be 100% sure that it isn't the case that...", and after I stubbornly resisted, she just made up a quote that agreed with her, and that I would obviously never have said. But outside of that one thing, the rest of the interview was okay. I also know two journalists who make interviews in a style "let's talk for half an hour in front of a camera, then publish it online with minimum editing". One of them started doing it on YouTube, later he got employed in a mainstream newspaper. The other already started as a journalist, first doing paper interviews, later also video interviews. (Both of them non-English.) These two I would trust in a video interview, and probably also in a paper interview. But I've never interacted with either of them.

1frontier649mo

I think we tend to agree on the method to safely talk to a journalist. At least, the method that I see you write about is virtually the same as the method I suggested in my comment. What I want to emphasize though is that for most ordinary people whom journalists will try to talk to, the format will mostly be just talking to the journalist and letting them write an article later. Most journalists will not do the whole long form interview that recorded and video taped with people who aren’t already famous. So for your average person who doesn’t already know the depths of journalist depravity, it’s much better to just have a blanket “don’t talk to journalists” rule.

[-]ChirpingSubagent9mo175

Let's list some mysteries in this case! Here are 3 of mine.

Why did 2 killings happen within the span of one week?
How did so many people get radicalized i.e. going from being essentially nerds to people seemingly willing to commit pre-meditated murder?
What happened with Zajko and LaSota between Zajko writing about LaSota threatening to murder Zajko, and then Zajko's parent’s killings (which she is a suspect for)?

[-]lc9mo*120

Why did 2 killings happen within the span of one week?

According to law enforcement the two people involved in the shootout received weapons and munitions from Jamie Zajko, and one of them also applied for a marriage certificate with the person who killed Curtis Lind. Additionally I think it's also safe to say from all of their preparations that they were preparing to commit violent acts.

So my best guess is that:

Teresa Youngblut and/or Felix Bauckholt were co-conspirators with the other people committing violent crimes
They were preparing to commit further violent crimes
They were worried that they might be arrested
They made an agreement with each other to shoot it out with law enforcement in the event someone tried to arrest them
If the press/law enforcement isn't lying, they were stopped on the road by a border patrol officer that was checking up on a visa, they thought were about to be taken in for something more serious, and *Teresa pulled a gun

The border patrol officer seems like a hero. Whether he meant it or not, he died to save the lives of several other people.

8AnonymousAcquaintance9mo

I believe it was Teresa Youngblut, not Ophelia (Felix) , who first pulled a gun and opened fire. Only after the shooting between Teresa and the border patrol started did Ophelia (Felix) pull a gun.

2Tonal Spring9mo

Who is the other person who was living with Ophelia & Milo in North Carolina?

[-]AprilSR9mo15-6

I think it is worth knowing that—I haven't heard of any examples of people who have been radicalizing in a Zizianish direction, lately, who are unaccounted for. I and people I know thought about it when we heard about the border patrol shootout, and the only person we came up with was Audere / Maximilian Snyder, who is now under arrest for the murder of Curtis Lind.

Seeing the one person you and your partner have been kind of worried about for a while... end up being the one who did a murder... it's, well, a hell of an observation to have to update on. Apparently a ball was dropped.

I haven't made a particular point of going around thoroughly asking everyone who might plausibly know someone, but—all three of the people who recently got in conflicts were known by someone or another I've spoken with, to at least plausibly be at risk. So I think there's some chance that we mostly do collectively have eyes on the "new people becoming Zizian" part.

Of course, maybe it becoming a national news story entirely changes the dynamics there, I don't know what the situation will look like in a year. But—despite there having been three new people here that haven't been discussed in any previous community alerts on Zizians, which maybe most people around hadn't heard of at all, I don't currently worry much that there's some substantial number of unknown Zizians out there or something.

8lc9mo

So, to be clear, everyone you can think of has been mentioned in previous articles or alerts about Zizians so far? Because I have only been on the periphery of rationalist events for the last several years, but in 2023 I can remember sending this[1] post about rationalist crazies into the San Antonio LW groupchat. A trans woman named Chase Carter, who doesn't generally attend our meetups, began to argue with me that Ziz (who gets mentioned in the article as an example) was subject to a "disinformation campaign" by rationalists, her goals were actually extremely admirable, and her worst failure was a strategic one in not realizing how few people were like her in the world. At the next meetup we agreed to talk about it further, and she attended (I think for the first time) to explain a very sympathetic background of Ziz's history and ideas. This was after the alert post but years before any of the recent events. I have no idea if Chase actually self-identifies as a "Zizian" or is at all dangerous and haven't spoken to her in a year and a half. I just mention her as an example; I haven't heard her name brought up anywhere and I really wouldn't expect to know any of these people to begin with on priors. 1. ^ Misremembered that I sent the alert post into the chat, but actually it was the Habryka post about rationalist crazies.

[-]Chase Carter9mo103

Hi Dean (?)! If you have any pressing questions in this vein (or heck, any other vein for that matter) re: me, you've always been welcome to ask me in a DM or in the group chat you mentioned. Which I am still in. I'd be down to schedule a zoom call even. I'm an open book. Thanks for your concern (I think?).

[-]ToasterLightning9mo*102

....I know someone named Chase Novinha? I don't think it's the same person, though.

Edit: Confirmed same person, slimepriestess has said they are "safe and accounted for," and are one of the cofounders of its alignment company.

5AprilSR9mo

Yeah, I haven't heard of this person, though it's possible someone I know knows them—that definitely sounds like the kind of person someone should be trying to check in on to me. I think there are a lot of people out there who will be willing to tell the Ziz sympathetic side of the story. (I mean, I would if asked, though "X did little wrong" seems pretty insane for most people involved and especially for Ziz). Like, I think there's a certain sort of left anarchismish person who is just, going to be very inclined to take the broke crazy trans women's side as much as it's possible to do so. It doesn't seem possible or even necessarily desirable to track every person with a take like that... whereas with people very very into Zizianism, it seems like important information. I don't know exactly what update should be drawn from the fact that people I know were collectively 3 for 3 on having known the people who showed up in recent incidents, information on the topic hasn't generally been shared freely enough for me to have a whole picture. Edit: To be thorough about the "everyone I can think of" part, there is this tweet I saw, and you could argue @Slimepriestess hasn't technically been mentioned in articles or alerts. I don't really believe either of these people to be dangerous (more confident on Slimepriestess I don't know much about that Twitter user) but they have explicitly described themselves as Zizian even after recent events, so. I'll also explicitly specify that I'm not really inclined to like, list every person I know who is half-fluent in hemisphere nonsense or who has read Sinceriously, there are rather a lot of people who've done those things. It's stuff like, under what situations does this person endorse violence, do they do ideological purity tests for who they'll be friends with, do they explicitly call themselves a Zizian, and especially whether they've started being more reclusive lately.

5Matrice Jacobine9mo

I think that describes quite a few people in Rationalist Tumblr, and you could find them reblogging the accounts of the mainliner-Zizian conflict by Somni or pseudonymous pro-Zizian accounts like @aflowerbynoothername and @donttrythisathome (which I don't think have ever been identified, and I suspect based on style those may be maintained by Ziz and Gwen while in hiding) (There is also a specific blogger I won't name out of respect (but who anyone in Rationalist Tumblr will be familiar with) that was a friend of many of the Zizians, including Emma and Ophelia, and was/is heavily involved in their legal defense after the violent clash with Curtis Lind.) I would, however, caution against overcorrecting: some of the more recent Zizian recruits, like Silver and Ivory (formerly a Rationalist Tumblr mainstay) and Ophelia, both ultimately implicated in violence, seem to have started out as telling the Ziz-sympathetic side of the story without initially approving her ideology. So there is still a slippery slope to watch for, but I don't think it's a good idea to do it publicly.

4AnonymousAcquaintance9mo

It might be useful to have somewhere a chart of legal names and chosen names so that those of us not on rationalist twitter can keep track. Ivory is the Max who has been charged with Mr. Lind's murder?

3Matrice Jacobine9mo

Check the Detailed timeline of events linked in the OP.

[-]Friendly Monkey9mo143

If we are going to be destroyed by Zizianism

I don't understand why rationalism would be destroyed by Zizianism. The murders have not been against rationalists. Do you mean, "If rationalism's reputation is damaged as a result of association"?

[-]khafra9mo110

The quoted paragraph is a reference to a CS Lewis essay about living under the threat of global thermonuclear war. The euphony and symmetry with the original quote is damaged by making it slightly more accurate by using that phrase instead of "if we are going to be destroyed by Zizianism."

6AnonymousAcquaintance9mo

I believe the fear is something more like rationalists converting to Zizianism, and thereby becoming murderers, as happened to Ophelia (Felix) among others. At least that is my primary fear.

5utility-sloth9mo

Yet. (I assumed this possibility & understandable fear is what Ben had in mind.)

9Matrice Jacobine9mo

As documented in the 2023 Medium article, Ziz has threatened to murder rationalists for a while, and I'm aware prominent rationalists have been paranoid about possible attempts on their life by Zizians for the past few years. Aella has also recently stated on Twitter she wouldn't accept an interview on the subject without an upgraded security system on her house.

8Friendly Monkey9mo

I see. Well, in case one of them reads this: to the extent it might matter to you, as a fellow radical vegan I request you not kill anyone trying to figure out how to make the first takeover-capable AI be benevolent. (I'm aware that humans are such that it's not obvious that designer-chosen-alignment → benevolence, and that one does actually have to reason about that instead of just assuming the hopeful option, but after having reasoned about it, I think most would choose benevolence in the end.[1] At least, I do not expect important exceptions to be alignment researchers, as opposed to selected-for power-seekers in high positions.) 1. ^ It seems to me that actually reflectively endorsing evil (objectively describing what's happening and then being like "this is good", instead of euphemizing and coping with arguments that often secretly amount to "if you're right then the world would be really bad, and that's scary" like "but nature has it") is rare, and most people are actually altruistic on some level but conformism overrides that and animal abuse is so normal that they usually don't notice it, but then when they see basic information like "cows have best friends and get stressed when they are separated" they seemingly get empathetic and reflective (check the comments).

3Viliam9mo

Thank you for your kind words, but I wouldn't bet on Ziz actually listening to them.

3Mateusz Bagiński9mo

@Ben Pace care to elaborate?

[-]Viliam9mo6-7

I wrote a shortform about Zizians, before I noticed this thread.

Short version is: could the rationalist community have handled these things better (even if we magically knew a decade ago that something like this would happen, but we wouldn't know the specific names)? Is there a lesson to learn, or is it just bad luck that sometimes if you have a workshop, a future serial killer will participate?

It seems that we are not responsible for Ziz existing, or coming to our workshop, or coming up with a crazy theory that allowed them to create a murderous cult.

But ... (read more)

[-]TsviBT9mo118

There's a lot more complexity, obviously, but one thing that sticks out to me is this paragraph, from https://sinceriously.blog-mirror.com/net-negative/ :

I described how I felt like I was the only one with my values in a world of flesh eating monsters, how it was horrifying seeing the amoral bullet biting consistency of the rationality community, where people said it was okay to eat human babies as long as they weren’t someone else’s property if I compared animals to babies. How I was constantly afraid that their values would leak into me and my resolve would weaken and no one would be judging futures according to sentient beings in general. How it was scary Eliezer Yudkowsky seemed to use “sentient” to mean “sapient”. How I was constantly afraid if I let my brain categorize them as my “in-group” then I’d lose my values.

This is one among several top hypothesis-parts for something at the core of how Ziz, and by influence other Zizians, gets so far gone from normal structures of relating. It is indeed true that normal people (I mean, including the vast majority of rationalists) live deep in an ocean of {algorithm, stance, world, god}-sharing with people around them. And it's true... (read more)

2Viliam9mo

There is a 4D chess explanation for everything. But to me it seems like rationalization. I strongly suspect that if we tried to write down all this Insanity-Wolf ethics, it would turn out that Ziz actually did not follow it consistently, only when convenient. (Just like e.g. the Christians who insist that you have to follow the Bible no matter what... until they get to the chapter where it tells you to sell all your property and donate the money to the poor... at which point they switch to following the common sense instead.) For example, if paying a blackmailer is an unforgivable crime, how come they paid the 10k bail to get Ziz out of jail? And if betraying trust is so bad, how come they didn't want to pay the rent (but also didn't leave)? Also, the entire theory about Ziz being double-good and all her followers single-good, is so blatantly self-serving, that you probably need to have half of your brain sleeping in order to miss that. By the way, is there an explanation somewhere what actually happened? (Not just what Ziz believed.)

8TsviBT9mo

Just FYI none of what you said responds to anything I said, AFAICT. Are you just arguing "Ziz is bad"? My comment is about what causes people to end up the way Ziz ended up, which is relevant to your question "Is there a lesson to learn?". Somewhere on this timeline I think https://x.com/jessi_cata/with_replies

4Viliam9mo

Thanks for the link! So it's about that "miricult" website. Now I feel like rationality itself is an infohazard. I mean, rationality itself won't hurt you if you are sufficiently sane, but if you start talking about it, insufficiently sane people will listen, too. And that will have horrible consequences. (And when I try to find a way to navigate around this, such as talking openly only to certifiably sane people, that seems like the totally cultish thing to do.)

5Matrice Jacobine9mo

@PhilGoetz's Reason as memetic immune disorder seems relevant here. It has been noted many times that engineers are disproportionately involved in terrorism, in ways that the mere usefulness of their engineering skills can't explain.

8Viliam9mo

Teaching rationality the shallow way -- nope; knowing about biases can hurt people Teaching rationality the deep way -- nope; reason as a memetic immune disorder :( Perhaps there should be some "pre-rationality" lessons. Something stabilizing you need to learn first, so that learning about rationality does not make you crazy. There are some materials that already seem to point in that direction: adding up to normality, ethical injunctions. Perhaps the CFAR workshops should start with focusing on these things, in a serious way (like, spend at least one day only debating this, check that the participants understood the lesson, and maybe kick out those who didn't?). Because, although some people get damaged by learning about rationality, it seems to me that many people don't (some of them only because they don't change in any significant way, but some of them internalize the lessons in a good way). If we could predict who would end up which way, that could allow us to reduce the damage, while still delivering the value. Of course this only applies to the workshops; online communication is a different questions. But seems to me that the bad things mostly happen offline.

3ProgramCrafter9mo

There is an alternative way, the other extreme: get more and more rationalists. If the formed communities do not share the moral inclinations of LW community, those might form some new coordination structures[1]; if we don't draw from the circles of desperate, those structures will tend to benefit others as well (and, on the other hand, having a big proportion of very unsatisfied people would naturally start a gang or overthrow whatever institutions are around). (It's probably worth exploring in a separate post?) 1. ^ I claim non-orthogonality between goals and means in this case. For some community with altruistic people, its structures require learning a fair bit about people's values. For a group which wants tech companies to focus on consumers' quality-of-life more than currently, not so.

5Viliam9mo

From my experience, the rationality community in Vienna does not share any of the craziness in Bay Area that I read about, so yeah, it seems plausible that different communities will end up significantly different. I think there is a strong founder effect... the new members will choose whether they join or not depending on how comfortable they feel among the existing members. Decisions like "we have these rules / we don't have any rules", "there are people responsible for organization and safety / everyone needs to take care of themselves" once established, easily become "the way this is done here". But you are also limited by the pool you are recruiting the potential new members from. Could be, there are simply not enough people to make a local rationality community. Could be, the local memes are so strong (e.g. positive attitude towards drug use, or wokeness) that in practice you cannot push against them without actively rejecting most of wannabe members, which would be a weird dynamic. (You already need to push strongly against people who simply do not get what rationality means, but are trying to join anyway.)

9Eli Tyre9mo

These don't seem like very relevant or very actionable takeways. 1. we didn't stand firmly against drugs - Maybe this would have been a good move generally, but it wouldn't have helped with this situation at all. Ziz reports that they don't take psychedelics, and I believe that extends to her compatriots, as well. 2. didn't pay more attention to the dangers of self-experimenting - What does this mean concretely? I think plenty of people did "pay attention" to the dangers of self experimenting. But "paying attention" doesn't automatically address those dangers. What specific actions would you recommend by which people? Eliezer telling people not to self experiment? CFAR telling people not to self experiment? A blanket ban on "self experimentation" is clearly too broad ("just don't ever try anything that seems like maybe a good idea to you on first principles"). Some more specific guidelines might have helped, but we need to actually delineate the specific principles. 3. didn't kick out Ziz sooner - When specifically is the point when Ziz should have been kicked out of the community? With the benefit of hindsight bias, we can look back and wish we had separated sooner, but that was not nearly as clear ex ante. What should have been the trigger? When she started wearing black robes? When she started calling herself Ziz? When she started writing up her own homegrown theories of psychology? Weird clothes, weird names, and weird beliefs are part and parcel of the rationalist milieu. As it is, she was banned from the alumni reunion at which she staged the failed protest (she bought tickets in advance, CFAR told her that she was uninvited, and returned her money). Before that, I think that several community leaders had grey-listed her as someone not to invite to events. Should something else have happened, in addition to that? Should she have been banned from public events or private group houses entirely? On what basis? On who's authority?

9habryka9mo

FWIW, I think I had triggers around them being weird/sketchy that would now cause me to exclude them from many community things, so I do think there were concrete triggers, and I did update on that.

4Said Achmiz9mo

From https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/ziz-lasota-zizians-rationalism-20063671.php:

2Viliam9mo

I wasn't there, so who knows how I would have reacted, it probably looks different in hindsight, but it seems like there were already red flags, some people noticed them, and others ignored them: -- ‘Zizian’ namesake who faked death in 2022 is wanted in two states

4Slimepriestess9mo

Ziz is actually straight edge, she was super paranoid about drugs messing with her or leaving her in a less functional state. Also like, imo? kicking Ziz out sooner wouldn't have helped, if anything it would have exacerbated the issue and possibly just brought things to a head faster. you can't just inflict severe trauma on someone and wash your hands of them, eventually that will come back to bite you.

[-]Viliam9mo1411

Ziz is actually straight edge

Thank you for the info.

you can't just inflict severe trauma on someone and wash your hands of them, eventually that will come back to bite you.

Could you please clarify what do you mean in this context by "inflicting severe trauma"? Like, learning about timeless decision theory? (At the CFAR workshop, or would reading the Sequences online already qualify as inflicting trauma?)

If CFAR workshops were inflicting trauma on Ziz, then... more workshops mean more trauma? (Or don't they? How should CFAR predict which workshops will have a traumatizing effect and which ones will be okay? Especially for a person that seems unusual, because hundreds of others have participated at the workshops without being traumatized by them.) So it's like "if you inflict trauma on someone, you can't just stop inflicting more trauma on them"?

it would have exacerbated the issue and possibly just brought things to a head faster

This seems to match patterns like "you can't just break up with an abusive boyfriend, because that would escalate the situation and he might seriously hurt you". Like, maybe yes, but what is the proposed alternative, because obviously "doing more of the same"... (read more)

2Mateusz Bagiński9mo

Here's a way to find out. (Perhaps unrealistic/intractable (IDK) but it is a way to find out.) 1. Research the number of malefactors of Ziz type/magnitude per 1,000 active members, across various communities/movements. 2. Identify positive outliers: communities that have very below average malefactor-to-active-member ratio. 3. Identify what accounts for this. 4. If this is anything that can be replicated, replicate.

[-]ChristianKl9mo5-1

When it comes to Ziz, the articles that discuss her seem to leave out her interpretation of decision theory from explaining actions.

Ziz seem to engage in some reasoning based on her understanding of timeless decision theory that suggests cooperating with police is bad to the extent that she closed her eyes and didn't respond and let the police carry her out of her flat instead of just going along with the police.

Starting a shoot-out with the police when the police tries to arrest you is likely similar, if trying to arrest you means getting shot game ... (read more)

4Mateusz Bagiński9mo

Can you share some examples of things Pasek did for TDT-ish reasons that most people either wouldn't do at all or at least wouldn't do them for TDT-ish reasons. (I'm aware that this might be private stuff that you wouldn't like to share to any degree greater than what you've said already.)

7ChristianKl9mo

Pasek did couchsurf at my place in the days after a LessWrong Community Weekend in Berlin. That was before he went to the Bay Area, so probably 8 or 9 years ago and before he seemed to make contact with Ziz which was after Pazek left the Bay Area and moved to live with other rationalists in a group house in Gran Canaria. Pazek's contact with Ziz seemed to be mostly online while living in Gran Canaria. If you read Pasek's post where he thinks about committing suicide, there's plenty of TDT-thinking in it. I matched my idea of how Pasek thinks even before engaging with Ziz. Pasek was TDT-ish vegan. Pasek had some QS tracking for how he spent every waking hour of the day that he did on paper and seemed to not suffer from akrasia while guiding his actions. If I remember right, that he said that stealing is okay in cases where the TDT calculation would be in favor of stealing where traditional morality would say stealing is bad. I don't think that resulted in Pasek actually stealing things but I think we talked about some case where he thought it was justified to steal which surprised me at the time. My memory is here very fussy.

-3Matrice Jacobine9mo

You are referring to Pasek with male pronouns despite the consensus of all sources provided in OP. Considering you claim to have known Pasek, I would like you to confirm that you're doing so because you have first-hand information not known to any of the writers of the sources in OP, and I'm just getting the impression otherwise because your last posts on the forum were about how doing genetics studies in medicine is "DEI".

[-]ChristianKl9mo*133

In the time, I was interacting with Pasek, he was male. In the interaction with Ziz (as far as I can assess from data Ziz published), they adopted Ziz's idea of being bigender with one hemisphere being male and the other female.

The Chris Pasek, I meet was very much into TDT. Maia, the female personality that developed in the interaction with Ziz, cared more about feeling good. As far as I understand, the post laying out the case for committing suicide was not written by the female personality but the male one.

I know that I can create a male or female tupla via hypnosis in someone who's open to accepting that mental change work regardless of the gender they had before. I can see the path of how someone might make that created tulpa the new main actor in the person.

When looking at multiple of the Zizians who commit violence, people who knew them before say that the person who committed the violence is very different from the person they knew beforehand.

I don't have a good reason to believe that the personality that's created through the Zizian techniques is more legitimate than the older personality and thus is more deserving of the overall identity of the per... (read more)

-1localdeity9mo

I asked Claude a few questions. I'll just give snippets of the answers: 1. Are there scenarios where doctors recommend different doses of a medication, or other variations in a medical plan, based on a patient's race? 1. Yes. "For instance, some Asian populations metabolize certain antidepressants and antipsychotics differently, requiring adjusted dosages"; "African American patients often respond differently to certain blood pressure medications. Guidelines recommend specific first-line treatments like calcium channel blockers for this population." 2. In these scenarios, have people found out the relevant genes that make the difference? 1. Yes in some cases. "CYP2D6 gene: Affects metabolism of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and pain medications. Variations are more common in certain ethnic groups"; "HLA-B*1502 gene: Associated with severe skin reactions to carbamazepine in Asian populations, particularly those of Han Chinese descent." 3. Are there cases where doctors adjust the treatment plan by race but don't yet know which genes are relevant? 1. Yes. "Kidney Disease: African Americans show different progression and treatment responses compared to other racial groups, with ongoing research to identify genetic factors"; "Differences in heart disease risk and medication response across racial groups are recognized, with some genetic pathways identified but not fully mapped." So. If you do know what genes make the difference, then of course that's the best type of information to work with. But, particularly for polygenic effects, it may be that you have information about the relevance of race without knowing the genes in question. In that scenario, either you use the race information or you use nothing, and the former seems the better choice (though, yes, to the extent that "self-identification" means that someone would say "I'm X" instead of "I'm half-X and half-Y", that makes the information lower-quality).

6ChristianKl9mo

For background, I'm coming from Germany, where our liberals protest when they ask asylum seekers for their ethnic identity to find out whether they are discriminated in their homeland for their ethnic identity, because we believe treating people different based on ethnic identity is wrong. Obese people show different effects to all sorts of clinical interventions compared to people that are underweight. Yet, the FDA makes no attempt to have a representative sample of obese people and underweight people in their clinical trials. When Big Pharma companies recruit patients for clinical trials, they don't try to a representative population when it comes to weight. In many cases they have a hypothesis that their drug will be more effective if the trial population is based to have less preconditions and then they recruit a clinical trial population that's biased by design. Clinical trials have trial populations that are sized to find clinically significant effects in the total trial population. If you have a clinical trial that sized to find an effect in the general population but only have that effect on Native Americans or on Black people, you are unlikely to find a statistical significant effect if you have Native Americans and Black people at their normal representation of the population. The way doses for antidepressants and antipsychotics are chosen in clinical practice is often that you start with the lowest dose and change the dose for a single patient till the dose is good for the patient. It's also worth noting that genetic differences between different populations in Africa itself are higher than genetic differences between Whites and Asians. When people like Elizabeth Warren identify as Native Americans even when they are genetically mostly White, it's not very safe that you have a good idea of someone genetics from their racial self-identification. There's a reason why self-studies don't ask whether someone is gay but asks for whether they belong to t

2Viliam9mo

Pasek was a trans woman, Christian mentions in another comment having been in contact with Pasek 8 or 9 years ago, so... could it be the pronouns Pasek actually used back then?

[-]temp account9mo55

I barely know what a rationalist is and my introduction to effective altruism was SBF. And now I'm reading about a modern day Manson family. Can't forget about Annie Altman.

As an outsider looking in, it's not looking good.

4Viliam9mo

I agree that it's not looking good, if all you know is SBF and Zizians. But as far as I know, Annie Altman is not related to either rationalism or effective altruism.

5Mateusz Bagiński9mo

She's not but to the extent that people put the AI labs in one bucket with LW/EA (TESCREAL or sth), the Annie Altman incident may cause us additional reputational damage.

7Viliam9mo

Ha, that's a good reminder that other perspectives exist. Inside the bubble, it feels like a fact that the technology advances, LLMs exist, etc. Agreeing on these things doesn't make me feel like a part of some group anymore than believing that 2+2=4 does. But the general public seems to be in deep denial. (Except for artists sometimes complaining that the computers are stealing their jobs, and teachers complaining that kids feed all their homework to LLMs.) So from the outside perspective, anyone not in denial seems like a part of a very specific small group. That's basically the idea behind "TESCREAL" (if we ignore the EA part) that all people who believe that one day we might have intelligent robots and fly to the stars and stuff like that must be a part of some sinister conspiracy. Otherwise, why would they have such suspiciously similar beliefs? While from my perspective, it's like, if you have read sci-fi as a child, none of this sounds surprising. I kinda took it for granted that one day we will have intelligent robots, the only question is the timing, whether it will be 2000 or 2100 or maybe 3000. And the only new thing is that now it seems that 2030 is the answer. Funny thing is that a short time ago, David Gerard was busy deleting from Wikipedia any mentions of EA being connected to Less Wrong, and now it is popular to go to the opposite extreme and assume that everything is connected (as long as it uses computers, or decision theory, or some other weird stuff).

2Mateusz Bagiński9mo

Are you saying hat (most) sci-fi authors who take the futures they write about seriously (i.e. "we totally might/will see that kind of stuff in decades/centuries") are TESCREAL-ists (either in Torres & Gebru sense or in popular imagination)? My impression is that TESCREAL was more meant to point at some kind of ... industrial & philantropic complex?

[-]Matrice Jacobine9mo113

People who use the term TESCREAL generally don't realize that science fiction authors often take the futures they write about seriously (if not literally). They will talk about "TESCREALists taking sci-fi books too seriously" without knowing Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer whose "AI tasked to solve the Riemann hypothesis" thought experiment is effectively the origin of the paperclip-minimizer thought experiment, was the technical consultant for 2001: A Space Odyssey and was considered by Isaac Asimov to be one of the two smartest people he ever met (alongside cosmist Carl Sagan).

8Viliam9mo

To me this seems like a motte-and-bailey situation, where the motte is making true statements about various connections, and the bailey is making a conspiracy theory out of it. A similar situation in politics is e.g. pointing out that something is "connected to Soros". Sure, millions of things are: Soros is a billionaire who gives tons of money to lots of organizations and charities; many of them distribute the money further... Like, maybe there is a playground near your house, which was built using money from some city fund, which at some moment has received money from some other fund, which has received money from Soros. So I could make a technically true point that the playground next to your house was built using money from Soros. OK, what does that imply? Rationally speaking, it just says that Soros spends money on lots of various things, some of them trickle down to some local playgrounds; that's it. But a person who makes such statement on internet is typically using it to insinuate something. The full tweet will be like: "Yeah, of course Mateusz says X and opposes Y, that's no surprise for the people who actually know something about him. Even the playground next to his house was built using money from Soros!" And, you know, that kinda makes you an important part of the New World Order, and of course you are "skeptical" about chemtrails, that's what all people on his payroll would say. If you know about the "six degrees of separation", that basically just means that in (some kind of) network, the longer connections you make, the exponentially more nodes you can reach, so at a surprisingly small number of steps you can reach practically everyone. (Maybe the actual number is greater than six, depending on how we define a "friend". That means that any person, including you or me, is probably within six steps distance from Donald Trump, or Vladimir Putin, or whoever else. If you are directly connected to some international network (such as Less Wrong), the nu

4Mateusz Bagiński9mo

As far as I remember (may be misremembering), to the extent that their memetic genealogy analysis holds water, there was little bit more common origin than I expected. But ofc I agree that the entire thing is just an ideological carpet bombing via guilt by (often overblown) association. I didn't mean all of industry or all of philanthropy. I was pointing at their perception that there is a cluster of futuristic privileged dudes, fractions constantly bickering, and having some views on AGI, industry-ing and philanthropy-ing. (Possibly first time in my life I feel like I'm overcharitably steelmanning Torres & Gebru on TESCREAL. Is this even worse than I'm giving them credit for?)

2Viliam9mo

OK, so something like "businessmen who impose their crazy ideas on the world through philanthropy". (As opposed to businessmen who just want to make money; or philanthropy for the sake of philanthropy without trying to remodel the world according to some ideology.) Basically Soros, only with Thiel instead of Soros. :)

4Mateusz Bagiński9mo

It does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism

[-]Matrice Jacobine9mo*100

TBF, Torres denies using it to mean this, instead claiming it refers to some obscure 2010 article by Ben Goertzel alone. This doesn't seem a very credible excuse, and it has been largely understood by proponents of the theory (like Dave Troy or Céline Keller) to mean Russian cosmism (and consequently that "TESCREAL" is actually a plot by Russian intelligence to re-establish the Soviet Union).

2AprilSR9mo

That is such a bizarre claim to make but admittedly including Cosmism at all is really odd

7Matrice Jacobine9mo

TBF it is fairly striking reading about early Soviet history how many of the Old Bolshevik intelligentsia would have fit right in this community but the whole "Putin is a secret cosmist" crowd is... unhinged.

[-]Award Rhine8mo*21

While I was reading about Monty Python on The Guardian, I saw this article: "Killings across three states shine spotlight on cultlike ‘Zizian’ group: Police search for member currently on the run from charges linked to homicides across the US". I dug into what that was all about and found this post.

So, in case anyone here was interested, these "Zizian group killings" have made international news.

Edit: Stories about the Zizian murders have also appeared now in Wired and The Wall Street Journal (and the WSJ Podcast).

[-]Viliam9mo20

Here are some posts with a lot of links, although the author is quite confused about some things ("Singularity – is this an organization?")

https://genderdesk.wordpress.com/2025/01/25/zizians-a-glossary/

https://genderdesk.wordpress.com/2025/01/28/united-states-v-youngblut/

https://genderdesk.wordpress.com/2025/02/01/zizians-missing-pieces/

BTW, on Ziz's obituary someone wrote:

Like Jesus, he will arise from the dead.

not sure if sincere or trolling...

5localdeity9mo

The date on that comment is Jan 30 2025. Methinks 90% likelihood it's causally downstream from the recent murders and that the poster knows Ziz was never dead.

[-]Rebecca_Records9mo-3-1

I've started a wiki to help organize information about recent events, and could use help building it out: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpnPxn433EMWw2t6m/wiki-on-suspects-in-lind-zajko-and-maland-killings

1Matrice Jacobine9mo

This is duplicating Uncle Kenny's already very extensive work linked in the OP.

[+][comment deleted]9mo*20

LESSWRONG
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LESSWRONG
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Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond

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Octavia is not a Zizian in the relevant sense