"Least likely person to do X" is an interesting concept. People who deal with a shadow that has an attribute they despise often overcompensate to fight that shadow. That shadow might provide a substance based on which the alternative personality that acts very differently can be built.

I feel complicated about this; in a world where everyone is doing split-and-commit (or something similar) by default, this feels straightforwardly good to note.

But like. In this world, this feels like fodder for "you should interpret evidence that someone is unusually unlikely to X as evidence that they're actually quite likely to X, given some trigger."

And I think this is the sort of thing that is true in some very small minority of cases and an outright (and false) weapon all the other times.

I think we should be real careful about interpreting evidence against X as evidence of X, even given that the psychological structure you just described is one that exists.

The process that unleashed the Maia personality 

I think that this misidentifies the crux of the internal argument Ziz created and the actual chain of events a bit. 

imo, Maia was trans and the components of her mind (the alter(s) they debucketed into "Shine") saw the body was physically male and decided that the decision-theoretically correct thing to do was to basically ignore being trans in favor of maximizing influence to save the world. Choosing to transition was pitted against being trans because of the cultural oppression against queers. I've run into this attitude among rationalist queers numerous times independently from Ziz and "I can't transition that will stop me from being a good EA" seems troubling common sentiment.

 Prior to getting involved with Ziz, the "Shine" half of her personality had basically been running her system on an adversarial 'we must act or else' fear response loop around saving the multiverse from evil using timeless decision theory in order to brute force the subjunctive evolution of the multiverse. 

So Ziz and Paseks start interacting, and at that point the "Maia" parts of her had basically been like, traumatized into submission an... (read more)

Ziz's blog is openly, obviously evil. And not in a fun, trolly way—or even inadvertent mundane evil. Boringly explicit evil, with literal endorsement of the Star Wars Sith religion.

At the risk of this looking too much like me fighting a strawman...

Cults may have a tendency to interact and pick up adaptations from each other, but it seems wrong to operate on the assumption that they're all derivatives of one ancestral "proto-cult" or whatever. Cult leaders are not literal vampires, where you only become a cult leader by getting bit by a previous cult leader or whatever.

It's a cultural attractor, and a cult is a social technology simple enough that it can be spontaneously re-derived. But cults can sometimes pick up or swap beliefs & virulence factors with each other, when they interact. And I do think Ziz picked up a few beliefs from the Vassarite cluster.

I can dig up cases in Ziz's writing where Ziz has interacted with Vassar before, or may have indirectly learned things from him through Alice.

Doesn't make Vassar directly responsible for Ziz's actions. I think Vassar is not directly responsible for Ziz.

I do want to spell this out, because I'm reading a subtle implication here, that I want to push back against.

I heard that LaSota ('ziz') and Michael interacted but I am sort of under the impression she was always kind of violent and bizarre before that, so I'm not putting much of this bizarreness down to Michael. Certainly interest in evidence about this (here or in DM).

I'm gonna add an even more pessimistic hypothesis: That the disagreements around values are fundamentally irresolvable because there is no truth at the end of the tunnel.

Or, one man's "going off the rails" is another man's "correcting a massive oversight or collective moral failing", and these perspectives can't be reconciled.