I think all these worldview enhancements and drugs are no longer a solution to your original problem (not fitting in) and have evolved to a scary problem in itself. You should probably start pushing back.
She also organized a rather poorly received protest of that group which has gained her some notoriety within the community.
This deserves some clarification. Here's what happened. Ziz and some friends went to the CFAR alumni reunion in 2019, before it started. They put on their Sith robes, and chained their vehicle across the entrance road to block it. The previous users of the venue, a class of fifth graders, were still there. Venue staff called the police. The police interpreted it as a school shooting situation, and decided they needed to search the venue for bombs. And so a hundred-ish people, including me, while we were in the middle of driving to the alumni reunion, got an email saying: Don't come. There is a police helicopter and they are searching the area for bombs.
That is the first impression we all got of Ziz's protest. I saw a copy of the pamphlet they had intended to hand out, some time later. It wasn't as bad as that, but it was still nonsense.
A bunch of parts of civilization have nice barriers around them, and if you step outside of them you're at sea in a storm with no idea what's coming next. They tried to be disruptive+scary by chaining their car to an entrance way, and then suddenly there were kids involved and police with guns and helicopters.
Step outside of the barriers at your own peril. I'm not saying that the barriers are just, but your life is more stable and easier-to-predict when you stay inside of them. And don't go outside of them if you're incompetent.
If someone wanted to aquire a bad reputation, I'm not sure what the person could do that would be more effective at getting a bad reputation.
Given that as described Ziz seems to act according to game theoretic ideas, how plausible is that she wanted to achieve such an effect?
Even as I switched to a diet of mostly soylent to save money and attempted to adopt an extremely aggressive update schedule for this blog, I was slowly making myself more and more miserable and gaslighting myself about my own emotions.
Be warned: Soylent comes with a trap. It makes total calorie intake extremely legible, which can overshadow peoples' instinctive eating, causing them to undereat, which causes depression. In particular: for most people, 2000 calories per day is a shortfall. The standard answer to how much one should eat, if not attempting weight loss, is to use the Harris-Benedict formula. A mostly-Soylent diet is also a low-sodium diet, which I believe is also something to look at with skepticism. Whenever mental health issues appear close in time to questionable dietary changes, I believe the diet should be the first suspect, regardless of how compelling other narrative explanations might seem.
I actually ran directly into this after I'd been on soylent for about a month and a half. I found myself feeling consistently awful in a way that had slowly built over time and when I bought myself something to eat that wasn't soylent I felt so much immensely better I just started crying in relief and from that I pretty much immediately knew I had done something to mess up my diet. I backed off the soylent pretty substantially after that.
Okay, I've heard you say "for most people, 2000 calories per day is a shortfall" and other nutrition-related claims like a hundred times (probably literally if secondhand "Jim says X about nutrition" counts), but unless https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/nutrition is seriously failing me, you've never written about why you believe any of that. Which seems especially bad to me in a domain where most information is untrustworthy, and we all know that it's untrustworthy but most of us don't know how to figure what is true. I feel like I'm just supposed to believe you because you've said it so many times with so much conviction for so many years. Can you write a post or something?
I agree that I really need to write a post on this (and a half-dozen other nutrition-related things that I've become known for saying in person and in comments, but haven't written up properly).
For this specific point--about 2000 calories per day being a shortfall--it's fairly straightforward. There's a scientific-consensus answer to how many calories people typically need, the Harris-Benedict formula. (This has a few variations with slightly different constants, all of which trace back to linear-regressions on measured energy expenditure.) I typed in my own parameters, and those of a few other people, and observed that, within the demographics of people I know, ie mostly youngish male and with a height reflective of decent childhood nutrition, it was consistently well above 2000. I also traced the history of where the 2000 number used on nutrition facts panels came from, and found that it was never intended as any sort of recommendation, and seemed to have been misinterpreted as one by historical accident. I try to always include a link to the formula or a calculator for it, when I talk about calorie intakes, so that people can get the real number for themselves.
Thx for the comment.
There's a scientific-consensus answer to how many calories people typically need, the Harris-Benedict formula.
Out of interest, I checked wikipedia, which gives three different equations (Harris-Benedict, Mifflin St Jeor, and Katch-McArdle), saying "Historically, the most notable formula was the Harris–Benedict equation".
I just put in my details on them, and my daily caloric burn varied over 1000 calories (one was 500 less than the other which was 500 less than the other). One of them was pretty close to 2000. /shrug
Isn't the link to the Harris-Benedict formula sufficient evidence? Like, that's the actual formula nutritionists use. I don't know any specific reason for using the 2000 calories per day target other than that it's a nice round number.
I mean, not really? Everyone has told me that 'nutritionists do/believe it' is not a good reason to do/believe something. I'm also not saying that I stand behind 2000 calories per day; I'm saying that Jim says a lot of things about nutrition all the time and I want to know why.
Are you sure about the Harris-Benedict formula? It seems like Mifflin-St Jeor is the most reliable. Nonetheless, I'm curious if you have any recommended articles/books on diet and mental health?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris%E2%80%93Benedict_equation lists both, and seems to consider the Mifflin-St. Jeor version a revision that sort of uses the same name. The calculator I linked uses constants from Roza-Shizgal, which is technically neither of these. All of the sets of constants were produced by taking linear regressions on measured energy expenditure among different groups of people. I don't have much in the way of opinions about which of these sets of constants is best; the differences between them are small compared to the difference between "2000 is what it says on the nutrition facts panel" vs actually-using-any-sort-of-formula, and compared to the error in the activity-factor constant and the measurement error in a non-Soylent diet.
I had not realised that there is such a quantity of batshit insanity in the rationality community. Poe's law has applied to the collection of Insanity Wolf memes I recently made. (I won't link them again; you can look for the link if you really want to see it. It's twice as long as it was then.)
Yeah. It makes sense in retrospect that Eliezer's writings full of weighty meaning would attract lots of people with a "meaning-shaped hole". I wish we'd kept to fun puzzles about decision theory, evolution etc.
But Unity of Knowledge! The fun puzzles for some are exactly what has pushed others off the deep end.
Another 20-some Insanity Wolf memes added to the collection. I appear to be immune to basilisks. I can distantly appreciate the structure of Roko's Basilisk, but I saw nothing but incoherent rambling in Pasek’s Doom. I scoff at neurobabble and suspect anyone talking about "mental tech" to be infected with scientology. My faith, standing on a solid foundation of doubt, is a stout defence of my reason against vampires.
Perhaps not believing in total preference orderings or utility theory as the fundamental ground of motivation has something to do with that.
I scoff at neurobabble and suspect anyone talking about "mental tech" to be infected with scientology.
Scientology is a particular brand of techniques that comes with the belief that anything not invented by Hubbard doesn't work. Scientology itself has a bunch of techniques that do have effects and mess up many people.
One way to deal with that is to categorically reject the field. That works for many people but others feel like experimenting around. If I would meet a rationalist who gets into contact with scientology (maybe because he read LukeProgs endorsement of Scientology 101 on LessWrong) it's worth to be articulate the dangers and ways it messes up people in more detail.
Recently, a rationalist wrote on Facebook about considering meditation to be dangerous in general and given outcomes like Pasek or Eric Bruylant noticing some danger makes sense.
Both cases share similarities beyond just meditation. Both of them include taking substances (even when in the case of Pasek the hormones were legal), a lot of meditation and personality splits. In both cases most of what they did was autodicatic and not learned from experienced teachers.
If I look at other similarities that both share is that they were intent to create rationalist communities outside of existing hubs.
Hopefully it's not too late to try to keep the focus on the fun puzzles, etc! There really does seem to be an alarming amount of craziness floating around LW, along with the constant weird attempts to explicitly model things that we evolved to understand instinctively (eg most aspects of social interaction). Reading that stuff slightly negatively affected my mental health despite thinking it was mostly silly -- to the extent it's taken seriously it seems like it could have more substantial negative effects.
Ziz adheres to a moral principle which classifies all life which has even the potential to be sentient as people and believes that all beings with enough of a mind to possess some semblance of selfhood should have the same rights that are afforded to humans. To her, carnism is a literal holocaust, on ongoing and perpetual nightmare of torture, rape, and murder being conducted on a horrifyingly vast scale by a race of flesh eating monsters. If you’ve read Three Worlds Collide, Ziz seems to view most of humanity the way the humans view the babyeaters.
... well.
... I mean, letting aside the holocaust comparison which is just asking to have the whole discourse get pulled astray, can you really make rational arguments that it's not at least as bad as a quantitatively reduced version of doing the same things to human beings?
Having said this, I'm just puzzled on why she seems to think that the "flesh-eating monster hell" would survive a positive singularity with a human-aligned AI.
I can't really imagine a future with a positive singularity where there's just not a more convenient solution to have meat than actually growing and butchering a live animal. Humans, save perhaps a handful of sadistic psychopaths or a few people really wanting to cling about fringe stuff like "the moral value of the hunt" or barbaric recipes who would supposedly increase taste, would choose to have their meat sans-suffering if that was an option. You'd have to model people worse than Quirrelmort does, because they wouldn't even be able to role-play a good person act that simple as answering yes to that question.
Or should I interpret her utopia as making all life immortal as well, protecting animals from accidental deaths, each others and etc... ? I'd say it still seems like a trivial fix and not something to threaten or sabotage people working on singularity over.
I honestly felt a full cognitive assault reading the links with her writing and had to commit to never open links to her blog again, but I think this is mostly my own issues resonating hard.
Two months ago I kicked open the lid of my gender dysphoria, after having repressed it for some 15 years. I quickly found out that rationality+a kind of distress that doesn't get better if you can think clearly about it (not to say that rationality can't help making that going away in other ways) can quickly degenerate in paranoia, since you can't seem to manage to push a stop button to whatever search process your mind is attempting to solve your pain.
I had overthought what I was feeling a dozen different ways, and the way she seems to model other people's thoughts struck a lot of resonating chords with me about what people I talked to could actually be thinking about me.
can you really make rational arguments that it's not at least as bad as a quantitatively reduced version of doing the same things to human beings?
Yep. The animals aren't meaningfully conscious. That's such an argument. (And one that I believe.)
"Meaningfully conscious" seem a tricky definition, and consciousness a rather slippery word.
Animals clearly aren't sapient, but saying they aren't conscious seems to also sneak in the connotation that there's "nobody home" to feel the pain and the experience, like a philosophical zombie.
It's pretty clear that animal seem to act like there's somebody home, feeling sensations and emotions and having intentions, and what we know about neurology also suggests that.
Given how some animals even pass self-recognition tests, sapience seems the only hard cut-off we can trace between animals and humans.
I'd certainly agree that we should value life based on how "complex" it's mental life is, (perhaps with a roof that we reach when we hit sapience that I'd like to introduce for our convenience), and it certainly makes sense we shouldn't concern with the well being of stuff that has no mind at all, but it doesn't seem intuitive that the lack of sapience should mean that whatever suffering strikes a mind has zero moral weight.
If we agree that the suffering of a mind has a certain weight, then yeah, the "flesh eating monster hell" is a quantitatively reduced version of doing the same thing to human beings (measuring in total moral wrongness, some consequences of doing it to humans would be totally absent and others wouldn't be scaled down at all). We can of course discuss how much the moral wrongness is reduced.
One might argument that it's certainly preferable to slaughter a cow than to have a human die of hunger, or to slaughter a cow (with the exact meat of a human for convenience of our example) to feed two humans and save them from starvation than to slaughter a human to save two humans, and I'd agree.
I'd even agree that one might have much more urgent thing to do for the wellbeing of others than become vegan.
But the fact that we value human lives more than animals, because of sapience, doesn't implicate that animal lives and suffering have no value whatsoever, and as long as animal lives have some value, there are some trade-offs in animal pain for human convenience we should refuse or we're not thinking quantitatively about morals.
Deontological rules such as "let's let any number of animals die to save even a single human life" might be considered as a temporary placeholder to separate the issue of human lives from the issue of human convenience, I think it might make discussing the issue easier.
I do mean to imply that animals that can pass the mirror test are much more morally meaningful than the others. Computer game characters also exhibit ”intentions” and such, but there’s nobody home a lot of the time, unless you’re playing against another person.
I am fairly interested in knowing which animals are being factory farmed that pass the mirror test. If it’s anything like cows then I will be pretty upset.
Computer game characters also exhibit ”intentions” and such, but there’s nobody home a lot of the time, unless you’re playing against another person.
Yes, but what we know about the structure of a computer program is greatly different than what we know about the structure of an animal brain. More complex brains seem to share a lot of our own architecture, mammals brains are ridiculously complex, and mammals show a lot of behaviours that isn't purely directed to acquiring food, reproducing and running from predators.
For animals such as frogs and bugs, which seem to be built more like a "sensory input goes in, reflex goes out" I'd accept more doubt on whether the "somebody's home" metaphor can be considered true, for mammals and other smarter animals the doubt are a lot less believable.
It seems cows might be smarter than dogs and highly intelligent, and right now dogs are discussed as possibly having self-recognition, since they pass olfactory tests that require self recognition (from what I saw it seems the tests are a bit more complex than just requiring the dog to have a "this-is-your-urine-mark-for-your-territory.exe" in its brain).
Generally speaking, cows show to have long term social relations with each others, good problem solving skills, and long term effects on their emotional range from negative experiences. I haven't been able to find information on cows passing or failing self-recognition tests, visual or not, but from the intelligence they show I'd put them pretty high on moral meaningfulness.
Pigs are notoriously smart and have passed the self-recognition test, as Pattern commented.
Though, I think my main point it's that even simpler animals, as long as the brain architecture allows for doubts that our experience of "being home", feeling pain and etc, is in some way generalisable to theirs, would have some scaled down moral weight.
If I had to lose my higher cognitive function and be reduced to animal levels of intelligence, I wouldn't really be okay with agreeing to be subjected to significative pain in exchange for a trivial benefit now, on the ground that I wouldn't be sapient.
Note: this isn't really aimed at turning lesswrongers vegan. There are convincing reasons to be vegan based on the impact over humans, but if you are already trying to be an effective altruist by doing a hard job I can accept the need of conserving willpower and efficiency, though I guess one could consider if he/she/they could reduce consumption without risks.
I think the issue of the moral weight of animals should be considered independently from the consequences it might hold for one's diet or behaviour, or we're just back to plain rationalisation.
TL:DR; Pigs apparently do (see link below).
Ignoring the fact that the mirror test is biased towards more visual creatures, this seems relevant:
(Arguably, as smart as a dog should also be an issue. And the list only has 5 items, probably more for 'internet format' reasons, than that's how many there are.)
Deontological [decisions] such as "let's let any number of animals die to save even a single human life"
There might exist a number of animals (like the number of animals on Earth) such that, if they all died, people would die as a result - ignoring subsistence effects, we kind of need the biosphere to keep working.
Also, if hunting or farming of an animal species is done in a way that creates bio-risks, that's a problem. I'm not sure where the 'covid comes from bats' theory is at now, but the Spanish flu was a big deal and it did come from animals. While I'm not sure of how that happened - i.e. it might not have been factory farming - it seems important that we don't shot ourselves in the foot, globally.
Additionally, if an animal produces stuff that can be made into medicine, driving them extinct in order to meet current demand is obviously bad.*
In fact, even in terms of consumption and valuing that, over consumption is a problem.*
*If you care about future people at all, wrt. that.
I do agree on everything you said.
Right now farming animals seems to be a huge risk for zoonosis, if I remember correctly Covid-19 could have spread from exotic animals being sold in high numbers, and it jumped from man to minks in farms, spread like wildfire in the packed environment, gathering all sort of mutations, and then jumped back to man.
Farming animal is also not sustainable at all with the level of tech, resources and consumption we have now. I'd expect the impact of farming to kill at least some tens-millions people in a moderately bad global warming scenario, it's already producing humanitarian crises now, and I'm afraid global warming increases extinction risks due to how we would be more likely to botch AGI.
I had just suggested the rule for an entirely hypothetical scenario where we are asked to trade human lives against animal lives, because I was trying to discuss the moral situation "trade animal lives and suffering against human convenience" on its own.
While I'm extremely critical of the Ziz-cult, I have to admit that her theory of core self vs. narrative self is very close to my own thinking (although I think hyperbolic discounting exists in addition to the core/narrative dynamics.) I also did some kind of "deconstructing the matrix" when thinking about this. However, I strongly depart from her theory of morals. While I care about other people, I do so very non-uniformly so I'm nowhere near utilitarianism. For example, I'm against animal suffering but it probably wouldn't be worth it for me to be vegan if not for signalling value (while it probably would be worth it for me if I could make everyone vegan including myself.) I guess this might just mean that in her terminology I'm evil? However, I am very much in favor of engaging in mutually beneficial trade with other people, and in favor of creating social norms/matrices that are better for everyone.
Similar. I also pretty strongly think that e.g. many of the core beliefs driving our behavior have nothing to do with their stated reasons and are actually social strategies. But the whole hemisphere thing, as well as the vehemence that Ziz has around her moral views, don't seem compelling to me. They give me a strong vibe of themselves being derived from some unacknowledged emotional strategy she has going on, rather than reflecting any kind of real truth.
Yes, I'm very skeptical that Ziz is truly at her core the perfect utilitarian she claims to be, however, even in the universe in which that is true, I still want to own up to being "evil". Not because I deserve accolades for my selfishness (I don't), but because being honest is an important part of my life strategy and the sort of social norms I promote.
I wasn't making a proposal about turning everyone vegan. I was just observing that, at least if everyone was like me, the situation would have a "tragedy of the commons" payoff matrix (the Nash equilibrium is "everyone isn't vegan", the Pareto optimum is "everyone is vegan".)
I wonder about that.
I'd expect we'd first see a huge number of newspaper articles and internet websites trying to make health scares about "lab meat" and an ungodly about of memes about "real men eating real meat", or "only real meat has real taste", and then governments would ramp up subsidies to traditional farms because "cultural activities" and whatever. Oh, and a lot of jokes about the synthetic meat that many sci-fi dystopias have as an element.
Old, powerful lobbies don't like the free market regulating itself, at all, and making harmful/obsolete stuff a cultural/identity/political tribes battle is the first strategy to hinder it.
I'd agree it eventually will become the solution, but I expect it to go slightly worse than the energetic transition.
In case anyone is confused, I temporarily pulled this post to make some minor edits and when I re-published it on my blog it created a duplicate post here on LW. That post was up for a few hours before I realized what happened, did the edits on the LW version of the original post, and moved the repost into my drafts. I copied over all the comments from the repost into this thread except for the ones asking why there was the repost and everything should be fixed now.
I appreciate you writing this! Describing how exactly a set of ideas fucked with you, how the ideas interlock, and what you think their structure is, is something I'm always glad to see.
Very interesting post. I found Sinceriously to be a really good blog, full of ideas that resonated with my own experiences. I didn't find her to be a very skilled manipulator though; her attempts to sway me were transparently obvious and I had no problem stripping out the unwanted stuff and keeping the useful ideas.
Perhaps it helps to have already embraced one's dark side? Until now it hadn't occurred to me that doing so might trigger such a catastrophic response as you talked about. Mine was painful but not dangerous, so I at least know it can be done safely.
You've mentioned Pasek's Doom a few times before, but I'm still not quite sure what it means. Something about taking your own headspace drama too seriously in self-destructive ways?
From hivewired:
Pasek’s Doom is the name for induced internal conflict between hemispheres, named for Maia Pasek, whose death Ziz blames on suicide caused by hemisphere conflict. Supposedly after inducing a hemisphere split and finding out they were good male left brain and neutral female right brain, the right brain despairingly committed suicide and killed them both after being woken up enough to act in the world.
And I just realized I quoted OP's source. I seriously got lost reading all of this. But It sounds like taking own headspace drama too seriously is about right.
Pasek couch surfered at my place a few days before he got into contact with Ziz or self-identified as trans and we had deep discussions, so I have a snapshot of who he was back then.
Pasek didn't had the kind of head drama that the average person has. The term headspace drama suggests passivity that's doesn't really fit here. Pasek did a lot of self-modification. They had the ability to act in an aligned way and work 60-80 hours per week without akrasia.
In the end it seems like his logical part accepted that given that everybody dies (the latest at the heat death of the universe) life has no value and he sought meaning in transitioning and finding meaning out of feminity. Pasek started taking hormones.
A few months after taking hormones they were at traveling alone in Poland and committed suicide. Reading Ziz account suggests that Ziz was at the time the main person he spoke to, so he was cut of from his normal social ties at that moment.
So first off, thanks for sharing -- its really interesting to hear other ppls experience with scrupulosity and Ziz's work. That being said... I have a fair amount of criticism wrt your discussion of Ziz
And look, I don’t have a stake in any of that at this point and I’m not in a position to judge, but I don’t think she’s lying. I don’t think she ever lies, I just think she’s speaking from within her own worldview, the same way that she always does, the same way that everyone always does
Ziz has made a number of specific claims about the rationality community that seem extremely bad to me including (off the top of my head): endemic transphobia in CFAR, sexual misconduct, an attempted cover-up of sexual misconduct endemic (at least at a point) in MIRI. If these occured, they are real concrete events independent of worldview.
That stuff matters. It mattered enough to me that I've been off this website and un-associated with the rationality community for upwards of a year because I heard about it.
The final Big Idea on Sinceriously is the one which is widely considered to be the most intensely radioactive and results in most of the hostility aimed at her and her followers. This is Ziz’s moral theory, which is, to put it lightly, very extreme.... To her, carnism is a literal holocaust, on ongoing and perpetual nightmare of torture, rape, and murder being conducted on a horrifyingly vast scale by a race of flesh eating monsters.
Just showing up here to preemptively lightly push back on the textual association here between "very extreme moral theory" and "carnism is a literal holocaust." There is a very broad spectrum of moral beliefs that notice that carnism is a literal holocaust and Ziz's philosophy just happens to also be rigorous enough to notice this.
Hm maybe this set me off on defensiveness but, as I continued reading, I couldn't help reinterpret parts of it as a hit piece on Ziz. Here are specific quotes I view as designed to be unjustifiably adversarial (in bold) and my response (in italics) explaining why I perceive them as such:
Ziz has made a number of specific claims about the rationality community that seem extremely bad to me including (off the top of my head): endemic transphobia in CFAR, sexual misconduct, an attempted cover-up of sexual misconduct endemic (at least at a point) in MIRI. If these occured, they are real concrete events independent of worldview.
That stuff matters. It mattered enough to me that I've been off this website and un-associated with the rationality community for upwards of a year because I heard about it.
It seems that Ziz has a worldview according to which she's willing to lie when it furthers her goals. Why do you believe her enough at this point?
Since this post is back-up, let's just have convo here alright? Don't wanna make things confusing
idk if you can read this since the post was deleted but the short answer is that, per the top post, Ziz never lies (for a reasonable definition of what a lie is) and I'm inclined to agree:
And look, I don’t have a stake in any of that at this point and I’m not in a position to judge, but I don’t think she’s lying. I don’t think she ever lies, I just think she’s speaking from within her own worldview, the same way that she always does, the same way that everyone always does.
Moreover, if it is true that Ziz's goals are promoting a vegan singularity, then the specific claims she made about transphobia/cover-ups/etc are extremely suboptimal for furthering this goal
Per the top post, Ziz never lies (for a reasonable definition of what a lie is). Other than that, I don't think she is lying for four main reasons: 1) her decision theory implies that she isn't, 2) the content of her claims seems plausible to me, 3) her claims don't seem particularly strategically helpful) and 4) I have been able to independently verify some sub-components of her claims
And look, I don’t have a stake in any of that at this point and I’m not in a position to judge, but I don’t think she’s lying. I don’t think she ever lies, I just think she’s speaking from within her own worldview, the same way that she always does, the same way that everyone always does.
Here's my extended reasoning for the four justifications above:
I found those claims disturbing as well, but when I tried to verify them I pretty much hit a brick wall. As someone disconnected from the bay area community and fairly new to the online community, it's very hard for me to dig into this sort of thing.
If you have more information than what was talked about on Sinceriously, I'd love to hear about it.
I'm hesitant about saying things here since, to the extent that my epistemics are right, this is a relatively adversarial environment. I think discussing things would reveal things that I know/how I found out about them without many positive effects (I'm also disconnected from the Bay Area Community). After all, if you were confident that Ziz was lying, nothing I know would likely change your mind. Similarly, if you felt like Ziz might be telling the truth, the gravity of the claims probably has more relevance to your actions than the extent to which my info would move the probability.
That being said, DM me and we can chat. I'm also pretty curious about your interactions with Ziz/how she tried to manipulate you.
Ziz's whole philosophy is based on TDT and lying is trivially a defection that globally damages credibility
The stunt at the CFAR reunion is defection that globally damages her credibility.
your response is an example of how
My response is an example of me estimating her to have low credibility because she's willing to do things like that.
Given that she her operating decision theory lets her do things like that, I see no reason to expect her not doing other things that damage her credibility as well.
Wearing Sith robes and naming themselves after a fanfic villian is similar in that it damages reputation among many people and not a strategy to develop a reputation as someone to be trusted.
Any one of the three things alone suggests her seeing it okay to take actions that cost credibility. Together they also suggest a strategic decisions to not value credibility, maybe because seeking credibility contrains her range of actions.
How do you explain those three decisions if you think that she's committed to upholding her credibility?
If I had to propose a model for this here, it's something like:Ziz believes in the power of what you might call "Woke Twitter Leftism" as a force that will one day come to completely dominate society and sees her own ideological principles as the natural evolution/convergence point of those ideas. If you're a Woke Twitter Leftist and you legitimately believe the principles of Woke Twitter Leftism in your soul, you'll naturally come to embrace her ethical positions over time. She thinks that since "Cthulu swims left" her faction will gradually grow to dominate politically and the actions she takes that would seem to damage her credibility will become credibility boosting in that future. Her callout posts, her protests, the way she expresses disapproval, it's all clearly strategized to fit into the ideological pattern of twitter wokescolds and tumblr tenderqueers. The people she seems to be carelessly defecting against aren't the people she thinks will win the culture war and so the fact that she's damaging her credibility with them is irrelevant.I think Ziz's belief in the power of this acausal coalition and the belief that it will actually win the culture war that we're currently embroiled in is the result of herrejecting necessityandrefusing a gate. You can pretty clearly see where in her ideological theory this error is sitting and the canards she has to adopt to make it work. She thinks that most people are evil, but she still believes her tiny coalition of good-aligned people can shift the timeline which makes no sense. In order to support that, she has to adopt the completely unfounded belief that only good-aligned people can cooperate or use game theory and that nongood people will defect on each other too often to defeat her alliance.
These are all JD's words, this is JD's take on Ziz, not mine. This is an interesting post because there's nothing fundamentally wrong with anything it says, it just frames it as a negative despite the fact that really, if twitter leftists are the scariest thing in the world to you, what does that really say about you as a person, hmmm? Don't you know cancer has no future? Ziz is right and we are going to win. :)
I don't think Woke Twitter Leftism has a problem with telling lies to hurt people who deserve to be hurt in their view and that there's huge reputational risk for that kind of lies in that crowd.
To the extend that this model is accurate, I don't think it suggests that we should expect her to always tell the truth.
She thinks that since "Cthulu swims left" her faction will gradually grow to dominate politically and the actions she takes that would seem to damage her credibility will become credibility boosting in that future. Her callout posts, her protests, the way she expresses disapproval, it's all clearly strategized to fit into the ideological pattern of twitter wokescolds and tumblr tenderqueers.
That still doesn't explain the Sith robes and fanfic villian name.
the completely unfounded belief that only good-aligned people can cooperate or use game theory and that nongood people will defect on each other too often to defeat her alliance.
Can you elaborate on why you think this belief is completely unfounded? It seems to me that there are clear asymmetries in coordination capacities of good vs nongood. For example, being more open to the idea of a "Good Person" in power than a "Bad Person" seems like common sense. Similarly, groups of good people are intrinsically value-aligned while teams of bad people are not (each has a distinct selfish motivation) -- and I think value-alignedness increases effectiveness.
Assuming Ziz is being honest, she pulled the stunt at CFAR after she had already been defected against. This does not globally damage her credibility. It does damage her reputation among a) ppl who think they can't defect against her sneakily but plan to try and b) ppl who think she is bad at judging when she's been defected against. I am in neither of those categories so I have no reason to expect Ziz to defect by lying at me.
In contrast, if Ziz was being dishonest, she pulled that stunt for... inscrutable reasons that may or may not be in the web of lies she might have made. I think this is unlikely. As I've already said, her claims seem plausible and, if she was lying, she could do far worse than she did. If she wanted to defect really hard and wasn't constrained by truth, she could just raise issues that non-marginalized communities have a personal stake in (instead of something like transphobia).
Wearing Sith robes and naming themselves after a fanfic villian is similar in that it damages reputation among many people and not a strategy to develop a reputation as someone to be trusted.
Do you think Little Nas X is less honest because he became Satan in his hit music video Montero? I doubt that wearing Sith Robes / naming yourself after a villain (Ziz is a mythological bird?) is useful information about how honest someone is. This goes double when you know other things. Three points here:
How do you explain those three decisions if you think that she's committed to upholding her credibility?
Well I think I've covered it above. The purpose of "Upholding Credibility" is so that the ppl you care about knowing the truth can actually receive the truth from you. And none of the decisions above impede information-conveyance or reflect defections on the groups of ppl Ziz would be interested in helping (ethical ppl who can work with her, concerned trans women who might be at risk, etc).
...
I'll admit, I'm a little angry with your response so I might have a harsher tone here. Some of your arguments struck a nerve with me because it really feels like you're implying that a bunch of my (non-rationalist, completely unaffiliated) LGBTQ+ friends are liars. Here's what your arguments sound like to me:
Some of my thoughts on Ziz's honesty:
While I don't think any of the above requires "lying", I do think it makes most statements from Ziz straightforwardly untrustworthy.
Thanks, I appreciate the concrete examples of untrustworthiness than don't rely on inferences made about reputation. I am specifically concerned about things like this (which seems like a weird and bad direction to take a conversation (https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative/). It also seems hard to recount falsely without active deception or complete detachment from reality and I doubt Ziz is completely detached from reality:
They asked if I’d rape their corpse. Part of me insisted this was not going as it was supposed to. But I decided inflicting discomfort in order to get reliable information was a valid tactic.
You say that you "never said that sentence or tried to imply it..." Do you have any sense of why Ziz interpreted you as saying that? I'd like to gauge the distance between what you said and how Ziz interpreted it to gauge degree-of-untrustworthiness.
Do you have any sense of why Ziz interpreted you as saying that?
I don't know. I think part of the conversation was about some meta-level stuff on when it's just and fair to attack MIRI and other institutions if they do something terrible. I don't think I remember the details, but I might have said something like "I generally think it would be bad to make up outright lies and falsehoods about a thing, and I do think that if someone is very obviously making stuff up, something like a defamation lawsuit might make sense as a kind of last resort, though I am generally quite hesitant about defamation lawsuits and think they are pretty bad for the world".
Again, I don't remember the details, sadly. It was over 3 years ago. But my sense is that transforming sentences like the above into sentences like the one Ziz accuses me of is how most of their "quotes" work.
Assuming Ziz is being honest, she pulled the stunt at CFAR after she had already been defected against. This does not globally damage her credibility.
It got her a criminal record which means it will damage her credibility which every person who runs a criminal background check on her.
Reading https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Mystery-in-Sonoma-County-after-kidnap-arrests-of-14844155.php is going to make any normal person consider the people to have no credibility and having an article like that with your legal name that people can google to find more about you in interactions like applying for a flat, is a heavy reputational cost.
"If a marginalized person claims Something Bad is happening, handles it inappropriate, and copes with marginalization by inverting mainstream aesthetics, they're systematically a liar"
False imprisonment of kids that are innocent bystanders isn't just "handles it inappropriately". None of the LGBTQ+ people I know personally have to the extend of my knowledge done something as bad nor would I expect that to be in their range of possible actions.
As far as Ziz, TDT and falsehoods, she writes herself:
They asked what I’d do, I said I’d socially retaliate. They asked how.
I said I would probably write a LessWrong post about how they thought I’d be bad for the world because I was trans. Half of me was surprised at myself for saying this. Did I just threaten to falsely social justice someone?
So she's open about having threatened to say false things that part of her believed to be false for retaliation. From the TDT perspective actually fulfilling what you threaten seems quite reasonable.
Since you've quoted Ziz out of context, let me finish that quote for you. It is clear that the other half of her (whatever that means) did in fact believe those things and it is clear that this was a recounting of a live-conversation rather than a broad strategy. It is not that weird to not have fully processed the things that you partially believe, live, in the middle of a conversation such that you are surprised by them.
The other half of me was like isn’t it obvious. They are disturbed at me because intense suffering is scary. Because being trans in a world where it would make things worse to transition was pain to intense for social reality to acknowledge, and therefore a threat.
I see you're equivocating between "honesty"/"credibility" and "reputation" again:
Reading https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Mystery-in-Sonoma-County-after-kidnap-arrests-of-14844155.php is going to make any normal person consider the people to have no credibility and having an article like that with your legal name that people can google to find more about you in interactions like applying for a flat, is a heavy reputational cost.
I see you've quietly dropped the two other reasons to ding credibility I mentioned to focus on the protest, which along with a misquote is your main reason for why Ziz is a liar:
False imprisonment of kids that are innocent bystanders isn't just "handles it inappropriately". None of the LGBTQ+ people I know personally have to the extend of my knowledge done something as bad nor would I expect that to be in their range of possible actions.
It seems obvious to me that false imprisonment of kids is a noncentral description of what Ziz was doing (ie "she staged a protest and unbeknownst to her there were children somewhere" is my model). Given that this was scaled back to a misdemeanor, I imagine that you're focusing on this specifically for rhetorical effect.
While I'm dubious about the protest being a Smart Move, I don't think this has much bearing on Ziz's honesty and I certainly don't think the coincidental presence of children somewhere in the area has any bearing on it.
From the TDT perspective actually fulfilling what you threaten seems quite reasonable.
From a TDT perspective, actually treating the first thing you come up with after someone asks you a question (esp when its couched in wiggle-terms like "probably") as a binding pre-commitment does not seem reasonable to me at all.
Given your manipulation of context above, and my notable lack of context wrt this whole situation, you have an asymmetric information advantage here that I suspect you may use to deceive me. As a result, I'm tapping out of the convo here.
If you are in good faith, I wish you well.
I see you've quietly dropped the two other reasons to ding credibility I mentioned to focus on the protest, which along with a misquote is your main reason for why Ziz is a liar
I didn't say that there were three reasons, I only spoke of one reason being that there's a pattern of behavior. It's about the generator function. The question is about what generator function explains all three events
We are talking about a person who supposedly follows a coherent decision theory and makes game theory backed moves. I wouldn't expect that the average LGBTQ+ thinks their actions through in game theoretic terms. There's also an IQ difference between Ziz and the average human or average LGBTQ+ person where she's very likely >130 IQ. That means I'm more likely to take a stupid action by a random person as simply a stupid action but expect Ziz to have a better thought out model for why her action makes sense then I would expect for the averge person.
Ziz writes about the importance of not following social conventions and preventing herself from value drift. From the inside I would expect both the Sith robes and the fanfic villian name to be stoic exercises with the intend of immunizing herself against social conventions affecting her. In the post about Pasek's doom she writes about it being important to be a Gervais-sociopath. Being able to act unconstrained and being able to lie when adventagous is part of being a Gervais-sociopath and the stoic exercises are a way to train mentally into that direction.
My model would explain most weird (as seen by general society) actions of most LGBTQ+ people to be made because even when they are costly (certain people think less of them for it) they are done because the person considers expression of their sexual of gender identity to be a sacred value. Sith robes are not expressions of their sexual of gender identity and thus taking the reputational hit for them shows valuing reputation less.
There's also sometimes weirdness that comes from lack of social skills and not from conscious decisions that aren't directly sexual / gender identity. Choosing a fanfic villian name and wearing Sith robes is however done through conscious choice.
It seems obvious to me that false imprisonment of kids is a noncentral description of what Ziz was doing (ie "she staged a protest and unbeknownst to her there were children somewhere" is my model). Given that this was scaled back to a misdemeanor, I imagine that you're focusing on this specifically for rhetorical effect.
The article was the first impression I got about Ziz (I live in Germany and never have attended a CFAR workshop) and I would expect that I'm not the only person for which it's true.
You said that the action was only costly with people who Ziz thinks defected with her and that's not how the action turned out.
While it likely played out worse then she expected beforehand, I don't think the idea that it was only likely to damage her reputation with the CFAR staff (whom she thinks defected) was a reasonable model of the situation.
The article was the first impression I got about Ziz (I live in Germany and never have attended a CFAR workshop) and I would expect that I'm not the only person for which it's true.
Ah, mea culpa. I saw your other comment amount Pasek crashing with you and interpreted it to mean you were pretty close to the Ziz-related part of the community. I'm less hesitant about talking to you now so I'll hop back in.
they are done because the person considers expression of their sexual of gender identity to be a sacred value. Sith robes are not expressions of their sexual of gender identity and thus taking the reputational hit for them shows valuing reputation less.
I really feel that you're making a category error by repeatedly merging the concepts "credibility with a small set of helpful ppl" and "general reputation." I don't see why Sith Robes or gender identity or aesthetics in general should cause me to trust someone less, especially when I have other information on them I consider more relevant. This because, unlike most social conventions which serve as forms of control/submission to the mob/etc, the ability to be perceived as honest by those you want to work with allows you to more easily work with them.
Gervais sociopaths often have principles that include telling the truth.
I don't think her aesthetic was stoically motivated as much as motivated by the desire to treat ones own interests and values as logically prior to social convention -- a refusal to let ones own interests bow to the mob. This seems conceptually similar to me as treating something as a sacred value. It just has more decision theory behind it.
It's about the generator function. The question is about what generator function explains all three events
I think this is somewhat noncentral because (as mentioned), I disagree that a single generator produced all three events. What do you think the actual relevant generator is, and why do you think it also generates lie-behavior against parties Ziz might want to work with (eg publishing everyone-facing lies on the internet)?
While it likely played out worse then she expected beforehand, I don't think the idea that it was only likely to damage her reputation with the CFAR staff (whom she thinks defected) was a reasonable model of the situation.
Yeah fair enough. I agree that this isn't a reasonable model but my point still stands I think. The issue is that I neglected a third group aside from people who plan on defecting against Ziz or have low opinions of her judgement. People who automatically flinch away from others who do unconstrained things would also likely trust her less. Still, that group would be unable to help do the unconstrained things she wants to so I don't think it means much to Ziz that she can't work with them.
What group of people do you think Ziz wanted to work with that she is no longer able to because of the protest?
consider not being evil